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 dishwasher. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dishwasher. Show all posts
Thursday, October 20, 2022
ONE NEEDS TO HAVE PLANS WHEN ONE IS STUCK HOME DUE TO AN INJURY OR ILLNESS
Thursday, March 11, 2021
WHAT WORKS IN ORGANIZING FOR ONE PERSON DOES NOT WORK FOR EVERYONE - WHAT ARE YOUR PROBELMS OR SOLUTIONS?
How about some of you write an email to tell me some of your problems with getting organized and declutter or something which you found helpful or a problem that you have. I know that some of you are reading my posts – it would be nice to get some response.
I know that the blog wanders a bit for one about organizing. When I wrote early posts I ended up discarding what I wrote – does anyone out there want a list of “I put 3 dinner plates on the bottom shelf of one of my kitchen closets with two utility dishes on them and our two lunch sized plates on the top of the stack.” or I keep my good china in the cabinet over my stove set up so I can easily pull out 2 plates, 2 bowls, 2 cake plates, and one coffee cup and saucer”?
I though not. I sort figured the process of working on trying to get organized and what I do is more interesting than lists of where I put what.
Let's face it, we all know the basics – get rid of excess stuff, find a place for each item you keep and put everything its in place. But in real life does that actually work?
One online organizing group which I am on, often has a post saying to make sure everyone in the house puts their dirty dishes in the dishwasher to make it easier. This presumes that one has a dishwasher (not everyone does) and that it is used. We have a dishwasher. The first one came with the house when we bought it from the last owners. Husband insisted I should use it, so I did. My mom always said that the dishwasher does not clean as well as a person – she was right, it could not even get the newsprint ink off the dishes and such from when it was packed to come to the house.
The dishwasher died a few years on. Husband convinced me to buy a new one and we used it – I spent a lot of time rewashing dishes. That dishwasher died in steps – first the interlock died (the device that lets the dishwasher know it is locked and it is okay to wash the dishes) I would lean a chair on the door of the dishwasher to keep it locked and in position for a number of years. One morning I came downstairs and the dishwasher was full of water – the pump had died. I bailed it out and dried it. I turned it into a drying rack for hand washed dishes – not good as I had to keep drying it out from the dripping that went on. It is now used to store some large items which do not fit into cabinets.
Husband pushed me to buy a new dishwasher. I went looking. After a year or so I found one liked, I was ready to buy it. Then I read the reviews of dishwashers. It was not rated well and it seems that the newer dishwashers work differently and often dishes need to be washed again. So I did not and do not plan to buy a new dishwasher. For two people who normally only eat 1 to 2 meals a day at home – do I really need one? Even now - when we are eating 3 meals at day at home due to Covid and staying at home – it takes rather less than 10 minutes to wash the dishes, pots, etc after each meal.
So, if I had my husband put his dirty dishes (a plate, maybe a bowl, and silverware three times a day and a glass also at night – we leave our glasses on the table during the day and reused them) in the dishwasher – I would have to wash the dishwasher also. I clear the table after we eat and wash the dishes, etc – no big deal.
Everyone and their problems in organizing are different. Fixed rules do not apply other than the general idea of trying to have less stuff and putting it where it belongs – both of which vary person to person.
THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -
What problems do you have? Do you consider your problems in getting organized and decluttered to be large or small? What suggestions can you offer others about what you have done.
Thursday, January 9, 2020
HOW WAS YOUR FIRST WEEK OF THE NEW YEAR - I CAUGHT A COLD
So here we are, a week into a new year. Hard to believe.
First, something I heard on TV, that is very true. Many of us date things in this format – 01/01/20 for January 1, 2020. Do not use the 20 on it's own for the year. Why, when you have always done this? Well, if you write 01/01/20, the year part of the date can be changed in the future to any year in this year in this decade – such as 01/01/2021 or 01/01/2029 – see what I mean – in theory the date would not run out for 10 years on say a blank check or memo note, etc. So instead date things as 01/01/2020 to avoid problems.
So how has your organizing, cleaning, etc. been going this year? Mine not so much. I managed to come down with a cold last week – not anything major, just enough to make me miserable. Husband is a hypochondriac. So when I get sick he does not want me to touch anything – I even get my 2 liter soda bottle with an X on it so he does not touch it. Biggest problem is cooking and dishes.
