My foot is much healed - though not completely yet – since last week.
It has been hard staying off my foot as much as possible. This means, of course, sitting in one place or another and greatly limiting switching to other places – though we did have to go out for a bit of food shopping. Staying off my foot seems to be working as it seems be about half better already.
Husband has been trying to help as much as possible – he even washed the dishes for a couple of days. He has always been upset that I did not replace our dishwasher when it died – as much as he did not want me having to wash the dishes by hand, he did not want to have to do so himself when I could not. Even long before Covid I would put on a mask (he has them for his woodworking) or tying a towel around my face and putting on disposable plastic gloves when ill so he would not have to do the dishes. He also cooked – but he has always been the cook of the two of us.
THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -
One needs to be prepared for when cannot do the normal housework – or other jobs which one normally does. What sort of plans do YOU have for when you cannot deal with house, cooking, or work for a period of time.
Do you have someone else to take over or help you – spouse, child, parent, housemate or really good friend? Do you have disposable goods – paper plates, cups, napkins to use when you cannot deal with washing up after meals? The telephone number of a place which delivers for an affordable price?
Whether an injury or an illness which keeps one home one needs to be prepared to be able to eat and deal with one's house should something happen.
Showing posts with label plates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label plates. Show all posts
Thursday, October 20, 2022
ONE NEEDS TO HAVE PLANS WHEN ONE IS STUCK HOME DUE TO AN INJURY OR ILLNESS
Thursday, November 30, 2017
THANKSGIVING TURNING INTO CHRISTMAS
I hope you all had a pleasant Thanksgiving (if you are here in the U.S.) last week. Did you run out to shop during the day or the night - or did you at least wait until “Black Friday” to shop? Or are you waiting still to start shopping?
We had our Thanksgiving dinner, the two of us. I managed to bang my head - not once but twice - on the corner of the dining room table while putting away a table cover which should have been put away months and months ago - I bent over to put it in a bag and hit my head. I really screamed. Husband came in, “are you okay, and there, there’d” me and then gave me a lecture on making sure it was clear in front of me before bending over. He went back to cooking in the kitchen and I took 2 steps back and bent over again to put away the cover. I hit my head again on the same corner and same spot on my head - just less of the corner and got to listen to the lecture again. Worst of all it was the same spot on my head that I hit last month in our RV.
It was relatively easy to take out the china and items we needed. I had gone through the cabinet where it is all stored last year and donated a lot of items we did not need. Instead of needing to take out stacks and stacks of items, only one or two had to removed. How pleasant. I plan to work on the serving pieces stored in the living room next - I have better uses for the storage space there than bowls and platters we bought or received as gifts and have never used. Hmm, maybe I can finally get husband to hang two handled cups from when we were each a kid that match which are stored in the living room. He had the juice cup, I had the orange juice cup - but they match. They must have been popular cups for children back then.
The turkey had directions on it - basically we were to cook it at 325F, when the little popper popped we should test the breast with a thermometer and make sure it was at least 180F. There were also instructions to tent the turkey with foil and then remove same, and brush will oil a few times. Also on the turkey wrapping was a list of times to cook the turkey - only this said for a turkey cooked at 350F - 25 degrees higher than the instructions said to cook at. We discussed this - for a quite awhile. In the back of my head it seemed to me that I remember the same problem with the turkey from the same place last year, but could not remember what I did. We cooked it at the 325F with the logic that it could always be cooked more, but cooked not be cooked less if it was overcooked. About a half hour longer than the chart said (for cooking at 350F) the popper popped and I checked the turkey breast with a thermometer and it was 180F and rising. We took the turkey out and set it aside on the kitchen table to “set”.
In the interim we finished cooking other food items and had our soup. Husband then went to carve the turkey. The turkey breast looked wonderful as he carved into it - but as he went beyond the breast - the turkey was terribly undercooked. He finished carving the breast - moving it to another platter to do so. He then cut up the rest of the turkey - wings, legs, dark meat - and we placed it all on two oven trays to heat it further. I ended up with the 2 extra trays and 2 extra platters as a result of all this. We are not sure what went wrong - should we have cooked it at 350F instead? But the popper popped and it was the correct temperature on the thermometer. Husband has written a letter to the supermarket’s owner (this is one of those of stores where the owner’s photo is all off and he does the ads himself and is actually involved in his company day to day) asking what happened.
The dishes and all were washed Thanksgiving night. I have put all away. When I put my large platter back in the basement, I took out my “everyday” Christmas dishes and glasses. I washed them and we are using them. I move some of my normal everyday dishes higher in the cabinet - where I can’t normally reach stuff - to make room for these to fit in.
We had the leftover turkey etc for the second set of leftovers tonight. There is at least one dinner’s worth of turkey left - but that is all. It will either be eaten early next week or will be frozen.
We do not go shopping on Thanksgiving. We don’t go out for Black Friday sales either. Okay, one time husband wanted a small laptop that was going on Black Friday sale at a chain electronics store and we went and waited in line for it. He did get the laptop, but then again, it was still on sale at the same price - and in stock - the following week. It was not worth standing in line in the freezing cold. This store was rather well organized. There was a line. Items which were limited had coupons for them handed out to people by employees walking along the line, so the coupons were handed out to people based on where they were in line.
We have many times, including this year, while out on Friday to have lunch (at Wendys of course) and run errands gone past empty looking stores and malls by the time we went out. I had needed to renew a medication at the Walmart pharmacy and figured it would be ready over the weekend, but we were called Friday afternoon that it was ready decided to see how bad the crowds were. It was empty! Items which had been put out late Wednesday sealed up until the sales started, were still plentiful for the most part - husband started rooting through the DVDs. We have been in Walmarts again since then and still sale items are still in their displays - either less people came in than they thought would do so, or they intended for the sale items to be available long beyond last Friday.
When we woke up today I noticed the temperature was 61F - 61! I pointed this out to husband and suggested that today was the day to put up our outdoor Christmas decorations. He agreed. We checked our box at the post office, had lunch at Wendys and came home. We keep our outdoor decorations on a platform in the top of the garage. We used to have everything there for Christmas, but as we have aged and it is not that easy for husband to climb on a ladder and get everything - much is heavy - down, I moved the rest into our basement. He can now stand on his worktable (after clearing it off enough) and get the, only, two boxes of lights and wires, three potted artificial poinsettia, and 3 light up candy canes down. No more balancing on a ladder to hand me things. Much safer. We have some wreaths, swags, and such in our shed, but are not putting them up any longer - maybe again in the future.
We put the poinsettia in the same stands that hold our flowers the rest of the year. Husband made these poinsettia in pots. We bought artificial poinsettia which could go outside in the weather and 3 pots to fit the holders. He then bought a couple of cans of spray insulation - the kind that is a foam and expands to fit what it is in. He filled the pots and we added a poinsettia to each. The foam was topped with fake greens and they look great. 5 minutes and they are out in place.
We put lights on our bushes and a dwarf spruce tree. (The dwarf tree is now over 6 ft tall, I am so glad that I talked him out of a full size one.) Of course two set of lights did not work when tested - one of the ones which goes on the bushes and one that is red and white and goes around the white plastic pillar of our mailbox a bit of a candy cane look. We have in the boxes with the lights two electric boxes which stick into the ground. One is placed on one side of the front of our house and the other is placed on the other side of the front of our house. A long flat outdoor extension cord is plugged into the outdoor outlet and run across the front of the house, over the top of the stairs (under the door mat so no one trips) and the electric box on the side away from the outlet is plugged into it - and then the lights are plugged into the electric box. The electric box on the side of the house near the outlet is plugged into the other outlet in the wall box and the lights on that side of the front of the house plug into it.
After we put out and plugged in the lights that worked, we drove to Walmart to buy replacement. No white and red lights - no red lights on their own. We came back, put up the new light set on the bush that was short a set. Husband then took the red and white set into the garage, plugged it in and started shaking it. One half started working. So we wrapped the lit half of the strand around the mail box pillar and dropped the rest on the ground.
The wreath we bought last year for the front door was in the basement with the rest of the “in the house” decorations. The former one was decorated by husband as a copy of one we saw and liked at Colonial Williamsburg - only we used plastic fruit instead of real fruit so we could keep reusing it. The problem is that it had to hung on the outside of the storm door as it did not fit between the door and storm door - this involved annually rigging strands of fishing line around screws in the storm door and trying to adjust it so we could still see through the peep hole of the door - and remember we both on the short side. The new wreath has lights on it - lit by batteries with a timer so it is on for 6 hours every night at the same on and off time. Went up in less than 20 minutes with a magnetic hook on the door - and it is out of the weather, unlike the old wreath which if got covered snow might break free and fall.
So our house now looks presentable to the world. Husband is still trying to figure out where we could put one of those projector decorations - but the front of our house is just not set up for it.
Notice that because fixed place for the Christmas decorations in the garage and plastic boxes to hold the lights, wires, and plug in boxes for them, as well as an assigned spot in the basement to hold the Christmas decorations, it was easy and quick to find everything and put it out. The empty boxes in the garage were stacked on each other with the bags that the lights were kept in stored inside, relatively out of the way so that when we go to take down the lights - they will be easy to find again and then they will be put back up in garage along with poinsettia and the candy canes so that next week we will find them again.
Sometime next week I will put away my few Thanksgiving decorations in the house and then I will start putting out the Christmas ones. This year the holidays seem to be going okay.
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK -
As you take out your holiday decorations and other items try to leave the packing in a way that it will be easy to find and put everything away after the holiday. If it is all a mess - try to figure out while you unpack items how you can better store them away at the end of the season to make them either to access next year, while not being in your way all year.
We had our Thanksgiving dinner, the two of us. I managed to bang my head - not once but twice - on the corner of the dining room table while putting away a table cover which should have been put away months and months ago - I bent over to put it in a bag and hit my head. I really screamed. Husband came in, “are you okay, and there, there’d” me and then gave me a lecture on making sure it was clear in front of me before bending over. He went back to cooking in the kitchen and I took 2 steps back and bent over again to put away the cover. I hit my head again on the same corner and same spot on my head - just less of the corner and got to listen to the lecture again. Worst of all it was the same spot on my head that I hit last month in our RV.
It was relatively easy to take out the china and items we needed. I had gone through the cabinet where it is all stored last year and donated a lot of items we did not need. Instead of needing to take out stacks and stacks of items, only one or two had to removed. How pleasant. I plan to work on the serving pieces stored in the living room next - I have better uses for the storage space there than bowls and platters we bought or received as gifts and have never used. Hmm, maybe I can finally get husband to hang two handled cups from when we were each a kid that match which are stored in the living room. He had the juice cup, I had the orange juice cup - but they match. They must have been popular cups for children back then.
