Monday, June 25, 2007

Resupply

The cupboards are far from bare at the Chateau, but given the time of the year, we’re certainly beginning to notice that some things are running out.

The weekend, for example, marked the consumption of the last can of soft drink that we had shipped up on the sealift. We ordered 19 cases each contained 24 cans. That works out to 456 cans of pop. We received out sea lift order in mid-September, so that lasted us roughly nine months or 270 days.

Yes, that sounds like a lot of soft drinks, but there are two of us and we each had one can of soft drink per day as a rule. And they were mostly diet soft drinks (I think we had three cases or Orange Crush). So I think we did all right in stretching that out.

Other items are also beginning to run out. We have about six boxes of spaghetti left. We have a couple of cans of pasta sauce. Our pesto sauce has long since vanished (and we discovered the brand we like we can’t get any longer as it’s being discontinued). Other items gone or getting down to bare numbers include granola bars, rice crispy cookies, toilet paper, paper towel, tissues, laundry detergent, chocolate bars and rice.

This is hardly unexpected. It’s the time of the year when you start to run low on things. And hell, some of these items (toilet paper and paper towel) we ordered so much of on our initial sealift back in 2005 that we’re only now starting to run low. It’s always a guessing game trying to figure out how much you need to last a year, versus how much room you have. With our small sealift room, we don’t have a lot of space to go crazy.

We kept that in mind when working on our latest order. It’s already been submitted to NorthMart and it’s the smallest of the three we’ve made so far. However, it still managed to come in around $3,000, which can always make you wince when you see that number slide across your Visa statement.

Still, it’s better than trying to buy many of these items in the north. If there was ever a definition for “short term pain, long term gain” the sealift is it. A safe estimate is that if we were to buy everything we ordered in the sealift in town, we would pay about 50 per cent more. I just bought a case of soft drink to make do for the next month (not that Cathy cares, she’s gone in less than 10 days) and it cost $20. And it was on sale.

So yeah, if you live here or are thinking about coming here, then get a sealift. One of the easiest is Sealift Express.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A can of soft drink every day? Ummm... that's tremendously unhealthy.

Even though each can has the equivalent of about 50-20 teaspoons of sugar, tooth decay is the least of your problems.

A can a day doubles your risk of diabetes, and is linked to increased risk of osteoporosis.

It is also correlated with obesity. Oddly, diet soft drinks actually lead to a greater risk of obesity than 'normal' soft drinks.

I'd suggest tea or coffee as a better choice of beverage.

towniebastard said...

Corey, I'm not the least bit worried about having a single can of diet coke a day. I drink several litres of water, a glass of orange juice and a Diet Coke. I'm not pretending that I have the best diet in the world, but one can of soft drink a day isn't going to kill me. If so, plenty of other people will be ahead of me in the morgue.

As for coffee or tea, never cared for them. Never particularly liked hot beverages. But thanks for the advice all the same.