CHEAPER SHOPPING

I've been noting my six-month weekly grocery shopping spend 
averages since 2021 and posted about the observed inflationary 
trend in 2022-08-06.2Inflation.txt, with updates following, most 
recently at the end of 2026-03-29.2Week_thoughts.txt. Over that 
time I've been trying to reduce my expenditure by buying larger 
bulk packs (to the limited extent that it's possible) and generally 
trying to economise. Not because I litterally can't find the money 
to pay more, but every saving is more money in the bank or invested 
in shares, earning on its own and there to fall back on if my 
income does drop too far, or ideally so one day I can retire and 
live off it entirely. It's an obvious approach to me, so much so 
that I forget it seems to be an unpopular one in the general 
population. But maybe something about the routine of working for a 
pay cheque numbs people to the meaning of the money they receive, 
and they just presume it will be provided to them forever? I guess 
that is how the system is contructed, but I can't see myself ever 
placing that much faith in it even if I were to work for someone in 
a regular job.

Anyway, to tick one more thing off my weekend to-do list, today I 
calculated my average grocery shopping spend for the six months to 
June this year and got a surprise: $36.97/week (AUD). A decrease! 
It was $39.04/week in the six months to December 2025. Since then 
there's been the whole Iran War oil chaos, so, though I haven't 
been watching individual prices that closely, I've assumed some 
price increases would be passed on from increased transport costs. 
Apparantly not, or some other factor is masking it. Since the local 
supermarket stopped delivering paper catalogues I did write a 
script to query the undocumented API that the Australian 
supermarket chains use to generate their online catalogue (yes, 
except for ALDI, they all use them same company, SaleFinder, to do 
this for them) and show just products I'm interested in*. Maybe 
that has helped me find more specials that I've been missing before?

In any case my shopping spend hasn't been this low since June-Dec. 
2023, so it's a welcome reversal of an otherwise unrelenting 
upwards trend. Though before June 2023 the weekly spend was down 
around $34/week for a year, so it still hasn't fully returned from 
that sudden jump. I was thinking about writing a tool to generate 
ASCII vertical bar graphs from info like this, but I just can't be 
bothered with hobby programming projects anymore so you'll have to 
visualise that yourself.

Other bills aren't so co-operative. Somehow I've been using 
marginally more elctricity this winter than last year. Heating 
obviously, but I thought I'd been economising even more on that, 
and though the maximum daily outdoor temperatures have seemed low 
this winter, apparantly the minimums have been almost consistently 
above average. It does all depend on how much sun I get to warm up 
the sun room and then the lounge room before the evening when I put 
the heating on though - lots of overcast days, even though not very 
much rain. Even solar power won't help me with that problem. A wood 
fire is the usual solution out here in the country, but my house is 
too 1970s-modern to have one - designed for running your high-tech 
reverse-cycle A/C from electricity that's too cheap to care about. 
I do have very fond memories of sitting naked beside a wood fire, 
which I haven't experienced for a very long time. But with all the 
time required for collecting and chopping firewood, electricity 
probably still isn't expensive enough to justify devoting time 
(likely including work time) to that instead.

It's nice to have somewhere to babble about these things. I 
normally assume they're as uninteresting to the real-life humans I 
meet as many of their topics like food or pop-culture are to me.
Not that I'm much convinced that you Gophers will be interested
either.

In other news, yesterday I finally got around to trying to 'derust'
the second fuel tank from that old Jag I'm trying to get back on
the road. Probably swallowed far too much rust dust in the process
again - amazing how much rust was inside even after my in-place
cleaning attempts on that tank. I'm not sure how long to leave it
in the electrolytic derusting tank since the last one seemed not to
be quite finished even after two days last time. I'm now resigned
to not getting it perfect and just making my best effort. So long
as I don't get a major hydrogen explosion it's a win. Worst case:
an extra six-month's shopping budget amount goes to getting new
reproduction fuel tanks sent from the USA - only about the same as
the yearly rego bill for my running Jag which arrived the other
day (hopefully I can eventually get this other Jag on a cheaper
"club" rego for infrequently-used old vehicles). More money so the
government can maintain the pretty moonscape of craters in the
gravel roads I drive on around here.

 - The Free Thinker

* Let me know if you're interested in the script. I was going to 
post it to the scripts section here but figured there wasn't much 
point wasting hours documenting it and providing easy ways to 
change settings when the audience was limited to just the niche of 
tightarse Australians browsing Gopherspace. Plus it's done in a 
pretty lazy (but effective) way - snipping out chunks of a webpage 
into invalid-but-displayable HTML.