The turkey had directions on it - basically we were to cook it at 325F, when the little popper popped we should test the breast with a thermometer and make sure it was at least 180F. There were also instructions to tent the turkey with foil and then remove same, and brush will oil a few times. Also on the turkey wrapping was a list of times to cook the turkey - only this said for a turkey cooked at 350F - 25 degrees higher than the instructions said to cook at. We discussed this - for a quite awhile. In the back of my head it seemed to me that I remember the same problem with the turkey from the same place last year, but could not remember what I did. We cooked it at the 325F with the logic that it could always be cooked more, but cooked not be cooked less if it was overcooked. About a half hour longer than the chart said (for cooking at 350F) the popper popped and I checked the turkey breast with a thermometer and it was 180F and rising. We took the turkey out and set it aside on the kitchen table to “set”.
In the interim we finished cooking other food items and had our soup. Husband then went to carve the turkey. The turkey breast looked wonderful as he carved into it - but as he went beyond the breast - the turkey was terribly undercooked. He finished carving the breast - moving it to another platter to do so. He then cut up the rest of the turkey - wings, legs, dark meat - and we placed it all on two oven trays to heat it further. I ended up with the 2 extra trays and 2 extra platters as a result of all this. We are not sure what went wrong - should we have cooked it at 350F instead? But the popper popped and it was the correct temperature on the thermometer. Husband has written a letter to the supermarket’s owner (this is one of those of stores where the owner’s photo is all off and he does the ads himself and is actually involved in his company day to day) asking what happened.
The dishes and all were washed Thanksgiving night. I have put all away. When I put my large platter back in the basement, I took out my “everyday” Christmas dishes and glasses. I washed them and we are using them. I move some of my normal everyday dishes higher in the cabinet - where I can’t normally reach stuff - to make room for these to fit in.
We had the leftover turkey etc for the second set of leftovers tonight. There is at least one dinner’s worth of turkey left - but that is all. It will either be eaten early next week or will be frozen.
We do not go shopping on Thanksgiving. We don’t go out for Black Friday sales either. Okay, one time husband wanted a small laptop that was going on Black Friday sale at a chain electronics store and we went and waited in line for it. He did get the laptop, but then again, it was still on sale at the same price - and in stock - the following week. It was not worth standing in line in the freezing cold. This store was rather well organized. There was a line. Items which were limited had coupons for them handed out to people by employees walking along the line, so the coupons were handed out to people based on where they were in line.
We have many times, including this year, while out on Friday to have lunch (at Wendys of course) and run errands gone past empty looking stores and malls by the time we went out. I had needed to renew a medication at the Walmart pharmacy and figured it would be ready over the weekend, but we were called Friday afternoon that it was ready decided to see how bad the crowds were. It was empty! Items which had been put out late Wednesday sealed up until the sales started, were still plentiful for the most part - husband started rooting through the DVDs. We have been in Walmarts again since then and still sale items are still in their displays - either less people came in than they thought would do so, or they intended for the sale items to be available long beyond last Friday.
When we woke up today I noticed the temperature was 61F - 61! I pointed this out to husband and suggested that today was the day to put up our outdoor Christmas decorations. He agreed. We checked our box at the post office, had lunch at Wendys and came home. We keep our outdoor decorations on a platform in the top of the garage. We used to have everything there for Christmas, but as we have aged and it is not that easy for husband to climb on a ladder and get everything - much is heavy - down, I moved the rest into our basement. He can now stand on his worktable (after clearing it off enough) and get the, only, two boxes of lights and wires, three potted artificial poinsettia, and 3 light up candy canes down. No more balancing on a ladder to hand me things. Much safer. We have some wreaths, swags, and such in our shed, but are not putting them up any longer - maybe again in the future.
We put the poinsettia in the same stands that hold our flowers the rest of the year. Husband made these poinsettia in pots. We bought artificial poinsettia which could go outside in the weather and 3 pots to fit the holders. He then bought a couple of cans of spray insulation - the kind that is a foam and expands to fit what it is in. He filled the pots and we added a poinsettia to each. The foam was topped with fake greens and they look great. 5 minutes and they are out in place.
We put lights on our bushes and a dwarf spruce tree. (The dwarf tree is now over 6 ft tall, I am so glad that I talked him out of a full size one.) Of course two set of lights did not work when tested - one of the ones which goes on the bushes and one that is red and white and goes around the white plastic pillar of our mailbox a bit of a candy cane look. We have in the boxes with the lights two electric boxes which stick into the ground. One is placed on one side of the front of our house and the other is placed on the other side of the front of our house. A long flat outdoor extension cord is plugged into the outdoor outlet and run across the front of the house, over the top of the stairs (under the door mat so no one trips) and the electric box on the side away from the outlet is plugged into it - and then the lights are plugged into the electric box. The electric box on the side of the house near the outlet is plugged into the other outlet in the wall box and the lights on that side of the front of the house plug into it.
After we put out and plugged in the lights that worked, we drove to Walmart to buy replacement. No white and red lights - no red lights on their own. We came back, put up the new light set on the bush that was short a set. Husband then took the red and white set into the garage, plugged it in and started shaking it. One half started working. So we wrapped the lit half of the strand around the mail box pillar and dropped the rest on the ground.
The wreath we bought last year for the front door was in the basement with the rest of the “in the house” decorations. The former one was decorated by husband as a copy of one we saw and liked at Colonial Williamsburg - only we used plastic fruit instead of real fruit so we could keep reusing it. The problem is that it had to hung on the outside of the storm door as it did not fit between the door and storm door - this involved annually rigging strands of fishing line around screws in the storm door and trying to adjust it so we could still see through the peep hole of the door - and remember we both on the short side. The new wreath has lights on it - lit by batteries with a timer so it is on for 6 hours every night at the same on and off time. Went up in less than 20 minutes with a magnetic hook on the door - and it is out of the weather, unlike the old wreath which if got covered snow might break free and fall.
So our house now looks presentable to the world. Husband is still trying to figure out where we could put one of those projector decorations - but the front of our house is just not set up for it.
Notice that because fixed place for the Christmas decorations in the garage and plastic boxes to hold the lights, wires, and plug in boxes for them, as well as an assigned spot in the basement to hold the Christmas decorations, it was easy and quick to find everything and put it out. The empty boxes in the garage were stacked on each other with the bags that the lights were kept in stored inside, relatively out of the way so that when we go to take down the lights - they will be easy to find again and then they will be put back up in garage along with poinsettia and the candy canes so that next week we will find them again.
Sometime next week I will put away my few Thanksgiving decorations in the house and then I will start putting out the Christmas ones. This year the holidays seem to be going okay.
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK -
As you take out your holiday decorations and other items try to leave the packing in a way that it will be easy to find and put everything away after the holiday. If it is all a mess - try to figure out while you unpack items how you can better store them away at the end of the season to make them either to access next year, while not being in your way all year.
Thursday, December 1, 2016
THANKSGIVING IS OVER - CHRISTMAS IS COMING
Well, Thanksgiving is behind us. Now we move on to the December holidays. While due to differences in religion, we celebrate both Christmas and Chanukah, 99% of the decorating is for Christmas.
Normally we would have put our outside decorations up this past week, but due to running around to find a turkey and shop for Thanksgiving dinner at the last minute, we did not get a chance to do so. We are currently having rain. We plan to put up the outside decorations on Thursday - it is not suppose to be raining then and it is suppose to go to a relatively “toasty” 59 degrees Fahrenheit.
We put strands of lights on our larger bushes and 2 small trees in front of our house. We put a wreath (artificial) each on our front and side doors. We also have swags (again artificial) which we hang from our light fixtures on either side of the front door. Last year we added a strand of red lights around our white mail box post - gives the look of, sort of, a candy cane. We used to have wreaths on our lower front windows and swags under them, but we cannot do so since we had our windows and siding replaced. The outside lights are controlled by a timer. We have one in our basement for the outlets that they are plugged into - since they are on their own circuit breaker this is a heavy duty timer, which works for the circuit. We also put battery operated candles in our front windows which go on for 6 hours a night automatically. We used to have plug in window candles, but when we replaced the windows, we found that there was a ledge of plastic on the inside of the window which meant that the candle had trouble staying on the window sill and leaned against the window blinds and would have melted them - so we replaced them with these LED candles -no heat so they do not melt the shades.
This past weekend I took out my Christmas dishes. These are not fancy china to be used for company. They are everyday dishes. I use them for dinner during the holidays. I also have Christmas glasses - they were a “spend this amount and get a gift” that I got when I bought a baby gift for a friend decades ago. I keep the dishes and glasses in their original boxes in the gas meter closet in our basement and wash them before I use them each year. I have only 3 glasses - the fourth one broke - and I keep a small 2 piece nativity set in the 4th space in the box, so the nativity goes out when I take out the glasses. I only take out 2 of the glasses and 2 of the cups to the dishes as I am the only one who uses them. Husband has certain plastic glasses he prefers and I put one out for him as it not worth insisting that he use the holiday stuff.
Husband, as I have mentioned before, got a loom last Christmas. It is a good size piece of furniture, 32 inches wide and about the same size deep. It is set up in the living room as are various related items, including a small table and large plastic boxes of yarn/finished pieces. It does not fill the room, but since it sits in the middle of the room, it takes up much of the floor space. When husband set it up last January, I told him that I expected the living room back after Thanksgiving until January so that I could decorate. I never really expected same, and I will be decorating around the loom etc. when I decorate as I got a blank stare when I asked when the loom was being stored for the season. Our dining room has additional items for his weaving, mostly items used to wash the woven items after they are made (to draw the threads together into fabric) which is done in our kitchen. At some point the items other than the loom will have to be moved somewhere - my guess is the walkways of our studio behind the kitchen. The nativity mentioned above goes into a display case in a corner of the living room - normally it is the center of the shelf. Right now it is on a corner of the shelf as I could not open the door to the cabinet due to the weaving boxes stored adjacent to the cabinet, but managed to get it open enough to put the nativity just inside the door. I will move it when I move the boxes elsewhere - really, they have to moved or no tree.
The dining room also has stuff which needs to go out to our RV. (This is all the stuff I had to move to use the dining room table last week.) The last chance we figure to use the RV is this coming weekend and we are pretty sure we will not - then all will go out there for winter storage. It is stuff that is used seasonally in the RV - mostly for cold weather travel - and has to be stored in the house when not being used in the RV.
