After putting it off for weeks (some might say, "months"), last night for about two hours, I cleaned my kitchen (note: I'm not done. I still need to mop). What was involved? A sinkful of dishes, combat with one or two containers of, um, mold, and cleaning out and scrubbing the refrigerator.
I found a bottle of Ken's Salad Dressing that was four years old.
Four years old! How can this have happened?
Well, I'll tell you: I'm a slob.
Cleaning the refrigerator was surprisingly entertaining and I felt very good about life, myself, and my household when the task was complete. Who knew that 120 minutes (the time MTV used to take to play the
good videos) of elbow grease could accomplish so much? Man is that thing clean now. And, when I was done: it was empty. I can state from memory pretty much everything in there as of completion of the cleaning:
- 3 bottles of Fat Tire beer
- 1 bottle of Asahi
- 1 bottle of some sort of pink mum (?) wine somebody brought to a party I had at least 5 years ago
- 1/2 bottle of Jagermeister that Patrick's friend Chris sent us from Germany when we got married... 11 years ago
- Mustard
- Ketchup
- Baking soda
- A package of wheat tortillas
- Patrick's container of "Superfood" that expires next month and just barely made the cut
After discovering that we have no food, we went to Fresh & Easy, normally my least favorite household chore (and F&E makes it, literally,
easy). We didn't go nuts - we'd like to cut down on eating out for lunch so much, so we bought the sort of things you buy when that's what you have in mind (sandwich stuff, including our favorite Omega 3 multi-grain bread, salad stuff, yogurt, cereal, etc.). We bought good stuff. When we were in the chip aisle, I put my foot down (I consumed a whole container of Pringles over Friday and Saturday night only because we HAD. CHIPS. IN. THE. HOUSE). When I tried to sneak a six-pack of diet Coke into the basket, Patrick had his moment: "No chips for me, no diet Coke for you." Fine. We had fun dancing to the 70s hits they like to play; thankfully I wasn't afflicted by the urge to sing the Eagles' song "Take It Easy" (substituting "Fresh and" for "Take it"), as I usually am, though, I guess my joy at coming home to a clean kitchen did have me singing Queen's "We Will Rock You" as we emptied the car (thank you, neighbors, for the round of... silence). We forgot a gallon of pink lemonade somewhere between the parking lot and home, but decided it wasn't worth while to go back and get it. The best part was, we made lunches!
Patrick: several peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, fortified with apple slices and... raisins? Cesar salad. Some sort of burrito thing. Baby carrots, baby tomatoes. I sense a theme that I'm going to ignore.
Irene: turkey sandwich; salad (tomatoes, apple slices, raisins. I bought the yummiest salad dressing in the cuttest little container).
I can't wait for lunch time and to go buy a diet Coke at the vending machine across the way. And maybe a little bag of chips, too.
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