We normally eat lunch out so that is easy. But he does not want me to cook dinner with my germ covered hands. When we were younger, had more money and there were more places at which we could afford to eat dinner, we would go out for dinner or bring stuff in. Not really a choice any more other than the weekly dinner at Ikea, at Wendys and at the Asian buffet. One night in a week we can deal with deli turkey (even though we ate same 5 times in 2 weeks while doing the event with our reenactment unit in the last 2 weeks). But night after night? We brought in Chinese food one night - husband looked around for the paper goods – something new for us, we never used to have paper plates, bowls, cups, etc. as we considered it wasteful – last year he bought all of these for use in our RV and we had used them last time I had a “bug”, but when I finally was able to clear out the dining room – it all went out to the RV. He found plastic plates in the basement – intended for craft use – and there is plastic tablewear in the secretary in the living room. But as he unpacked the Chinese soup he was upset about not having a paper bowl for the soup – my suggestion - “there” is a stack of previous soup containers brought in – all washed and ready for use – he was not happy, but it did the trick. He keeps saying that we need to replace the (non-working) dishwasher if just for when I am sick. (I had figured out that it took me the same time to wash the dishes, etc as it did to load the machine and then rewash what did not wash – plus reading about the new machines they seemed too much work with the need to clean filters and other things. (Our original dishwasher came with the house or we never would have had one – though we did replace that one once.) My solution is to put on disposable plastic gloves when I wash the dishes.
We were not sure if we were to have snow today (report changed constantly and TV news did not agree channel to channel) so we made sure that we had lunch for today and dinner when we shopped yesterday. (I used to be organized – read the store circulars, had a shopping list, bought stuff on sale and used the saved coupons – but now with him along – we food shop just about day by day and due to changes in the coupons available and what we can eat and use – coupons that match what we buy are rare. I still have a shopping list, instead of being a paper on the fridge (if we need more – add it or we won't have it) it is in my cell phone – the other day I tried to remove an item as bought it – and the entire list erased itself and since it can only synced automatically – the computer version was pffft also. Luckily husband managed to bring up a list from the day before for me. Some things really are better on paper.
It did not snow enough to matter, went out for lunch and tonight we were having turkey sausages with macaroni (pasta – he is Italian by background all types of pasta are called macaroni). He is cooking as I am sick. Despite my hinting “am I cooking tonight or you?” about an hour before dinner, we did not get downstairs to cook until about 20 minutes before we would normally eat dinner. I was out of tomato “gravy” (sauce to you and me). I had mentioned this when we picked this dinner and he said “no problem”. So we are very late starting to make dinner and he has to make “the gravy” - something he actually taught me how to do from his mom's recipe (which for some reason is simpler and quicker by about 5 and a half hours than the recipe his sister makes which she says is how their mom made it.) He should know what he is doing since he taught me – right?
“What do I start first, the gravy or the water for the macaroni?” he asked. “Heating the pan for the sausages” - my reply. I tell him which (cast iron) pan to take out - “you need the one without the ridges.” He starts to take the one with the ridges – the one that last time I used it, filled our kitchen with smoke and the smoke detector would not go off for hours and I have still had not had a chance to clean it http://wheredidileavethat.blogspot.com/2018/07/not-in-pennsylvania.html He took out the correct pan and put it on the stove – turned on the burner for it to heat. Then I had him start the water to boil – I have to tell him which pot for which food. Then we started making the gravy. I make 2 large cans of tomatoes with 2 small cans of tomato sauce. Lately I have been using one large can of petite diced tomatoes and one of puree – gives him the pieces of tomatoes and also a thicker liquid than if I just used the tomatoes. “What do I add to it?” - Sheesh – he taught me – and I point him to the spice cabinet (built by him to fit our apartment kitchen, but fit perfectly here also – noticed that I need to clear it out as there is a lot of stuff that we have not used in decades and will not use again, such as “Mrs. Dash” - I mostly just stick my hand in and pull out what I need – showing him where, made me notice this – new job to do. Macaroni added to the boiling (no salt no oil) water. “What now” -he said exasperated. I told him to take some water on his finger and drop in the pan - “If it dances it is ready”. It did and he added the sausages. Now, it took him longer to add the items to the gravy than it would take me to cook the gravy, so we are even further behind. Next though, was to heat the leftover half can of soup for him to have soup before dinner.
So eventually we had dinner. I got sick – I won't say it was his cooking… Then to wash the dished I put on disposable gloves and washed them – they are air drying now.
My embroidery group met today. I did not go. I thought and thought about where I could sit in the relatively small room we meet in and not infect all of the other members, then realized that the proper thing to do was not to go. So last night I telephoned the group president and told her and that I would email the treasurer's report to her and to the secretary. I wrote it and emailed it. This afternoon I checked my email – I had sent them both the January 2019 minutes instead of the treasurer's report – so now I will email to the chapter members. I have to stop messing up and needing to do things over and over.
I had planned on running errands today that are easier to run without husband, but since I did not go to the meeting – we were together – he actually did not complain about the errands, some of which annoy him. We went to our reenactment unit's bank and I redeposited some cash as I had needed to take out some cash and we needed less than we thought. I also got a copy of the cash check as we have a grant and the cash was for part of the costs of same and we need to submit all copies of all checks, deposits and a lot of other paperwork – with a check sending back the excess of the grant money to the non- profit which gave us the grant and when I got home later I emailed copies of everything I had to the member who got us the grant and is handling the paperwork. Hopefully something done on the first try.