Why does the dining room have to be cleared out to decorate the living room? Because there is a good sized wooden box piece of furniture in the living room where the tree goes. Husband made this some years ago. It looks like what was called a “hope chest” for a young woman to store the items she made for when she got married. This one, however, holds DVDs. Instead of the top lifting the front drops down and drawers come out to hold the DVDs. It is on wheels (we knew we had to move it back and forth to the dining room once a year) and is rolled to the far wall of the dining room (where the table normally is and all the stuff to deal with is now) and stays there for the season with the table in the center of the room where normal people put it all the time.
I admit to still having Thanksgiving decorations out. I have a small light up “house in a tree trunk” which I painted some years ago and also painted a ceramic bear family and their guests coming to the house. I have since added some small purchased bears. Every year I set it up with the bear family at the house and the other bears coming there. This year after the holiday I had the idea to turn the visitors around and they are now “on their way home”. There are a few other small items to be put away also - it all fits in one box. I plan on it all being stored by the end of the week - it only took 15 minutes to put out.
I have large plastic boxes of stuff to put out for Christmas in the basement. We used to keep it in the garage, but we are getting older - hard to climb up and take out and store the boxes - and the boxes are getting heavier, so I found a spot in the basement to store them. There are decorations for the living room, front hall, dining room and kitchen as well as the ornaments for the trees and my teddy bear Christmas village figurines, buildings, etc.
More on all that in future posts - or I would have nothing to post. We bought a new snow blower Monday. We cannot find anyone who does “residential snow removal” and have to be able to do it on our own. Our old snow blower is probably around 30 years old and is large and heavy. We tried starting it over the weekend and it did not start, although it did last summer when we tried it. We had planned on buying this one anyway as it is hard to get to the other one in back of the house and this one, being smaller, we figure we can store it in a small plastic shed in front of our side door. We still have to get the shed and assemble and try out (at least that it starts and moves) the new blower. Husband is researching on what may be wrong with the old one as he wants it as a backup. They were surprised at the (large home big box) store at which we bought the snow blower that we were buying one. I guess everyone else waits until it snows - when it is too late.
I wanted to talk about holiday shopping. Did you go running out on Black Friday or even Thanksgiving? Visit your local stores for Small Business Saturday (started by that so warm hearted American Express credit card company)? Sit all day at work on Monday for Cyber Monday?
We did none of these things. With the exception this year of a TV which husband thought was a good deal (not that we bought/are buying one) which is still on sale at that large box store everyone hates, we have never seen anything worth running for the deal. In addition we don’t buy large amounts of gifts - or stuff for ourselves - for the holidays or otherwise. Are we grinches? No. Husband’s 2 nieces (under 20 years old) always get Christmas gifts from us which we buy. My niece and nephews are in the mid 20's and we mail them checks for Chanukah. Some years ago we agreed with my family not to exchange gifts between the adults. Every year I bought my sister a sweater at a reasonably priced department store (the one with the tool department) with the return card from the gift she had bought me the year before and she would buy me something there also - I was pretty sure with the return card from the sweater I had given her the year before. Gradually this mostly happened with husband and his small extended family also - which was an exchange of cash for check any way.) Husband buys himself a few small items which catch his eye - I then wrap them and Santa puts them under the tree. Generally I don’t get anything. If I do it is a book or a bear item we found on sale during the year and put away until Christmas (one year I forgot we were doing so and read half the book before I remembered). In case you have not figured it out - I have a passion for teddy bears and some of their friends. I believe that a gift should be a token, not an overwhelming “LOOK AT THIS”. The spending of more money for a bigger or more expensive gift does not mean that one is loved or appreciated more - just that someone spent more money, which chances are means they are further into debt than they should be. Plus, more and bigger items mean more clutter in the house!
Speaking of clutter - this is a good time of year to pass along by donation items you no longer need or want which are taking up room in your house. I am planning on donating my winter coat - I have not worn it in years and due to weight loss, I am not even sure it fits anymore. I plan to add to it some dresses I never wear and if we get a chance to go through them - most of the luggage we have as we don’t use luggage with the RV. We will each keep one suitcase and will also keep a rolling backpack. The backpack and a soft bag should fit in the other bag.
So as you are start getting ready this year - remember, whatever you buy or get has to fit somewhere in your home.
Normally we would have put our outside decorations up this past week, but due to running around to find a turkey and shop for Thanksgiving dinner at the last minute, we did not get a chance to do so. We are currently having rain. We plan to put up the outside decorations on Thursday - it is not suppose to be raining then and it is suppose to go to a relatively “toasty” 59 degrees Fahrenheit.
We put strands of lights on our larger bushes and 2 small trees in front of our house. We put a wreath (artificial) each on our front and side doors. We also have swags (again artificial) which we hang from our light fixtures on either side of the front door. Last year we added a strand of red lights around our white mail box post - gives the look of, sort of, a candy cane. We used to have wreaths on our lower front windows and swags under them, but we cannot do so since we had our windows and siding replaced. The outside lights are controlled by a timer. We have one in our basement for the outlets that they are plugged into - since they are on their own circuit breaker this is a heavy duty timer, which works for the circuit. We also put battery operated candles in our front windows which go on for 6 hours a night automatically. We used to have plug in window candles, but when we replaced the windows, we found that there was a ledge of plastic on the inside of the window which meant that the candle had trouble staying on the window sill and leaned against the window blinds and would have melted them - so we replaced them with these LED candles -no heat so they do not melt the shades.
This past weekend I took out my Christmas dishes. These are not fancy china to be used for company. They are everyday dishes. I use them for dinner during the holidays. I also have Christmas glasses - they were a “spend this amount and get a gift” that I got when I bought a baby gift for a friend decades ago. I keep the dishes and glasses in their original boxes in the gas meter closet in our basement and wash them before I use them each year. I have only 3 glasses - the fourth one broke - and I keep a small 2 piece nativity set in the 4th space in the box, so the nativity goes out when I take out the glasses. I only take out 2 of the glasses and 2 of the cups to the dishes as I am the only one who uses them. Husband has certain plastic glasses he prefers and I put one out for him as it not worth insisting that he use the holiday stuff.
Husband, as I have mentioned before, got a loom last Christmas. It is a good size piece of furniture, 32 inches wide and about the same size deep. It is set up in the living room as are various related items, including a small table and large plastic boxes of yarn/finished pieces. It does not fill the room, but since it sits in the middle of the room, it takes up much of the floor space. When husband set it up last January, I told him that I expected the living room back after Thanksgiving until January so that I could decorate. I never really expected same, and I will be decorating around the loom etc. when I decorate as I got a blank stare when I asked when the loom was being stored for the season. Our dining room has additional items for his weaving, mostly items used to wash the woven items after they are made (to draw the threads together into fabric) which is done in our kitchen. At some point the items other than the loom will have to be moved somewhere - my guess is the walkways of our studio behind the kitchen. The nativity mentioned above goes into a display case in a corner of the living room - normally it is the center of the shelf. Right now it is on a corner of the shelf as I could not open the door to the cabinet due to the weaving boxes stored adjacent to the cabinet, but managed to get it open enough to put the nativity just inside the door. I will move it when I move the boxes elsewhere - really, they have to moved or no tree.
The dining room also has stuff which needs to go out to our RV. (This is all the stuff I had to move to use the dining room table last week.) The last chance we figure to use the RV is this coming weekend and we are pretty sure we will not - then all will go out there for winter storage. It is stuff that is used seasonally in the RV - mostly for cold weather travel - and has to be stored in the house when not being used in the RV.
Why does the dining room have to be cleared out to decorate the living room? Because there is a good sized wooden box piece of furniture in the living room where the tree goes. Husband made this some years ago. It looks like what was called a “hope chest” for a young woman to store the items she made for when she got married. This one, however, holds DVDs. Instead of the top lifting the front drops down and drawers come out to hold the DVDs. It is on wheels (we knew we had to move it back and forth to the dining room once a year) and is rolled to the far wall of the dining room (where the table normally is and all the stuff to deal with is now) and stays there for the season with the table in the center of the room where normal people put it all the time.
I admit to still having Thanksgiving decorations out. I have a small light up “house in a tree trunk” which I painted some years ago and also painted a ceramic bear family and their guests coming to the house. I have since added some small purchased bears. Every year I set it up with the bear family at the house and the other bears coming there. This year after the holiday I had the idea to turn the visitors around and they are now “on their way home”. There are a few other small items to be put away also - it all fits in one box. I plan on it all being stored by the end of the week - it only took 15 minutes to put out.
I have large plastic boxes of stuff to put out for Christmas in the basement. We used to keep it in the garage, but we are getting older - hard to climb up and take out and store the boxes - and the boxes are getting heavier, so I found a spot in the basement to store them. There are decorations for the living room, front hall, dining room and kitchen as well as the ornaments for the trees and my teddy bear Christmas village figurines, buildings, etc.
More on all that in future posts - or I would have nothing to post. We bought a new snow blower Monday. We cannot find anyone who does “residential snow removal” and have to be able to do it on our own. Our old snow blower is probably around 30 years old and is large and heavy. We tried starting it over the weekend and it did not start, although it did last summer when we tried it. We had planned on buying this one anyway as it is hard to get to the other one in back of the house and this one, being smaller, we figure we can store it in a small plastic shed in front of our side door. We still have to get the shed and assemble and try out (at least that it starts and moves) the new blower. Husband is researching on what may be wrong with the old one as he wants it as a backup. They were surprised at the (large home big box) store at which we bought the snow blower that we were buying one. I guess everyone else waits until it snows - when it is too late.
I wanted to talk about holiday shopping. Did you go running out on Black Friday or even Thanksgiving? Visit your local stores for Small Business Saturday (started by that so warm hearted American Express credit card company)? Sit all day at work on Monday for Cyber Monday?
We did none of these things. With the exception this year of a TV which husband thought was a good deal (not that we bought/are buying one) which is still on sale at that large box store everyone hates, we have never seen anything worth running for the deal. In addition we don’t buy large amounts of gifts - or stuff for ourselves - for the holidays or otherwise. Are we grinches? No. Husband’s 2 nieces (under 20 years old) always get Christmas gifts from us which we buy. My niece and nephews are in the mid 20's and we mail them checks for Chanukah. Some years ago we agreed with my family not to exchange gifts between the adults. Every year I bought my sister a sweater at a reasonably priced department store (the one with the tool department) with the return card from the gift she had bought me the year before and she would buy me something there also - I was pretty sure with the return card from the sweater I had given her the year before. Gradually this mostly happened with husband and his small extended family also - which was an exchange of cash for check any way.) Husband buys himself a few small items which catch his eye - I then wrap them and Santa puts them under the tree. Generally I don’t get anything. If I do it is a book or a bear item we found on sale during the year and put away until Christmas (one year I forgot we were doing so and read half the book before I remembered). In case you have not figured it out - I have a passion for teddy bears and some of their friends. I believe that a gift should be a token, not an overwhelming “LOOK AT THIS”. The spending of more money for a bigger or more expensive gift does not mean that one is loved or appreciated more - just that someone spent more money, which chances are means they are further into debt than they should be. Plus, more and bigger items mean more clutter in the house!
