Our Saturday had a different look to it today. We headed south to meet up with our friends Tom and Durlene at the Cactus Flower restaurant in Navarre. The Pensacola location is one of our favorites but the food is just as good at the Navarre one and it's roughly halfway between our house and their condo for the month. We somehow managed to stop talking and laughing long enough to consume some wonderful Mexican food before piling in the car for a drive along Navarre Beach.
It was a beautiful to day to enjoy blue skies, turquoise water and sugar white sand, even if us locals thought it a bit cool. It's hard to believe half their time in our corner of the world is gone already.
A lunch date meant we skipped the Saturday morning run to Walmart. Just as well...I wasn't prepared anyway. We're having everyone over for gumbo at the end of the week and I need to check the recipe and get a list together. It should be easy now that the pantry is bare newly-organized.
I've never been a devoted grocery-list-maker, relying more on memory than a written slip of paper. It worked fine most of the time...I'd do a quick scan of the fridge and the pantry, mentally note what we were out of or would soon need, and shop accordingly. The problem was I missed things or I ran out of them early in the week and forgot about it by shopping day.
Enter the iPhone and its multitude of apps. I was carrying with me anyway...why not put it to use? So I found a grocery app that looked appealing, paid all of $.99 for it and made semi-shopping lists. I say semi because it was more a "don't forget" list than a "this is everything you need" list. When I ran out of something during the week, I'd grab the phone and add it to the list.
I've probably had this app for a year or more and we get along fine. It's not complicated and working with it is pretty intuitive. In other words, I didn't have to spend a lot of time figuring out all its bells and whistles. Well...maybe the more accurate statement is that I didn't spend any time figuring those things out. You get no instructions; you just sort of discover how it all works on your own.
Imagine my surprise when I accidentally discovered last week that I could have more than one shopping list going at the same time. Ohhh...one for Walmart and one for Publix; I'm liking that. And then I figured out how I could rearrange the order in which the categories appeared on the screen so it matched the route I take through the store. Holy technology, Batman...grocery shopping may never be the same again!
The list now holds everything from the gumbo recipe that we need to buy as well as those things I've been adding through the week as we ran out of them, all in the order we'll travel through the store. And there's another list for the things we'll look for at Publix. Is everything that needs to go in the buggy on there? No, but it never is. I am, however, feeling very organized and pulled together...and it only took a year to figure it out. Go, me.
I think I must be slower! I just jumped on the iPhone bandwagon. So what is this app called. I was using the Notes app that came with the phone for my grocery list and, while shopping, my thumb was resting on the delete button and I erased half my list and had to try to remember what was on it! I thought there must be aa app for that and here you are with one.
Posted by: Jan | January 15, 2012 at 07:45 AM