We went to our bank vault – I keep my “offsite data backup” in it. I used to make a data backup once a month and send to work with husband and he would bring home the one I sent with him the month before. When he quit his job, I needed an alternative – our bank vault became the alternate. (I use 2 USB flash drives – one is at the bank, other is here to update the next month.) We got one of the “platform” employees that is good and I figured, okay husband won't be getting upset. But when we went to go into the vault area with the employee – we had to wait as other employees were in there on bank business – that annoyed him.
Not doing laundry tonight (I start on Wednesday nights and continue into Thursday – Friday if needed) due to my cold – I figure to give it another day of recovery before I start. Since the washer and dryer were not being used, husband washed a scarf he finished weaving ( just a minute – I have to double check that he shut off the water to the washer – afraid if the hose breaks it will make a mess in basement, so we keep the water to the hose shut off when not in use. …… He did shut the water off, but did not push in control of the washer to make sure it was off.
So how was your first week of the new year?
THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -
Treat the new year as a new opportunity for a clean slate – but don't go crazy trying to change everything at once – change one small thing and keep at it – then when that is going well – change another and continue and so on.
First, something I heard on TV, that is very true. Many of us date things in this format – 01/01/20 for January 1, 2020. Do not use the 20 on it's own for the year. Why, when you have always done this? Well, if you write 01/01/20, the year part of the date can be changed in the future to any year in this year in this decade – such as 01/01/2021 or 01/01/2029 – see what I mean – in theory the date would not run out for 10 years on say a blank check or memo note, etc. So instead date things as 01/01/2020 to avoid problems.
So how has your organizing, cleaning, etc. been going this year? Mine not so much. I managed to come down with a cold last week – not anything major, just enough to make me miserable. Husband is a hypochondriac. So when I get sick he does not want me to touch anything – I even get my 2 liter soda bottle with an X on it so he does not touch it. Biggest problem is cooking and dishes.
We normally eat lunch out so that is easy. But he does not want me to cook dinner with my germ covered hands. When we were younger, had more money and there were more places at which we could afford to eat dinner, we would go out for dinner or bring stuff in. Not really a choice any more other than the weekly dinner at Ikea, at Wendys and at the Asian buffet. One night in a week we can deal with deli turkey (even though we ate same 5 times in 2 weeks while doing the event with our reenactment unit in the last 2 weeks). But night after night? We brought in Chinese food one night - husband looked around for the paper goods – something new for us, we never used to have paper plates, bowls, cups, etc. as we considered it wasteful – last year he bought all of these for use in our RV and we had used them last time I had a “bug”, but when I finally was able to clear out the dining room – it all went out to the RV. He found plastic plates in the basement – intended for craft use – and there is plastic tablewear in the secretary in the living room. But as he unpacked the Chinese soup he was upset about not having a paper bowl for the soup – my suggestion - “there” is a stack of previous soup containers brought in – all washed and ready for use – he was not happy, but it did the trick. He keeps saying that we need to replace the (non-working) dishwasher if just for when I am sick. (I had figured out that it took me the same time to wash the dishes, etc as it did to load the machine and then rewash what did not wash – plus reading about the new machines they seemed too much work with the need to clean filters and other things. (Our original dishwasher came with the house or we never would have had one – though we did replace that one once.) My solution is to put on disposable plastic gloves when I wash the dishes.
We were not sure if we were to have snow today (report changed constantly and TV news did not agree channel to channel) so we made sure that we had lunch for today and dinner when we shopped yesterday. (I used to be organized – read the store circulars, had a shopping list, bought stuff on sale and used the saved coupons – but now with him along – we food shop just about day by day and due to changes in the coupons available and what we can eat and use – coupons that match what we buy are rare. I still have a shopping list, instead of being a paper on the fridge (if we need more – add it or we won't have it) it is in my cell phone – the other day I tried to remove an item as bought it – and the entire list erased itself and since it can only synced automatically – the computer version was pffft also. Luckily husband managed to bring up a list from the day before for me. Some things really are better on paper.
It did not snow enough to matter, went out for lunch and tonight we were having turkey sausages with macaroni (pasta – he is Italian by background all types of pasta are called macaroni). He is cooking as I am sick. Despite my hinting “am I cooking tonight or you?” about an hour before dinner, we did not get downstairs to cook until about 20 minutes before we would normally eat dinner. I was out of tomato “gravy” (sauce to you and me). I had mentioned this when we picked this dinner and he said “no problem”. So we are very late starting to make dinner and he has to make “the gravy” - something he actually taught me how to do from his mom's recipe (which for some reason is simpler and quicker by about 5 and a half hours than the recipe his sister makes which she says is how their mom made it.) He should know what he is doing since he taught me – right?