Speaking of clutter - this is a good time of year to pass along by donation items you no longer need or want which are taking up room in your house. I am planning on donating my winter coat - I have not worn it in years and due to weight loss, I am not even sure it fits anymore. I plan to add to it some dresses I never wear and if we get a chance to go through them - most of the luggage we have as we don’t use luggage with the RV. We will each keep one suitcase and will also keep a rolling backpack. The backpack and a soft bag should fit in the other bag.
So as you are start getting ready this year - remember, whatever you buy or get has to fit somewhere in your home.
Thursday, August 11, 2016
ANNIVERSARY
This week is our 37th wedding anniversary. The years went past in an instant.
What does this have to do with organizing?
Well, for 37 years I have been cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, paying bills, we have been taking care of each other when one of us was ill - or each other when we both were, and in general dealing with the day to day matters of life. This had taken a lot of organizing.
We had both lived with our parents until we married. Before the wedding we went ahead being the organized people we thought we were - we got an apartment, bed, bedroom furniture, living room furniture, borrowed a folding table and chairs for the kitchen. We bought the dishes we wanted, the matching glasses, tableware, sheets, and pillowcases. We had carpeting installed in the bedroom and living room and vinyl flooring in the kitchen. We had the utilities started - sometimes I went and waited for whoever was coming - at least once my mom did. (I had my first meal at the place we still get Chinese takeout from while waiting for something or other - the place was in view of the apartment and I stood out at the curb watching while they cooked - so I could see if someone came to the door of the apartment. I had not brought the silverware there yet and had to get a plastic fork to use.)
Have you noticed what is missing from the list of what we bought? I made the bed before our wedding so it would be ready when we returned from our honeymoon. We planned to bring our individual pillows from home, so we did not buy any. We married, went on our honeymoon and returned home somewhere after midnight. As we drove home we realized that we had no pillows and we had no towels. We stopped at my in laws (as they lived closer to us than my parents) and husband slipped into the house without waking them and took his pillows (we shared them) and borrowed some towels. See - no matter how organized one thinks they are, they are not.
I had to use a public laundry as there was none in our building. The first time I fell behind we resolved the problem by buying a third set of sheets and pillow cases so I didn’t have to run out and do the laundry on the weekend when we had time together. We later also lost a weeks worth of clothes, towels and bed linens there when someone left a lipstick in the dryer and it melted all over our stuff! The biggest problem is that we both are short and have trouble getting clothes - so replacement was not easy. We dealt with this by getting a small, portable washer and matching dryer. After this I spent most of the week doing the laundry as the washer could hold about a week of shirts for either of us - so we had to do a lot of loads - and the dryer did not vent to the outside, but rather into the room through the lint filter in the door. It took much longer to dry than a regular dryer and vented the heat into the room - horrible in summer. The dryer did make a nice serving surface with a table cloth over it if we had company in - it easily pushed into the living room.
I used to clean the apartment on Friday nights. Husband would be exhausted from working all week and would go to sleep early. I would close the bedroom door and clean the bathroom and kitchen - within feet of the bedroom - and then the living room. I only had to clean the bedroom when he was awake.
We could not find bedroom curtains we liked, so I got my first sewing machine to make the curtains. (One day soon I will get it fixed so I can use it again. When we had the bed bugs in this house the wire in the cord seems to have melted or detached.) We returned the living room furniture we had bought as there were problems and bought a new set of furniture. We bought a kitchen set. We settled in.
About 9 years in we bought this house - within extended walking distance of the apartment. We planned to save money moving - we would bring as much as we could to the house on our own. So we would fill the car and the van and bring the stuff here and unload it - by this time we had our craft business and all of the inventory and other items had to be moved here also. On the weekend before we were to move, my sister and her husband joined us in moving things. We would fill the 3 vehicles and drive them over and unload them. Oh, did I mention that my sister had recently had my niece? So the four of us loaded up at the apartment. When we got to the house she would take care of niece - feeding, changing, etc. while the 3 of us unloaded. After a couple of trips we thought we were okay and all went out for dinner. They left. We went back to moving stuff - and we realized that we were not going to get it done in time. We called husband’s father - he came and helped us load up and unload once. After that we were on our own. The moving company came on Monday - they took the furniture, the books (9 feet of floor to ceiling shelving) and vinyl LPs. Then we went back to finish. Still not enough time. So on Tuesday - the day we had to vacate - I was back alone taking out the last of the stuff - one of the best birthdays I have had.
Well, each problem, situation, and year we got a little better at keeping up with everything. We learned that something will always happen to throw us off (like the recent computer mess) and that we just have to go with it and catch up after. Our house is far from magazine perfect and I found out today that I have bought black markers 3 times - as I have 3 started packs - so we are not as organized as you might think. One has to take life as it comes and do ones best.
What’s next? Another 37 years? That would make me.... probably not.
What does this have to do with organizing?
Well, for 37 years I have been cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, paying bills, we have been taking care of each other when one of us was ill - or each other when we both were, and in general dealing with the day to day matters of life. This had taken a lot of organizing.
We had both lived with our parents until we married. Before the wedding we went ahead being the organized people we thought we were - we got an apartment, bed, bedroom furniture, living room furniture, borrowed a folding table and chairs for the kitchen. We bought the dishes we wanted, the matching glasses, tableware, sheets, and pillowcases. We had carpeting installed in the bedroom and living room and vinyl flooring in the kitchen. We had the utilities started - sometimes I went and waited for whoever was coming - at least once my mom did. (I had my first meal at the place we still get Chinese takeout from while waiting for something or other - the place was in view of the apartment and I stood out at the curb watching while they cooked - so I could see if someone came to the door of the apartment. I had not brought the silverware there yet and had to get a plastic fork to use.)
Have you noticed what is missing from the list of what we bought? I made the bed before our wedding so it would be ready when we returned from our honeymoon. We planned to bring our individual pillows from home, so we did not buy any. We married, went on our honeymoon and returned home somewhere after midnight. As we drove home we realized that we had no pillows and we had no towels. We stopped at my in laws (as they lived closer to us than my parents) and husband slipped into the house without waking them and took his pillows (we shared them) and borrowed some towels. See - no matter how organized one thinks they are, they are not.
I had to use a public laundry as there was none in our building. The first time I fell behind we resolved the problem by buying a third set of sheets and pillow cases so I didn’t have to run out and do the laundry on the weekend when we had time together. We later also lost a weeks worth of clothes, towels and bed linens there when someone left a lipstick in the dryer and it melted all over our stuff! The biggest problem is that we both are short and have trouble getting clothes - so replacement was not easy. We dealt with this by getting a small, portable washer and matching dryer. After this I spent most of the week doing the laundry as the washer could hold about a week of shirts for either of us - so we had to do a lot of loads - and the dryer did not vent to the outside, but rather into the room through the lint filter in the door. It took much longer to dry than a regular dryer and vented the heat into the room - horrible in summer. The dryer did make a nice serving surface with a table cloth over it if we had company in - it easily pushed into the living room.
I used to clean the apartment on Friday nights. Husband would be exhausted from working all week and would go to sleep early. I would close the bedroom door and clean the bathroom and kitchen - within feet of the bedroom - and then the living room. I only had to clean the bedroom when he was awake.
We could not find bedroom curtains we liked, so I got my first sewing machine to make the curtains. (One day soon I will get it fixed so I can use it again. When we had the bed bugs in this house the wire in the cord seems to have melted or detached.) We returned the living room furniture we had bought as there were problems and bought a new set of furniture. We bought a kitchen set. We settled in.
About 9 years in we bought this house - within extended walking distance of the apartment. We planned to save money moving - we would bring as much as we could to the house on our own. So we would fill the car and the van and bring the stuff here and unload it - by this time we had our craft business and all of the inventory and other items had to be moved here also. On the weekend before we were to move, my sister and her husband joined us in moving things. We would fill the 3 vehicles and drive them over and unload them. Oh, did I mention that my sister had recently had my niece? So the four of us loaded up at the apartment. When we got to the house she would take care of niece - feeding, changing, etc. while the 3 of us unloaded. After a couple of trips we thought we were okay and all went out for dinner. They left. We went back to moving stuff - and we realized that we were not going to get it done in time. We called husband’s father - he came and helped us load up and unload once. After that we were on our own. The moving company came on Monday - they took the furniture, the books (9 feet of floor to ceiling shelving) and vinyl LPs. Then we went back to finish. Still not enough time. So on Tuesday - the day we had to vacate - I was back alone taking out the last of the stuff - one of the best birthdays I have had.
Well, each problem, situation, and year we got a little better at keeping up with everything. We learned that something will always happen to throw us off (like the recent computer mess) and that we just have to go with it and catch up after. Our house is far from magazine perfect and I found out today that I have bought black markers 3 times - as I have 3 started packs - so we are not as organized as you might think. One has to take life as it comes and do ones best.
What’s next? Another 37 years? That would make me.... probably not.
Thursday, April 14, 2016
PROCRASTINATION AND CLEANING UP
I finished our tax return yesterday and I only have left extensions for 1 of my clients to prepare. I would say I finished record early, but my practice has gotten so small, that it is easy to be finished earlier. Have you finished your tax return? If not file for an extension of time to file, but make sure you have paid enough to cover the amount of your taxes, as it is not an extension of time to pay. Oh, and this year the Federal returns and many, if not all, state returns are not due until April 18 - two states not until April 19! Okay, I know, enough with taxes already.
Now, on to today’s subject. Keeping up with what you are doing. I am a major procrastinator. I know many other people with organizing or clutter problems are also procrastinators. I try to keep up with what I am doing and clean up from what I am doing right after I do it. I am on several Yahoo groups about organizing and someone on one of the groups was talking about having to wash the dishes - apparently there are stacks of dirty dishes. It reminded me of a children’s book when I was young - The Man Who Did Not Wash His Dishes. It is, of course about a man who does not wash his dishes as he uses them and by the end of the book he is using soap dishes to eat out of and ends up piling all his dishes on his truck and leaving them out in the rain. (Obviously the book was enough of an explanation of why one needs to do their dishes on a regular basis that some 55 years later I still remember it.)
