supplies!

It's that time of year again, where I stock up with a vast quantity of Korean noodles to see me safely through the winter. This year's batch are now safely stowed in the utility room (see picture) ready for gradual consumption over the next year or so, or in a more concentrated burst should it all kick off when Barack Obama and his fellow NATO heads of state are in town in a couple of weeks and we have to barricade ourselves into the house until it all calms down.

As you'll be aware, it's the excellent Wing Yip that I get my internet noodles from, and one of the things their website does is keep a history of details of past orders. So I can see at a glance exactly when I placed an order, and how many packets of noodles I ordered each time. I can also see the occasional extra products I ordered at the same time, so I can for instance remind myself of the can of Famous House Grass Jelly Drink that I ordered as a bit of a dare, and of the fun we subsequently had in the office trying it when it turned up. Here's a couple of pictures:

Basically this is a sort of murky greeny-brown liquid with little cubic lumps of green jelly in it, not especially attractive to look at, although of course that is entirely a product of culture and upbringing. It's well popular in Asia, so they must presumably like the look of it. Other versions are available that are heavier on the jelly and lighter on the liquid and for which I imagine you might need a spoon.

In addition to the somewhat faecal appearance, I was slightly put off by the jelly as I'm not particularly fond of drinks with "bits" in, fruit juice for instance. My view here is: either it's food and I need to chew it, or it's a drink and I don't; don't start blurring the boundaries. But for the full experience you need to consume the whole thing, jelly and all, so I did. I can't honestly say it was all that pleasant, but it wasn't especially unpleasant either.

Back to the noodles: it occurred to me that it would be of interest (if possibly only to me) to work out how many packets of noodles I'd got through over the last 6 years or so since I put the first bulk order in. So here's the order history:

Order date	Quantity	Unit price
15/07/2008	30	0.45
07/05/2009	60	0.59
28/01/2010	80	0.59
14/12/2010	80	0.65
07/11/2011	80	0.59
28/08/2012	100	0.59
01/10/2013	120	0.49
15/08/2014	120	0.55

Working out how many packets I get through per year is slightly tricky because I don't eat all the packets I order; there are a few people at work who usually take a few off me. A completely unscientific pulling of a number out of my arse results in a figure of 15% of each order passed on to other people (note that I don't say "given", since I do expect payment). Apply this across the board and you end up with a figure of roughly 470 packets of noodles consumed by me in the last six years, at a rate of one just under every five days. Say three a fortnight, give or take. Note that I'm also ignoring the fact that something like 90% of the packets I eat these days are shared with a small person; I'm not about to try and account for that as well though. Here's a year-by-year chart; no definitive number for 2014 yet but all the indications are that it'll smash all previous consumption records.