“What do I start first, the gravy or the water for the macaroni?” he asked. “Heating the pan for the sausages” - my reply. I tell him which (cast iron) pan to take out - “you need the one without the ridges.” He starts to take the one with the ridges – the one that last time I used it, filled our kitchen with smoke and the smoke detector would not go off for hours and I have still had not had a chance to clean it http://wheredidileavethat.blogspot.com/2018/07/not-in-pennsylvania.html He took out the correct pan and put it on the stove – turned on the burner for it to heat. Then I had him start the water to boil – I have to tell him which pot for which food. Then we started making the gravy. I make 2 large cans of tomatoes with 2 small cans of tomato sauce. Lately I have been using one large can of petite diced tomatoes and one of puree – gives him the pieces of tomatoes and also a thicker liquid than if I just used the tomatoes. “What do I add to it?” - Sheesh – he taught me – and I point him to the spice cabinet (built by him to fit our apartment kitchen, but fit perfectly here also – noticed that I need to clear it out as there is a lot of stuff that we have not used in decades and will not use again, such as “Mrs. Dash” - I mostly just stick my hand in and pull out what I need – showing him where, made me notice this – new job to do. Macaroni added to the boiling (no salt no oil) water. “What now” -he said exasperated. I told him to take some water on his finger and drop in the pan - “If it dances it is ready”. It did and he added the sausages. Now, it took him longer to add the items to the gravy than it would take me to cook the gravy, so we are even further behind. Next though, was to heat the leftover half can of soup for him to have soup before dinner.
So eventually we had dinner. I got sick – I won't say it was his cooking… Then to wash the dished I put on disposable gloves and washed them – they are air drying now.
My embroidery group met today. I did not go. I thought and thought about where I could sit in the relatively small room we meet in and not infect all of the other members, then realized that the proper thing to do was not to go. So last night I telephoned the group president and told her and that I would email the treasurer's report to her and to the secretary. I wrote it and emailed it. This afternoon I checked my email – I had sent them both the January 2019 minutes instead of the treasurer's report – so now I will email to the chapter members. I have to stop messing up and needing to do things over and over.
I had planned on running errands today that are easier to run without husband, but since I did not go to the meeting – we were together – he actually did not complain about the errands, some of which annoy him. We went to our reenactment unit's bank and I redeposited some cash as I had needed to take out some cash and we needed less than we thought. I also got a copy of the cash check as we have a grant and the cash was for part of the costs of same and we need to submit all copies of all checks, deposits and a lot of other paperwork – with a check sending back the excess of the grant money to the non- profit which gave us the grant and when I got home later I emailed copies of everything I had to the member who got us the grant and is handling the paperwork. Hopefully something done on the first try.
We went to our bank vault – I keep my “offsite data backup” in it. I used to make a data backup once a month and send to work with husband and he would bring home the one I sent with him the month before. When he quit his job, I needed an alternative – our bank vault became the alternate. (I use 2 USB flash drives – one is at the bank, other is here to update the next month.) We got one of the “platform” employees that is good and I figured, okay husband won't be getting upset. But when we went to go into the vault area with the employee – we had to wait as other employees were in there on bank business – that annoyed him.
Not doing laundry tonight (I start on Wednesday nights and continue into Thursday – Friday if needed) due to my cold – I figure to give it another day of recovery before I start. Since the washer and dryer were not being used, husband washed a scarf he finished weaving ( just a minute – I have to double check that he shut off the water to the washer – afraid if the hose breaks it will make a mess in basement, so we keep the water to the hose shut off when not in use. …… He did shut the water off, but did not push in control of the washer to make sure it was off.
So how was your first week of the new year?
THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -
Treat the new year as a new opportunity for a clean slate – but don't go crazy trying to change everything at once – change one small thing and keep at it – then when that is going well – change another and continue and so on.
Thursday, August 3, 2017
TREADING WATER
Last Saturday we actually got away for the day - despite prior weather reports of heavy rain Friday and Saturday. (We did not go Friday due to the heavy rain, but it cleared up for Saturday. Nice day for an outdoor event. It was a reenacting market - we didn’t buy anything, but it is always nice to look. The fair was near Allentown, PA and then we drove down to Lancaster for dinner and then home.
This week I looked forward to a quite week. Nothing other than ordinary household chores to do. Start of month is always quiet for bills and such. Then heck broke loose.
On Monday, we found out a friend’s mom died. Wake was yesterday and today. Funeral tomorrow. We went to the wake today, and I thought we should go to the funeral, but we cannot.