Our dishwasher died several years ago (the machine, not a person). I went out looking for a new one. I am a cheap person and looked at dishwashers towards the bottom of the middle of the range of dishwashers. I was not seeing ones that did what I wanted them to do. Finally I saw it - a dishwasher with tines which looked far enough apart for my ceramic dishes, a timer to start it, the silverware basket was in sections so I did not have to use the entire basket and waste space for a few pieces of silverware and the tines folded down for putting in pots. Even better ,when I pulled the bottom rack out it did not fall off the track and need to be picked up and put back in place (there is major company highly recommended and when we looked at their dishwashers the bottom rack did not stay on the track and had to be picked up and put back on - try that with it loaded with dishes and pots!) Then I saw the problem with my dream dishwasher - it was almost twice the price of the others. I was not in a rush to buy one and we kept looking. I had just about decided to spend the extra money for the one I liked and then I checked reviews - it came in dead last on one major reviewer! So now I was really confused. I read further online and found out that there is a problem with the dishwashers being made and they do not clean and do not dry. So over my husband’s protests (imagine a husband who wants his wife to spend money - that’s how cheap I am) I decided I did not need to replace the dishwasher. After all it is not a refrigerator or a stove, I can wash the dishes by hand. He protested this idea with the comment - “Wash them every day? You can’t do that.” I reminded him that the first 9 years we were married and living in an apartment I did that. He swore we had a dishwasher in the apartment until I asked where it was and he realized we had not had one.
So now I wash the dishes (and pots and pans, and bowls and glasses and tablewear and cooking utensils and serving pieces) by hand. I figured out it takes me about the same time to wash them and put them in a rack to dry as it did to load the dishwasher. When I started washing them by hand I used a dish rack next to the sink to let them dry. After we had mice I started using the dead dishwasher as a drying rack as everything is safely inside and unexposed while drying.
So I suggested to the person on Yahoo who was having a problem with her dishes that it might be easier to wash the dishes after each time they were used. I explained that after we have lunch I wash the 2 plates, 2 drinking glasses, and (generally) 2 knives and a spoon from lunch. This takes perhaps 5 minutes and then we are free to do whatever we need to do in the afternoon and the dishes are finished with.
After dinner we watch TV in the kitchen (well, we watch it during dinner also as we eat on the late side, around 8 pm). I read the newspaper while the TV is on and when I am done with the newspaper I wash the dishes. Pots, pans (my major pan for cooking is a cast iron skillet - it has to be washed by hand anyway), silverware, dinner dishes, soup bowls and plates, salad bowl, sometimes a gravy boat or small pitcher or a serving bowl or platter. Notice I did not wash the drinking glasses this time. We use them during the evening and for late night snack, so I leave them on the table. This takes about 20 minutes and all is done with.
Later in the evening we have our late night snack. We go to bed late and wake late, so lunch is our first meal of the day and this is our third meal of the day and substitutes for breakfast. When we are done and ready to go up to bed, I wash the glasses, cereal bowls (I told you it was a substitute for breakfast), silverware and anything else we have used. Again, it takes maybe 10 minutes to wash up. When we get up the next day I open the dishwasher “drying rack” and all is clean, dry and ready to go.
When I think about the idea of the dishwasher running for a couple of hours and using electricity, even if the new ones do use less water and electricity (which is why they apparently have problems washing and drying properly), hand washing seems like a better idea for me. I have nothing against dishwashers and will probably get one again (my husband always worries when one of us is ill about the dishes being sanitized enough without a dishwasher), so don’t think that this is a screed against them. It is a suggestion to keep current on washing dishes, etc. to make it easier to keep your kitchen clean and neat.
The person I posted this to replied that “I guess it is a good idea to wash the dishes as we use them. It would be easier.” I sort of hope that this is not someone who is stuck eating out of soap dishes and will have to take their dishes out to the car when it rains to get them cleaned.
Dirty dishes (etc) have other problems too - they will attract bugs and mice, but this idea works for other problems also. Take taxes (sorry, I guess I am mentioning them again) - when I finish a tax return I assemble all of the papers to go back to a client and staple the stack together. I write up the instructions, cover letter, invoice (you didn’t think I did it for fun did you? Well I do like filling in forms, but...) and put it all together to mail to the client, put it in the envelope, put a mailing label on the envelope, seal it up and put it where I keep the outgoing mail. (If the envelope is too big I have a card which says “Mail in bag” and I put that in with the outgoing mail and put the large piece in the bag used to carry the mail to the post office so I remember it.) I also gather together all of the papers which I want to keep for my records - a copy of the return, information notes I made, copies of some forms the client received, information the client wrote and sent to me, etc. I scan them into the computer and save the file to a “Current Clients” file and then staple the papers together and put them in my “to file” box. This way I have a hard copy to work from next year and permanent copy on the computer (of which I will make several backups which are kept in different places and on different media). I shred last year’s return’s hard copy as it was also stored on the computer last year. This way everything which needs to be sent to the client is done and everything I need to keep for myself is done. No lost papers.
After a craft project I try to clear up from it. I store any usable supplies left over, throw out what is not usable or too small an amount to used, and put the finished piece where it will be or where it will be held until it goes somewhere else (gifts, exhibitions, items to be sold).
So give it a try. Yes, I know you have heard it before, when you finish with something don’t leave it lying about - clean up! Each time you clean up as you finish or as you go there is that much less which will be needed to do something with in the future. Sometimes it even encourages me to clean up something else related - if I am putting away left over embroidery floss (thread) from a project and I see some other floss about or scissors or needles - I put them away too. The less new clutter, the easier to clear the old clutter bit by bit.
Now, on to today’s subject. Keeping up with what you are doing. I am a major procrastinator. I know many other people with organizing or clutter problems are also procrastinators. I try to keep up with what I am doing and clean up from what I am doing right after I do it. I am on several Yahoo groups about organizing and someone on one of the groups was talking about having to wash the dishes - apparently there are stacks of dirty dishes. It reminded me of a children’s book when I was young - The Man Who Did Not Wash His Dishes. It is, of course about a man who does not wash his dishes as he uses them and by the end of the book he is using soap dishes to eat out of and ends up piling all his dishes on his truck and leaving them out in the rain. (Obviously the book was enough of an explanation of why one needs to do their dishes on a regular basis that some 55 years later I still remember it.)
Our dishwasher died several years ago (the machine, not a person). I went out looking for a new one. I am a cheap person and looked at dishwashers towards the bottom of the middle of the range of dishwashers. I was not seeing ones that did what I wanted them to do. Finally I saw it - a dishwasher with tines which looked far enough apart for my ceramic dishes, a timer to start it, the silverware basket was in sections so I did not have to use the entire basket and waste space for a few pieces of silverware and the tines folded down for putting in pots. Even better ,when I pulled the bottom rack out it did not fall off the track and need to be picked up and put back in place (there is major company highly recommended and when we looked at their dishwashers the bottom rack did not stay on the track and had to be picked up and put back on - try that with it loaded with dishes and pots!) Then I saw the problem with my dream dishwasher - it was almost twice the price of the others. I was not in a rush to buy one and we kept looking. I had just about decided to spend the extra money for the one I liked and then I checked reviews - it came in dead last on one major reviewer! So now I was really confused. I read further online and found out that there is a problem with the dishwashers being made and they do not clean and do not dry. So over my husband’s protests (imagine a husband who wants his wife to spend money - that’s how cheap I am) I decided I did not need to replace the dishwasher. After all it is not a refrigerator or a stove, I can wash the dishes by hand. He protested this idea with the comment - “Wash them every day? You can’t do that.” I reminded him that the first 9 years we were married and living in an apartment I did that. He swore we had a dishwasher in the apartment until I asked where it was and he realized we had not had one.
So now I wash the dishes (and pots and pans, and bowls and glasses and tablewear and cooking utensils and serving pieces) by hand. I figured out it takes me about the same time to wash them and put them in a rack to dry as it did to load the dishwasher. When I started washing them by hand I used a dish rack next to the sink to let them dry. After we had mice I started using the dead dishwasher as a drying rack as everything is safely inside and unexposed while drying.
So I suggested to the person on Yahoo who was having a problem with her dishes that it might be easier to wash the dishes after each time they were used. I explained that after we have lunch I wash the 2 plates, 2 drinking glasses, and (generally) 2 knives and a spoon from lunch. This takes perhaps 5 minutes and then we are free to do whatever we need to do in the afternoon and the dishes are finished with.
After dinner we watch TV in the kitchen (well, we watch it during dinner also as we eat on the late side, around 8 pm). I read the newspaper while the TV is on and when I am done with the newspaper I wash the dishes. Pots, pans (my major pan for cooking is a cast iron skillet - it has to be washed by hand anyway), silverware, dinner dishes, soup bowls and plates, salad bowl, sometimes a gravy boat or small pitcher or a serving bowl or platter. Notice I did not wash the drinking glasses this time. We use them during the evening and for late night snack, so I leave them on the table. This takes about 20 minutes and all is done with.
Later in the evening we have our late night snack. We go to bed late and wake late, so lunch is our first meal of the day and this is our third meal of the day and substitutes for breakfast. When we are done and ready to go up to bed, I wash the glasses, cereal bowls (I told you it was a substitute for breakfast), silverware and anything else we have used. Again, it takes maybe 10 minutes to wash up. When we get up the next day I open the dishwasher “drying rack” and all is clean, dry and ready to go.
When I think about the idea of the dishwasher running for a couple of hours and using electricity, even if the new ones do use less water and electricity (which is why they apparently have problems washing and drying properly), hand washing seems like a better idea for me. I have nothing against dishwashers and will probably get one again (my husband always worries when one of us is ill about the dishes being sanitized enough without a dishwasher), so don’t think that this is a screed against them. It is a suggestion to keep current on washing dishes, etc. to make it easier to keep your kitchen clean and neat.
The person I posted this to replied that “I guess it is a good idea to wash the dishes as we use them. It would be easier.” I sort of hope that this is not someone who is stuck eating out of soap dishes and will have to take their dishes out to the car when it rains to get them cleaned.
