A Wild Young Under-Whimsy

Calculating how much weight I just carried home. Just now I have got home from the supermarket, which according to Google Maps is about 562 metres away from my house. Yet I am feeling absolutely exhausted and had to stop several times along the way because my hands were getting pins and needles from the handles of my nylon shopping bags, and my biceps were trembling and aching.

I thought, "Why don't I add up the weight of everything I bought, so I can see how much I was carrying?" So here you go.

Cat litter, 4.5L = 4.5kg
Dry cat food = 1kg
Wet cat food, 7 x 85g = 595g
Milk, 2L – 2kg
Soap, 4 x 100g = 400g
Bread = 650g
2 x 10pk tea bags @ 20g = 40g
2 x Moist wipes = 667g (approx)
Paper towels = 567g (approx)

I had to approximate the weight of the moist wipes and paper towels because they're not measured by weight but by the number of sheets. I couldn't find anywhere online that lists these specific products by weight, so I had to approximate – the moist wipes were listed as 1kg for three containers, whereas I had two; and the paper towels were listed in pounds on a US site, so I converted to grams.

So, according to these calculations I was carrying 10.419kg. This does not include the weight of my regular handbag, which I was wearing over my shoulder.

Which brings me to the biomechanics of carrying weights. If I had all this stuff in a backpack, I could probably have carried it quite comfortably, but instead the weight was suspended from my arms and I was bearing it mainly in my hands.

But anyway, this didn't measure all that much, yet still it exhausted me to carry it. Because of the restrictions in how much I can carry, I can't buy groceries in bulk and take advantage of the price savings. As it was, I had to buy the smallest bag of cat litter, which will basically only fill the litter box once, because I knew I simply wouldn't be able to carry the larger one.

I have thought about shopping online for groceries, but honestly I rarely have a large enough amount of ready money to buy in insane, Costco-esque quantities, and I prefer the experience of wandering the aisles of the supermarket and discovering things on special that I mightn't have sought out on my own. I'm not quite sure how that experience is replicated in the online space, although my Googling for the weights of my products uncovered a weird world of online discount shopping that I'm sure would become quite familiar if I ever used it.