Due to trips and when money is coming in to our bank for bills from third parties, we have been off our normal banking schedule. I have to be careful as we can only make 6 transfers/withdrawal a month from savings. (I keep the money in savings for the small amount of interest it earns and normally transfer to checking on Friday what is needed for the coming week.) In addition husband has some IRA CDs coming due on Friday and we need to rearrange how long money will be in new CDs. So Monday we went to the bank. The idea was that we would tell them what to do with the CDs when they come due (something I have done at our main bank - they take the information and put it into their “tickeler” file and take care of it on the day it needs to be done), as well as make a deposit for our reenactment unit and activate my ATM card for same - I am the treasurer. We made the deposit. The ATM machine was down. After a 40 minute wait we found out that they cannot take the info at the branch in advance for the CDs. We then went to the bank my embroidery chapter has its accounts at, and made a deposit for them. Afternoon gone.
Tuesday we went to our regular bank to transfer money as money came in from sources then - had to pay the real estate taxes - they went out in the mail same day as did a couple of smaller bills.
Husband has had tooth that has been loose for awhile and he has been waiting for it to fall out on its own. It reached the point where it still will not come out. It moves too much. It hurts. His dental partial plate is shifting with the tooth and hurting his gum. So Tuesday morning I called the dentist - no appointments until Thursday (closed Wednesday) so he has been miserable and we will be going to the dentist tomorrow. So we won’t be going to friend’s mom’s funeral. We may need to go a second dentist as our regular one does not do extractions and if the tooth does not come out when he takes the impression, it has to come out - we hate to spend the money on same when the tooth is so loose. We have been having a lot of soft food this week. He only wanted a “little bit of spaghetti when I made for me”. Somehow I managed to make twice as much as normal instead of only 3/4 as much! We have cold spaghetti in the refrigerator to use as needed.
President of my embroidery chapter wants to meet - at my house - to go over changes to two items I am writing for the chapter. We don’t let anyone in the house since the bedbugs and I am trying to find when and where we can meet. I explained about the horrors of what is going on this week and suggested that if she has her copy of the original examples and her notes and I have my copy of the original examples - can we do it on the phone? So after we come back from the dentist I have to call her with my copies out and see what she wants done - presuming I can do it.
Then Friday we have to go back to the bank and deal with the IRA CDs. The bank has a tiny parking lot and we try not to go there on Fridays when it is busy, but have no choice.
How did a week so empty fill up so fast and so completely?
I have been changing some things in the house. After we had mice a few years ago husband did not want me drying dishes in the rack on the counter. When the dishwasher died, I started drying the dishes in same. We plan to buy a new dishwasher, but it is expensive, the one I liked (which was rated so poorly we decided not to buy it) along with the concept of washing dishes automatically for 2 hours instead of washing them by hand in the same 15 minutes it takes to load the dishwasher, seems a waste of electricity. So I have been washing the dishes (and pots and such) by hand since then. Husband is not happy as I have to clean the dishwasher periodically as water is dripping in it. (He would love for me to buy a dishwasher as he figures some day I will be sick and he will have to wash the dishes.) The dish rack I used to use is very icky. I like it as it does not use a mat under it - the dripped water goes right back into the sink. I saw a new version in Costco last week and we had a discussion that it was okay to dry the dishes in the rack again as a result. I soaked and washed my rack - it is still icky - just not as much. Sunday when we go to Costco (cheap lunch and somewhere different to walk around for awhile) we will buy the new rack and see if it fits.
I am trying to put back extraneous items in the dishwasher. I tend not to unload it. I take out what I need, use it, wash it, and put it back. Some items not used regularly have ended up in it and not been put away. In anticipation of the new rack, I am trying to get all the extra items put away.
I have redone where food items are stored in our kitchen closet pantry. It is now easier to deal with some items, but it is a bit odd. When I open a box of pasta, for example, I put the pasta in a jar. I realized that the jars would fit on the shelf I keep my cans on - and I have less cans than I used to (mostly soup, mushrooms, and canned tomatoes) and moved the jars up to that shelf. Great, except I keep the spaghetti (I break it in half when I open the box before putting in the jar) is in a slightly taller jar (it has a wider neck, which is why it is different) so it has remained where it was. It all fits in better.
I am also still copying and pasting the contact listings from my computer Organizer software into the new cell phone. I really need to get it done. In addition to not having the Chinese takeout number last week when we were on the road, when I went to call the dentist, I did not have his number in it easier. I turned on one of my old phones and copied the number by hand into the new phone - the rest of the listing will follow.
Hopefully I will finish up this week even on time and things to do, so I will start next week with no remaining things from this week. Once the publications from my embroidery chapter are fixed, I will have one printed and mail them out. That should not take long - an afternoon and evening at most. The other will be emailed out a week before our September meeting.
How is YOUR summer going? How is YOUR organizing going? I’d love to hear from you.
THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -
Sometimes one just has to “go with the flow”. A quiet week became overcrowded and there is nothing which can be done about it. It is what it is.
This week I looked forward to a quite week. Nothing other than ordinary household chores to do. Start of month is always quiet for bills and such. Then heck broke loose.