Dirty dishes (etc) have other problems too - they will attract bugs and mice, but this idea works for other problems also. Take taxes (sorry, I guess I am mentioning them again) - when I finish a tax return I assemble all of the papers to go back to a client and staple the stack together. I write up the instructions, cover letter, invoice (you didn’t think I did it for fun did you? Well I do like filling in forms, but...) and put it all together to mail to the client, put it in the envelope, put a mailing label on the envelope, seal it up and put it where I keep the outgoing mail. (If the envelope is too big I have a card which says “Mail in bag” and I put that in with the outgoing mail and put the large piece in the bag used to carry the mail to the post office so I remember it.) I also gather together all of the papers which I want to keep for my records - a copy of the return, information notes I made, copies of some forms the client received, information the client wrote and sent to me, etc. I scan them into the computer and save the file to a “Current Clients” file and then staple the papers together and put them in my “to file” box. This way I have a hard copy to work from next year and permanent copy on the computer (of which I will make several backups which are kept in different places and on different media). I shred last year’s return’s hard copy as it was also stored on the computer last year. This way everything which needs to be sent to the client is done and everything I need to keep for myself is done. No lost papers.
After a craft project I try to clear up from it. I store any usable supplies left over, throw out what is not usable or too small an amount to used, and put the finished piece where it will be or where it will be held until it goes somewhere else (gifts, exhibitions, items to be sold).
So give it a try. Yes, I know you have heard it before, when you finish with something don’t leave it lying about - clean up! Each time you clean up as you finish or as you go there is that much less which will be needed to do something with in the future. Sometimes it even encourages me to clean up something else related - if I am putting away left over embroidery floss (thread) from a project and I see some other floss about or scissors or needles - I put them away too. The less new clutter, the easier to clear the old clutter bit by bit.
Thursday, January 7, 2016
KITCHEN CABINETS PART 2
Well, this week we are back to kitchen cabinets. Previously I had talked about the bottom shelf of my cabinet over the dishwasher (also known as the left hand cabinet). Right now I have managed to fit in service for 4 of Christmas dinner, soup, and dessert plates on the same bottom shelf. They will soon be returning to their box in the basement.
On the second shelf from the bottom I have some small serving bowls in a stack, some oval bakers also in a stack, some pudding cups - yes, again in a stack, and some spare mugs (behind the stack of serving bowls). On a wire shelf above them I have the rest of my dinner size and small plates, as well as 2 rimmed bowls. I can reach the front of this shelf, for the back, I need a step.
I realize now that I left something stored on the bottom shelf out. We take medications and the bottles for same are between the stacks of the dinner and smaller dishes. On the second shelf up I have a plastic dish that I can count the pills in and then pour them through a spout on the front of it into the daily pill boxes or from larger pill bottles into smaller one with a pill splitter kept in it.
In the next shelf up I have an assortment of items which match my dishes. I was young and foolish once and bought many accessories for the dishes that I thought would be of tremendous use. I am now starting, as I write this blog and realize the space I am wasting, to get rid of some of these items. This shelf has small round casseroles with lids - the sort in which one gets French onion soup in restaurants, a butter dish (I use a plastic one that seals closed instead), sugar bowl, candy dish and a couple of other things that I cannot see without climbing up, and the cups are hanging from a rack of hooks at the top of the shelf- all matching my dishes, as well as a cruet. I cannot reach this shelf without a step for the front or a chair for the back.
Now, the top shelf. I know that most kitchen cabinets have only 3 shelves, but I have 4 in this and the right hand cabinet (the other side of the sink). The cabinets are rather old - perhaps back to when the house was built in 1949 - either that or the fact that there are few cabinets in the kitchen (they are 2 of the 3 wall cabinets, other than the one over the stove) is why there are 4 shelves - oh, and the shelves are fixed and do not adjust in height.
The top shelf has things I very rarely use as I must climb up on a chair and climb onto the counter to reach this cabinet. I don’t like climbing and when I do climb onto the counter I am always concerned that I will break the counter. So this shelf has stuff I never use. Salt and pepper shakers that make another dish set from this company (all white, I thought they looked nice for company), small drinking glasses that match nothing, 3 ceramic glasses, with the bottoms indented that matching my set of dishes and are in holder with 3 rings for “relishes”, 3 more cruets (one matches the one below, the other 2 match each other), and a bagel holder. This last used to be used a lot, but we stopped eating bagels and it was stored up here out of the way.
So that is my left hand cabinet. From listing everything in it I have found out something. Try listing what is in your cabinets and it becomes more obvious what you can get rid of and not miss. My husband and I have had a storage problem for DVDs and I had planned to clean out and get rid of the drinking glasses which were sold to match my dishes (kept in the right cabinet) and move my good glasses there so we can use the space where they were for more DVD storage. I think I will be getting rid of more than the drinking glasses. Who knows what else I will get rid of by listing what I have and using that to realize what can easily be donated.
Next week onto the right cabinet.
On the second shelf from the bottom I have some small serving bowls in a stack, some oval bakers also in a stack, some pudding cups - yes, again in a stack, and some spare mugs (behind the stack of serving bowls). On a wire shelf above them I have the rest of my dinner size and small plates, as well as 2 rimmed bowls. I can reach the front of this shelf, for the back, I need a step.
I realize now that I left something stored on the bottom shelf out. We take medications and the bottles for same are between the stacks of the dinner and smaller dishes. On the second shelf up I have a plastic dish that I can count the pills in and then pour them through a spout on the front of it into the daily pill boxes or from larger pill bottles into smaller one with a pill splitter kept in it.
In the next shelf up I have an assortment of items which match my dishes. I was young and foolish once and bought many accessories for the dishes that I thought would be of tremendous use. I am now starting, as I write this blog and realize the space I am wasting, to get rid of some of these items. This shelf has small round casseroles with lids - the sort in which one gets French onion soup in restaurants, a butter dish (I use a plastic one that seals closed instead), sugar bowl, candy dish and a couple of other things that I cannot see without climbing up, and the cups are hanging from a rack of hooks at the top of the shelf- all matching my dishes, as well as a cruet. I cannot reach this shelf without a step for the front or a chair for the back.
Now, the top shelf. I know that most kitchen cabinets have only 3 shelves, but I have 4 in this and the right hand cabinet (the other side of the sink). The cabinets are rather old - perhaps back to when the house was built in 1949 - either that or the fact that there are few cabinets in the kitchen (they are 2 of the 3 wall cabinets, other than the one over the stove) is why there are 4 shelves - oh, and the shelves are fixed and do not adjust in height.
The top shelf has things I very rarely use as I must climb up on a chair and climb onto the counter to reach this cabinet. I don’t like climbing and when I do climb onto the counter I am always concerned that I will break the counter. So this shelf has stuff I never use. Salt and pepper shakers that make another dish set from this company (all white, I thought they looked nice for company), small drinking glasses that match nothing, 3 ceramic glasses, with the bottoms indented that matching my set of dishes and are in holder with 3 rings for “relishes”, 3 more cruets (one matches the one below, the other 2 match each other), and a bagel holder. This last used to be used a lot, but we stopped eating bagels and it was stored up here out of the way.
So that is my left hand cabinet. From listing everything in it I have found out something. Try listing what is in your cabinets and it becomes more obvious what you can get rid of and not miss. My husband and I have had a storage problem for DVDs and I had planned to clean out and get rid of the drinking glasses which were sold to match my dishes (kept in the right cabinet) and move my good glasses there so we can use the space where they were for more DVD storage. I think I will be getting rid of more than the drinking glasses. Who knows what else I will get rid of by listing what I have and using that to realize what can easily be donated.
Next week onto the right cabinet.
Thursday, November 26, 2015
THANKSGIVING AND OTHER HOLIDAYS
A step aside from the kitchen, well, a little bit. With (American) Thanksgiving coming this week I thought I would talk about holidays and organizing. While I am talking about Thanksgiving, it applies to all large family (or even company) dinners.
I used to make Thanksgiving dinner for our families. Since I am Jewish and my husband is Roman Catholic most family type holidays are different for our two families. Thanksgiving being an American holiday which crosses religions and ethnic backgrounds was the only holiday for which both our families wanted us for dinner at the same time. For years we waffled at what to do and generally ended up going out to dinner with his family. Then one year his sister was married just before Thanksgiving. Dinner with just his parents and grandmother seemed too small. I suggested we make Thanksgiving dinner in our little apartment and invite both families. He took some convincing that we could and that we could fit everyone in our apartment. So for 25 years we did. The year we moved from our apartment to our house - in October - we still had Thanksgiving dinner here in November - on the good china and cooked by us. Depending on the year we had 10-14 people, ranging in age- at various times from 2 months old (my niece - when her brother first came he was 3 months old) to my grandfather in his mid 90's.
In the apartment we would have to move stuff into the bathtub and close the curtain and into the trunks of our cars to make enough clear space for the dinner, especially when we were running a crafts business in the apartment (finished goods to the car trunks...). We would take my small electric clothes dryer put it in the corner of the living room and put a table cloth on it and use it for server for cheese and crackers and soda - so it was not in the way and we had the top to use. The small washer had to be shoved in the corner of the kitchen to be out of the way.
My mom would make family dinners for holidays and I learned to organize the meal from her. We cheated and had the turkey cooked by a local deli (and later their not so local related deli when the one near us closed). My sister and her family were nice enough to pick it up for us on their way here - it was a hot pickup on Thanksgiving in midafternoon. This left our efforts and oven available for other foods.
Due to our different background our families had different foods for Thanksgiving. When people have been interviewed about what they have for Thanksgiving the answer is generally “turkey and all the trimmings”. It was only when people were questioned about “trimmings” that it came out that each area of the country, each ethnic group, and each family has a different idea of trimmings. His family, being Italian, had manicotti as a course before the turkey. My family sometimes had dinner at kosher deli, as a relative we had Thanksgiving with was kosher, and my sisters and I would order corned beef sandwiches as mom made turkey sometimes for dinner and corned beef sandwiches were much rarer to us. (The deli staff was shocked at the idea, but they were offering their full menu.) To combine our families we went with traditional American. I made Pennsylvania Dutch beef vegetable soup, mashed potatoes, Colonial Williamsburg’s recipe for sweet potatoes (no marshmallows of course), “pop open can” rolls, canned cranberry sauce, canned gravy (plus the gravy that we got with the turkey), boxed stuffing, canned pumpkin pie (the pumpkin was canned, the pie was baked by us), apple pie (crumb topping as I prefer same, also baked by me), brownies (from a mix) and vegetables. As we went along I added venetians (rainbow cookies) and the vegetables varied including green bean- wax bean-carrot mix a couple of years, and one year I made succotash as my niece had a line in the Thanksgiving performance at school “Please pass the succotash” and I thought she should know what it was.
