I'm a little OCD ... and that's okay!

Earlier today, I called my sister to chat.  Our family loves to talk.  I seriously call them almost every day.

Anyway, we started talking about meal planning and started tossing around ideas about how to implement a meal planning system.  Once, I tried writing out dinners for a whole month on a Word calendar.  That worked out pretty well, except I didn't really like the idea of planning out a whole month worth of meals.  I decided it would probably be easier to do it in one- or two-week increments.

Then Marissa came up with this great idea.  She could take pictures of the meals she made and use the pictures on her calendar!

This gave me another idea one level up ... when we have kids that can participate in the meal planning, they can take the pictures and put them on the calendar!  It's a genius plan!

So of course I told Marissa she needs to go find herself a boy right now, get married, and make babies ... just so we can do the kids-putting-pictures-on-a-calendar thing in 6 years.

I hope she didn't take me too seriously. ;)


Anyway, then Mom got on the phone and asked what Marissa and I were getting so excited about.  She told me about some of her super-organized friends that had their own nifty meal planning systems (someone had a notebook with recipes in it and had a rotating several-week meal plan going on ...)

You know what the sad thing is?  This is all very, very exciting sounding to me.

You know what one of my secret fantasies is?  (No, don't worry - it's not one of those kinds of fantasies, you dirty-minded person, you!)

I secretly dream of taking everything out of my freezer and pantry and recording a complete current inventory of my food.  Then I could make meal plans based on what we have in our house and keep track of everything on the computer.  Of course, it would just be dinner-type food, not our spices and condiments and milk and stuff.  That would be going a little bit too far.  (Could you imagine coming home from the grocery store and re-recording every single thing you bought?  "And a jar of peanut butter, and a thing of onion flakes, and some peach yogurt, and two grapefruits ...")

Yeah.  It's a little bit sick.  I told Mom about this exciting plan, and she said, "Oh, boy ... our family really is a little bit OCD, aren't we?"

I tried to justify it by saying something like, "But it's not like I feel obsessively compelled to do it ... I just think it sounds like a really cool idea!!!!"  And we both laughed.


But no.  Now I'm seriously thinking about digging through my freeezer and counting up exactly how many bags of frozen vegetables I have so I know exactly how many meals I'd be able to make out of them without having to go to the store.  I love my little chest freezer from Costco. <3 <3 <3

It's not a surprise that my favorite classes in the business school had to do with systems management, supply chains, and finance, eh?  (Dang it, I should've done the supply chain emphasis, not the finance emphasis!  I don't even remember seeing the supply chain emphasis!!)