On Monday, we found out a friend’s mom died. Wake was yesterday and today. Funeral tomorrow. We went to the wake today, and I thought we should go to the funeral, but we cannot.
Due to trips and when money is coming in to our bank for bills from third parties, we have been off our normal banking schedule. I have to be careful as we can only make 6 transfers/withdrawal a month from savings. (I keep the money in savings for the small amount of interest it earns and normally transfer to checking on Friday what is needed for the coming week.) In addition husband has some IRA CDs coming due on Friday and we need to rearrange how long money will be in new CDs. So Monday we went to the bank. The idea was that we would tell them what to do with the CDs when they come due (something I have done at our main bank - they take the information and put it into their “tickeler” file and take care of it on the day it needs to be done), as well as make a deposit for our reenactment unit and activate my ATM card for same - I am the treasurer. We made the deposit. The ATM machine was down. After a 40 minute wait we found out that they cannot take the info at the branch in advance for the CDs. We then went to the bank my embroidery chapter has its accounts at, and made a deposit for them. Afternoon gone.
Tuesday we went to our regular bank to transfer money as money came in from sources then - had to pay the real estate taxes - they went out in the mail same day as did a couple of smaller bills.
Husband has had tooth that has been loose for awhile and he has been waiting for it to fall out on its own. It reached the point where it still will not come out. It moves too much. It hurts. His dental partial plate is shifting with the tooth and hurting his gum. So Tuesday morning I called the dentist - no appointments until Thursday (closed Wednesday) so he has been miserable and we will be going to the dentist tomorrow. So we won’t be going to friend’s mom’s funeral. We may need to go a second dentist as our regular one does not do extractions and if the tooth does not come out when he takes the impression, it has to come out - we hate to spend the money on same when the tooth is so loose. We have been having a lot of soft food this week. He only wanted a “little bit of spaghetti when I made for me”. Somehow I managed to make twice as much as normal instead of only 3/4 as much! We have cold spaghetti in the refrigerator to use as needed.
President of my embroidery chapter wants to meet - at my house - to go over changes to two items I am writing for the chapter. We don’t let anyone in the house since the bedbugs and I am trying to find when and where we can meet. I explained about the horrors of what is going on this week and suggested that if she has her copy of the original examples and her notes and I have my copy of the original examples - can we do it on the phone? So after we come back from the dentist I have to call her with my copies out and see what she wants done - presuming I can do it.
Then Friday we have to go back to the bank and deal with the IRA CDs. The bank has a tiny parking lot and we try not to go there on Fridays when it is busy, but have no choice.
How did a week so empty fill up so fast and so completely?
I have been changing some things in the house. After we had mice a few years ago husband did not want me drying dishes in the rack on the counter. When the dishwasher died, I started drying the dishes in same. We plan to buy a new dishwasher, but it is expensive, the one I liked (which was rated so poorly we decided not to buy it) along with the concept of washing dishes automatically for 2 hours instead of washing them by hand in the same 15 minutes it takes to load the dishwasher, seems a waste of electricity. So I have been washing the dishes (and pots and such) by hand since then. Husband is not happy as I have to clean the dishwasher periodically as water is dripping in it. (He would love for me to buy a dishwasher as he figures some day I will be sick and he will have to wash the dishes.) The dish rack I used to use is very icky. I like it as it does not use a mat under it - the dripped water goes right back into the sink. I saw a new version in Costco last week and we had a discussion that it was okay to dry the dishes in the rack again as a result. I soaked and washed my rack - it is still icky - just not as much. Sunday when we go to Costco (cheap lunch and somewhere different to walk around for awhile) we will buy the new rack and see if it fits.
I am trying to put back extraneous items in the dishwasher. I tend not to unload it. I take out what I need, use it, wash it, and put it back. Some items not used regularly have ended up in it and not been put away. In anticipation of the new rack, I am trying to get all the extra items put away.
I have redone where food items are stored in our kitchen closet pantry. It is now easier to deal with some items, but it is a bit odd. When I open a box of pasta, for example, I put the pasta in a jar. I realized that the jars would fit on the shelf I keep my cans on - and I have less cans than I used to (mostly soup, mushrooms, and canned tomatoes) and moved the jars up to that shelf. Great, except I keep the spaghetti (I break it in half when I open the box before putting in the jar) is in a slightly taller jar (it has a wider neck, which is why it is different) so it has remained where it was. It all fits in better.
I am also still copying and pasting the contact listings from my computer Organizer software into the new cell phone. I really need to get it done. In addition to not having the Chinese takeout number last week when we were on the road, when I went to call the dentist, I did not have his number in it easier. I turned on one of my old phones and copied the number by hand into the new phone - the rest of the listing will follow.