I tried to split the shopping into 2 trips, one, the second week of the month and the other, the third week of the month. (Of course there were still midnight Wednesday night runs to the 24 hour supermarket the first few years.) Cooking started in advance. If I was making the venetians it started on Tuesday as it was a 2 day process, if not, on Wednesday when I made the soup - most of the day it was on the stove - and we baked the pies and brownies and set up the sweet potatoes to bake the next day. I knew after awhile that on Thanksgiving the white potatoes went into boil first - they were baked later and by doing them first the stove was available and they could get cold as they would be heated in the oven later. The rest followed. I preplanned which pots and baking dishes, as well as which serving bowls and pieces were to be used for each dish. I kept each year’s meal in a spiral notebook with notes for the following years. In the first few years I listed what each dish would be cooked in and served in, as the years passed I knew what I had used before and it became instinct.
Not everything went well. One early year we were making chestnut stuffing from scratch. The chestnuts had to be cooked and then shelled and peeled. Peeled? We did not know that chestnuts had a skin to be peeled inside the shell. It took hours and hours and then we just dumped them in with the skin. At one point a drinking glass fell out of the closet and broke - not only did the glass need to be cleaned up, but the chestnuts which were out at that point had to be discarded! I was near tears, but we muddled thorough and never made chestnut stuffing again - although I did think about it this year. Another year towards the beginning I decided to bake a Colonial Williamsburg recipe bread. I tried it in advanced and it came out great. The day before Thanksgiving while I was making the soup and baking, I mixed up the bread mix and put it on the back burner of the stove to let it rise “in a warm place” as I had done previously. This day the kitchen and stove were much warmer and the dough rose much more - much, much more. It rose out of the bowl and onto and into the stove! The bread ended up coming out great, but I had to stop and clean up a huge mess in mid baking/cooking. I made rolls from scratch in a later year - again the trial run was fine, but this time I had done something wrong and they did not rise. The corn muffins one year did not want to leave the muffin pans (and they would have been such cute little teddy bears too). Believe it or not with all these baking problems I am a blue ribbon winning baker at the county fair. I learned not to make anything with a cream sauce which had to be made at the last minute - too much to do in the rush of the day.
We also had one year where my niece (then in high school) had gone to a dance near us the night before Thanksgiving and we picked her up for her parents and she stayed overnight for Thanksgiving so she helped with the baking, setup and cooking. One year we were watching one of husband’s nieces, preschool age at the time, the day before Thanksgiving and I had her help me set the table.
One thing I did to make it easier was to clean as I went, yes, everyone suggests this, but it works. I had figured out back in my mom’s house when we had dinner with extended family that if we stopped leaving everything to wash after dinner was over and filled the dishwasher and ran it when full, there was much less to do after everyone else left. In our apartment and after my house dishwasher died (and I have not replaced it yet) it meant to wash when I got a sink of stuff to wash and set it aside to air dry; when I had a dishwasher I would load it as I went and start it when full - unload it when dry to have it ready to reuse.
Generally I did not get around to setting the table until late Wednesday night or on Thanksgiving day. When we first started we used 2 folding tables the length of our apartment living room. For a while when we were first in the house we had to assemble the top we made which clamped on to our kitchen table to hold everyone - eventually we got a dining room table that when open almost filled our dining room, but we could squeeze in at one end and one my sisters and a child or two children, could fit at the other end. I have been gradually clearing away items which were sitting on the dining room table and putting them where they belonged (many in our tiny RV as they came in after the last trip to be emptied and never went back out.)
Today (Wednesday) I cleared the dining room of items which needed to go the basement and we had not brought down and of additional, larger items which needed to go out to the RV. The table is open and the table cloth, napkins and the table pad are waiting for the table to be set tomorrow for the two of us. Tonight I baked a pumpkin pie (low sugar) and assembled the sweet potatoes (also made with low sugar) in a casserole for tomorrow. I am trying new instructions for the turkey which involved some preparation tonight and it is done.
Each Thanksgiving night (or any other dinner I made/make) ALL of the dishes, pots, etc. (unless a pot really needed to soak) were washed that night - not necessarily put away or dried, but washed. Pots were done last. I would use extra towels to put items on to air dry as needed. In our house I also took the tablecloth outside the house and shook it out of crumbs and it and the napkins were washed in the washer and drying in the dryer before I went to bed. In the apartment it would be shaken out and all would be in the laundry bag for the next time I did laundry. I would put everything away starting Friday and have it mostly done by Sunday (some items still being used for the leftovers).
Leftovers from the main course were put into plastic containers or zipper plastic bags immediately after the main course. Family members, including children - especially children - are wonderful for helping with this, as well as clearing the table. (Children love to help, they think they are being treated special as grownups.) Leftovers from dessert and the soup were put away after the guests left. (The leftover soup needed to cool before being put back into the refrigerator.) The garbage went out Thanksgiving night.
We all have that collection of plastic containers that accumulate. Some we bought, some came filled with something and were too good to throw away, some just appeared, but they do accumulate. Since I used more of them after Thanksgiving dinner for leftovers than at any other time during the year, in the days after Thanksgiving I would look at what was left and after making sure I had a good size assortment, I would get rid of the spares which had come filled with food (ones not paid for) and passed along any excess other ones (the ones we paid for) that were not needed. By using this time of year I knew I had plenty of plastic storage containers to use during the year and more would accumulate by the following Thanksgiving.
Recently I was discussing on an online group that Thanksgiving is the unique American holiday that is celebrated across all lines. Someone posted back that it is only those with a deity who have someone to give thanks to. I pointed out that thanks may be given to mother earth, providence, the universe, one’s family, one’s friends, one’s luck, one’s self, etc. A Happy Thanksgiving to those here in the USA. Please remember that what is for sale on “Black Friday”, “Small Business Saturday”, “Cyber Monday” or any other day is just stuff and most of us have too much of it. Remember more stuff for you or those you gift it to, is more stuff to organize and deal with and the sales are not really as great as they seem.
I used to make Thanksgiving dinner for our families. Since I am Jewish and my husband is Roman Catholic most family type holidays are different for our two families. Thanksgiving being an American holiday which crosses religions and ethnic backgrounds was the only holiday for which both our families wanted us for dinner at the same time. For years we waffled at what to do and generally ended up going out to dinner with his family. Then one year his sister was married just before Thanksgiving. Dinner with just his parents and grandmother seemed too small. I suggested we make Thanksgiving dinner in our little apartment and invite both families. He took some convincing that we could and that we could fit everyone in our apartment. So for 25 years we did. The year we moved from our apartment to our house - in October - we still had Thanksgiving dinner here in November - on the good china and cooked by us. Depending on the year we had 10-14 people, ranging in age- at various times from 2 months old (my niece - when her brother first came he was 3 months old) to my grandfather in his mid 90's.
In the apartment we would have to move stuff into the bathtub and close the curtain and into the trunks of our cars to make enough clear space for the dinner, especially when we were running a crafts business in the apartment (finished goods to the car trunks...). We would take my small electric clothes dryer put it in the corner of the living room and put a table cloth on it and use it for server for cheese and crackers and soda - so it was not in the way and we had the top to use. The small washer had to be shoved in the corner of the kitchen to be out of the way.
My mom would make family dinners for holidays and I learned to organize the meal from her. We cheated and had the turkey cooked by a local deli (and later their not so local related deli when the one near us closed). My sister and her family were nice enough to pick it up for us on their way here - it was a hot pickup on Thanksgiving in midafternoon. This left our efforts and oven available for other foods.
Due to our different background our families had different foods for Thanksgiving. When people have been interviewed about what they have for Thanksgiving the answer is generally “turkey and all the trimmings”. It was only when people were questioned about “trimmings” that it came out that each area of the country, each ethnic group, and each family has a different idea of trimmings. His family, being Italian, had manicotti as a course before the turkey. My family sometimes had dinner at kosher deli, as a relative we had Thanksgiving with was kosher, and my sisters and I would order corned beef sandwiches as mom made turkey sometimes for dinner and corned beef sandwiches were much rarer to us. (The deli staff was shocked at the idea, but they were offering their full menu.) To combine our families we went with traditional American. I made Pennsylvania Dutch beef vegetable soup, mashed potatoes, Colonial Williamsburg’s recipe for sweet potatoes (no marshmallows of course), “pop open can” rolls, canned cranberry sauce, canned gravy (plus the gravy that we got with the turkey), boxed stuffing, canned pumpkin pie (the pumpkin was canned, the pie was baked by us), apple pie (crumb topping as I prefer same, also baked by me), brownies (from a mix) and vegetables. As we went along I added venetians (rainbow cookies) and the vegetables varied including green bean- wax bean-carrot mix a couple of years, and one year I made succotash as my niece had a line in the Thanksgiving performance at school “Please pass the succotash” and I thought she should know what it was.
I tried to split the shopping into 2 trips, one, the second week of the month and the other, the third week of the month. (Of course there were still midnight Wednesday night runs to the 24 hour supermarket the first few years.) Cooking started in advance. If I was making the venetians it started on Tuesday as it was a 2 day process, if not, on Wednesday when I made the soup - most of the day it was on the stove - and we baked the pies and brownies and set up the sweet potatoes to bake the next day. I knew after awhile that on Thanksgiving the white potatoes went into boil first - they were baked later and by doing them first the stove was available and they could get cold as they would be heated in the oven later. The rest followed. I preplanned which pots and baking dishes, as well as which serving bowls and pieces were to be used for each dish. I kept each year’s meal in a spiral notebook with notes for the following years. In the first few years I listed what each dish would be cooked in and served in, as the years passed I knew what I had used before and it became instinct.
Not everything went well. One early year we were making chestnut stuffing from scratch. The chestnuts had to be cooked and then shelled and peeled. Peeled? We did not know that chestnuts had a skin to be peeled inside the shell. It took hours and hours and then we just dumped them in with the skin. At one point a drinking glass fell out of the closet and broke - not only did the glass need to be cleaned up, but the chestnuts which were out at that point had to be discarded! I was near tears, but we muddled thorough and never made chestnut stuffing again - although I did think about it this year. Another year towards the beginning I decided to bake a Colonial Williamsburg recipe bread. I tried it in advanced and it came out great. The day before Thanksgiving while I was making the soup and baking, I mixed up the bread mix and put it on the back burner of the stove to let it rise “in a warm place” as I had done previously. This day the kitchen and stove were much warmer and the dough rose much more - much, much more. It rose out of the bowl and onto and into the stove! The bread ended up coming out great, but I had to stop and clean up a huge mess in mid baking/cooking. I made rolls from scratch in a later year - again the trial run was fine, but this time I had done something wrong and they did not rise. The corn muffins one year did not want to leave the muffin pans (and they would have been such cute little teddy bears too). Believe it or not with all these baking problems I am a blue ribbon winning baker at the county fair. I learned not to make anything with a cream sauce which had to be made at the last minute - too much to do in the rush of the day.