Hopefully I will finish up this week even on time and things to do, so I will start next week with no remaining things from this week. Once the publications from my embroidery chapter are fixed, I will have one printed and mail them out. That should not take long - an afternoon and evening at most. The other will be emailed out a week before our September meeting.
How is YOUR summer going? How is YOUR organizing going? I’d love to hear from you.
THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -
Sometimes one just has to “go with the flow”. A quiet week became overcrowded and there is nothing which can be done about it. It is what it is.
Thursday, March 30, 2017
BISQUICK ALL OVER !!
Well another week has gone by already - hard to believe. We, again, did not go away last Friday as it was not only to rain, but there was a chance of snow also. That is 6 one day trips planned (to more or less the same place) since the start of the year- and one trip taken.
As an accountant I have been busy doing income taxes - well, not so busy - I used to do many more returns than I do now - but somehow it takes the same time - I am sure you all know the concept of the work expands to fit the time. I have 3 returns sitting here each missing one piece of info to finish. I have extensions and estimates to prepare for one client who is not ready to file yet - an annual practice as he is away the first part of the year. I have another client who owes me info for 3 - yes 3 - years of tax returns and promised to send it. I would hate for them to lose their refunds.
Today we went out food shopping - sometimes one just has to do a big food shopping instead of just fill in. So there was a lot of food to put away when we got home - luckily none of it for the fridge or freezer. Well, I had planned to get butter free with the order and buy eggs, but the coupon for the butter was from another market - oops - and they did not have any extra large eggs. So we were able to stop at the service station and have our mechanic install two air filters he ordered for us. So when we got home, of course I just left the food out in the kitchen and went upstairs to pay bills and check for tax info. This left shopping bags and and a box of food around our tiny kitchen. It needed to be put away before I cooked.
Of course I got downstairs late to prepare dinner and had to do it around the groceries as I did not have a chance to put anything away. I had bought a box of Bisquick which I planned to use to make biscuits tonight to have with dinner - chicken, cream of mushroom soup, and vegetables over the biscuits. I have make biscuits like this many times, although not for this reason. The recipes I use is no longer on their boxes, so after coming downstairs late - I had to go find my backs of prior Bisquick boxes collection - in a folder of loose recipes on the shelf with the cookbooks. I knew where it was, but I had to climb over stuff to get to it and find which box back had the correct recipe. So now I am running late, have bags and large box taking up most of the space in my kitchen, have used more time looking for the recipe and I am about to start cooking.
Chicken defrosted in the microwave. We each have a different soup - but it is the second night we are having same so I can dump it into pots as both were split in half last night. So into the pots they go. I look at the recipe for the biscuits. Hmmm. They can be made as dumplings. I didn’t know that. Well, that is basically what we are using them for. I’ll make this recipe instead. And so started a nightmare. The dish I was cooking was simple - chicken breast cut in bite sized pieces and browned in the skillet. Cream of mushroom soup with 1/4 cup of milk for sauce. We wanted vegetables - husband carrots and me peas and carrots - so frozen vegetables had to be boiled - not a problem, it goes quickly. I made it into major cooking and a major mess.
I put up a medium pot - a couple of quarts - of water to boil as the recipe said to drop the mixed biscuit batter onto the boiling stew. Uh oh, says cook 10 minutes with no cover and then 10 minutes covered but that should be okay as we would have the soup before we needed it anyway. I mixed up half the recipe as it was just for two. I dropped the batter into the boiling water by the spoonful - per the recipes. I actually got the right number of dumplings - per the recipe. I then stepped away to cut up the now defrosted chicken.
I hear a noise at the stove and look over - the water is boiling over even though I turned it down to medium. I run over to see as it is the burner that has a bad thermostat and it sometimes goes to high when one is cooking at a lower temperature. No, the water is boiling over and the dumplings are, well, messy. I grab a large pot and slowly and carefully pour it all into the larger pot - after all - the problem must be that the pot is too small for the water and the dumplings. No, that is not the problem and the water is soon boiling over again. I finally get the stove to a low enough temperature for the water to be simmering and not boiling over.
I made the rest of the dinner. Husband comes down for dinner and I am still cooking as in addition to be late starting and working around the groceries it is taking much longer - and more pots - than I expected. The entire sight when he comes down is sort of like the end of “Woman of the Year”. For those who do not know this movie Katherine Hepburn does not know how to cook. She is coming back to her husband played by Spencer Tracy who she left a couple of days into the marriage and now she knows she made a mistake and has returned. She is a writer for a newspaper and is the Woman of the Year of the title and does not know how to cook or keep house. She attempts to make coffee (in an drip pot as was used then) and make waffles. When he comes into the kitchen he sees her struggling and sits down to read the newspaper. When it gets to the point that the coffee is shooting out the top of the coffee pot and the waffle has an air bubble in it that is about to burst and she starts crying he finally goes and shuts everything off. Well that is what the entire kitchen looked like tonight. (If you have not seen this movie - this one scene alone makes it worth while and is one of the funniest scenes ever filmed.)