We also had one year where my niece (then in high school) had gone to a dance near us the night before Thanksgiving and we picked her up for her parents and she stayed overnight for Thanksgiving so she helped with the baking, setup and cooking. One year we were watching one of husband’s nieces, preschool age at the time, the day before Thanksgiving and I had her help me set the table.
One thing I did to make it easier was to clean as I went, yes, everyone suggests this, but it works. I had figured out back in my mom’s house when we had dinner with extended family that if we stopped leaving everything to wash after dinner was over and filled the dishwasher and ran it when full, there was much less to do after everyone else left. In our apartment and after my house dishwasher died (and I have not replaced it yet) it meant to wash when I got a sink of stuff to wash and set it aside to air dry; when I had a dishwasher I would load it as I went and start it when full - unload it when dry to have it ready to reuse.
Generally I did not get around to setting the table until late Wednesday night or on Thanksgiving day. When we first started we used 2 folding tables the length of our apartment living room. For a while when we were first in the house we had to assemble the top we made which clamped on to our kitchen table to hold everyone - eventually we got a dining room table that when open almost filled our dining room, but we could squeeze in at one end and one my sisters and a child or two children, could fit at the other end. I have been gradually clearing away items which were sitting on the dining room table and putting them where they belonged (many in our tiny RV as they came in after the last trip to be emptied and never went back out.)
Today (Wednesday) I cleared the dining room of items which needed to go the basement and we had not brought down and of additional, larger items which needed to go out to the RV. The table is open and the table cloth, napkins and the table pad are waiting for the table to be set tomorrow for the two of us. Tonight I baked a pumpkin pie (low sugar) and assembled the sweet potatoes (also made with low sugar) in a casserole for tomorrow. I am trying new instructions for the turkey which involved some preparation tonight and it is done.
Each Thanksgiving night (or any other dinner I made/make) ALL of the dishes, pots, etc. (unless a pot really needed to soak) were washed that night - not necessarily put away or dried, but washed. Pots were done last. I would use extra towels to put items on to air dry as needed. In our house I also took the tablecloth outside the house and shook it out of crumbs and it and the napkins were washed in the washer and drying in the dryer before I went to bed. In the apartment it would be shaken out and all would be in the laundry bag for the next time I did laundry. I would put everything away starting Friday and have it mostly done by Sunday (some items still being used for the leftovers).
Leftovers from the main course were put into plastic containers or zipper plastic bags immediately after the main course. Family members, including children - especially children - are wonderful for helping with this, as well as clearing the table. (Children love to help, they think they are being treated special as grownups.) Leftovers from dessert and the soup were put away after the guests left. (The leftover soup needed to cool before being put back into the refrigerator.) The garbage went out Thanksgiving night.
We all have that collection of plastic containers that accumulate. Some we bought, some came filled with something and were too good to throw away, some just appeared, but they do accumulate. Since I used more of them after Thanksgiving dinner for leftovers than at any other time during the year, in the days after Thanksgiving I would look at what was left and after making sure I had a good size assortment, I would get rid of the spares which had come filled with food (ones not paid for) and passed along any excess other ones (the ones we paid for) that were not needed. By using this time of year I knew I had plenty of plastic storage containers to use during the year and more would accumulate by the following Thanksgiving.
Recently I was discussing on an online group that Thanksgiving is the unique American holiday that is celebrated across all lines. Someone posted back that it is only those with a deity who have someone to give thanks to. I pointed out that thanks may be given to mother earth, providence, the universe, one’s family, one’s friends, one’s luck, one’s self, etc. A Happy Thanksgiving to those here in the USA. Please remember that what is for sale on “Black Friday”, “Small Business Saturday”, “Cyber Monday” or any other day is just stuff and most of us have too much of it. Remember more stuff for you or those you gift it to, is more stuff to organize and deal with and the sales are not really as great as they seem.
Thursday, November 19, 2015
KITCHEN CABINETS -START
I said that this week I would tell you what I have in my kitchen to use - or at least start. Obviously the amount and assortment of plates, etc. that you need will vary by what you use them for, how many of you there are, and what you need. I wanted to tell you what we have, why we have it and where I keep it and how I organize it to help you decide what you might need.
In the wall cabinet over my dishwasher I have a set of everyday dishes for 8. Why 8? This was the standard set for dishes when we were married. We also never thought that we would stay a family of 2. We have dinner dishes, bowls for soup or cereal, small plates (for cake or side dish), cups, and saucers. Do we need them all, not really, but we do not want to break up the set and if we break some - oh, that’s right. I actually have 15 bowls, 2 of which have small chips. I broke a bowl - okay, I have broken several bowls, but the others were replaced. When I went to replace the latest broken and the 2 chipped bowls I found out that the company had completely changed the shape of the bowls and complained. They sent me 8 bowls in the new shape - free. I am used to the old shape and will need to break a few more before I switch to the new ones. So the old ones are with my dishes and the new ones are in the other wall cabinet with my glasses. (Since I use ceramic dishes the chipped bowls are good for use around the house where an electric connection has to be made, say with an extension cord, that would be sitting on carpet and could be a fire hazard. I use the chipped bowls to hold the connections and help to prevent a possible fire.
I do not keep the set together - a stack of dinner plates, a stack of small plates, a stack of bowls... I used to. I realized that it was inefficient to keep it all like that. I am on the short side and can only reach the bottom 2 shelves of my wall cabinets (and only the front of the 2nd shelf ). So I decided that it was silly to keep things together just because “one does”. I put what I use most often where I can reach it without a step and the rest above where I need a step to reach it.
So on the bottom shelf of the cabinet I have 2 dinner size dishes from the set in a stack with 4 other dinner size dishes. 2 of these others are “Corelle”. I use these for working on as well as in the microwave. (My ceramics can go in the microwave or the oven, but I prefer not to put them in the microwave.) I also use these for cutting up food on. The other 2 are heavy weight plastic plates. They were inexpensive and are used under food in the refrigerator - such as for meats which might leak.
Next to the dinner size plates I have 6 of the 8 small plates, mixed with 2 of the saucers and 2 “Corelle” small plates. We do not actually use the cups and these saucers are used under gravy servers and such. The “Corelle” plates are used for the same purposes as the larger ones. Why 6 of the 8? That is what fits in the space with the other 4 plates.
Between the two stacks of plates I keep the bottles of our medications. They stay dry and are convenient for filling our weekly pill boxes on Saturday nights.
I have a wire rack which sits over all of the above so I can put more items on this same shelf - remember I can’t reach too far above it without climbing up. On the wire rack I have 4 stacks of bowls - the 7 soup bowls to my dishes, 3 of the 7 (broke one of these also) small bowls that match my dishes, 2 small serving bowls (same company as my dishes, different pattern), and 2 “Corelle” small serving (or large soup) bowls. I think what most of these bowls are used for is obvious. The “Corelle” bowls are used for the microwave as are the plates.
Boy, all that on one shelf. This is probably about 90% of the dishes we use for dinner. I can reach what I need and put it away easily. Storage this way is easy for me.
Between the wire rack and cabinet wall, standing up is a trivet and our small collection of rarely used takeout menus.
Do you store your dishes as sets or as you need to use them?
“Corelle” is a trademark name of items made by Corning Glass. I am not endorsing in any way the plates, merely mentioning that I use these unique plates/bowls in this manner.
In the wall cabinet over my dishwasher I have a set of everyday dishes for 8. Why 8? This was the standard set for dishes when we were married. We also never thought that we would stay a family of 2. We have dinner dishes, bowls for soup or cereal, small plates (for cake or side dish), cups, and saucers. Do we need them all, not really, but we do not want to break up the set and if we break some - oh, that’s right. I actually have 15 bowls, 2 of which have small chips. I broke a bowl - okay, I have broken several bowls, but the others were replaced. When I went to replace the latest broken and the 2 chipped bowls I found out that the company had completely changed the shape of the bowls and complained. They sent me 8 bowls in the new shape - free. I am used to the old shape and will need to break a few more before I switch to the new ones. So the old ones are with my dishes and the new ones are in the other wall cabinet with my glasses. (Since I use ceramic dishes the chipped bowls are good for use around the house where an electric connection has to be made, say with an extension cord, that would be sitting on carpet and could be a fire hazard. I use the chipped bowls to hold the connections and help to prevent a possible fire.
I do not keep the set together - a stack of dinner plates, a stack of small plates, a stack of bowls... I used to. I realized that it was inefficient to keep it all like that. I am on the short side and can only reach the bottom 2 shelves of my wall cabinets (and only the front of the 2nd shelf ). So I decided that it was silly to keep things together just because “one does”. I put what I use most often where I can reach it without a step and the rest above where I need a step to reach it.
So on the bottom shelf of the cabinet I have 2 dinner size dishes from the set in a stack with 4 other dinner size dishes. 2 of these others are “Corelle”. I use these for working on as well as in the microwave. (My ceramics can go in the microwave or the oven, but I prefer not to put them in the microwave.) I also use these for cutting up food on. The other 2 are heavy weight plastic plates. They were inexpensive and are used under food in the refrigerator - such as for meats which might leak.
Next to the dinner size plates I have 6 of the 8 small plates, mixed with 2 of the saucers and 2 “Corelle” small plates. We do not actually use the cups and these saucers are used under gravy servers and such. The “Corelle” plates are used for the same purposes as the larger ones. Why 6 of the 8? That is what fits in the space with the other 4 plates.
Between the two stacks of plates I keep the bottles of our medications. They stay dry and are convenient for filling our weekly pill boxes on Saturday nights.
I have a wire rack which sits over all of the above so I can put more items on this same shelf - remember I can’t reach too far above it without climbing up. On the wire rack I have 4 stacks of bowls - the 7 soup bowls to my dishes, 3 of the 7 (broke one of these also) small bowls that match my dishes, 2 small serving bowls (same company as my dishes, different pattern), and 2 “Corelle” small serving (or large soup) bowls. I think what most of these bowls are used for is obvious. The “Corelle” bowls are used for the microwave as are the plates.
Boy, all that on one shelf. This is probably about 90% of the dishes we use for dinner. I can reach what I need and put it away easily. Storage this way is easy for me.
Between the wire rack and cabinet wall, standing up is a trivet and our small collection of rarely used takeout menus.
Do you store your dishes as sets or as you need to use them?
“Corelle” is a trademark name of items made by Corning Glass. I am not endorsing in any way the plates, merely mentioning that I use these unique plates/bowls in this manner.
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