My husband is surprised that he does not smell biscuits baking when he comes down and sees what is going on. Dumplings? Well, I figured we were using the biscuits as same anyway and I found the recipe on the box... He was disappointed. I tell him that if it is awful I will start over and make the biscuits - after the decades we have been together he takes this sort of thing passably well. (I suggested to him that he look at it as if we are newlyweds and I am still learning to cook and making a mistake - it would make us feel young again - he did not appreciate the idea. So in the end I had 3 dumplings and some small pieces instead of 5 and at least they were cooked through and we could eat them.
But - the problem was the mess. The stove was covered with goo that was the Bisquick and water that boiled over. The stove needed to be cleaned as a result of this. (Well, it needed to be cleaned anyway.) Luckily I managed to pick up most of the goo with paper towels and a large spoon and toss it out. I took the burner out that it had cooked on as it needed cleaning too and then I saw that It had oozed under the burner pan and I had to clean underneath also. “Oh well, there goes my night” I thought - not even sure I would get to write a post tonight.
I washed the dishes and other pots then dumped the large pot from the dumplings out in the toilet bowl - the stuff was too liquid for the garbage and too solid for the sink drain. I then set the pot to soak in the sink next to the dish pan I use to wash the dishes and started on actually cleaning the stove - having just sopped up the goo from it. I dropped the decorative rings around the burners and the burner pans (not their foil liners - they were tossed out) into the dishpan which still had hot soapy water in it to soak. I cleaned the stove - with lots of spray cleaner and paper towels.
When that was done I turned to the burner pans and rings. I had to go at them with steel wool and got them mostly clean. They are currently air drying in the dish washer (remember it doesn’t work and I use it as drying rack). The skillet from dinner still needs to be cleaned - it is cast iron and needs to go on the stove afterwards to heat to get water out of it so it doesn’t rust, so I figured that I would let the stove parts dry a bit first while I started the second load of laundry (I managed to get the first load started before starting to wash the dishes) and wrote this post.
Well, the stove needed cleaning anyway and now that is a job that can be checked off the list. I had spare foil pan liners for it and climbed up in the closet and got them out - ready to go into the burner pans when they go back.
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK -
Put stuff away as soon as you get it home.
The entire mess tonight would have been easier if I had put away the groceries when we got home. I would have at least the space to work. I still would have ended up making a mess and having excess stuff plus the stove to clean, but I would not have had to drape a towel over the groceries so that if water dripped on them they would not get wet - as they would not have been next to the sink.
I have since put away all the groceries.
As an accountant I have been busy doing income taxes - well, not so busy - I used to do many more returns than I do now - but somehow it takes the same time - I am sure you all know the concept of the work expands to fit the time. I have 3 returns sitting here each missing one piece of info to finish. I have extensions and estimates to prepare for one client who is not ready to file yet - an annual practice as he is away the first part of the year. I have another client who owes me info for 3 - yes 3 - years of tax returns and promised to send it. I would hate for them to lose their refunds.
Today we went out food shopping - sometimes one just has to do a big food shopping instead of just fill in. So there was a lot of food to put away when we got home - luckily none of it for the fridge or freezer. Well, I had planned to get butter free with the order and buy eggs, but the coupon for the butter was from another market - oops - and they did not have any extra large eggs. So we were able to stop at the service station and have our mechanic install two air filters he ordered for us. So when we got home, of course I just left the food out in the kitchen and went upstairs to pay bills and check for tax info. This left shopping bags and and a box of food around our tiny kitchen. It needed to be put away before I cooked.
Of course I got downstairs late to prepare dinner and had to do it around the groceries as I did not have a chance to put anything away. I had bought a box of Bisquick which I planned to use to make biscuits tonight to have with dinner - chicken, cream of mushroom soup, and vegetables over the biscuits. I have make biscuits like this many times, although not for this reason. The recipes I use is no longer on their boxes, so after coming downstairs late - I had to go find my backs of prior Bisquick boxes collection - in a folder of loose recipes on the shelf with the cookbooks. I knew where it was, but I had to climb over stuff to get to it and find which box back had the correct recipe. So now I am running late, have bags and large box taking up most of the space in my kitchen, have used more time looking for the recipe and I am about to start cooking.
Chicken defrosted in the microwave. We each have a different soup - but it is the second night we are having same so I can dump it into pots as both were split in half last night. So into the pots they go. I look at the recipe for the biscuits. Hmmm. They can be made as dumplings. I didn’t know that. Well, that is basically what we are using them for. I’ll make this recipe instead. And so started a nightmare. The dish I was cooking was simple - chicken breast cut in bite sized pieces and browned in the skillet. Cream of mushroom soup with 1/4 cup of milk for sauce. We wanted vegetables - husband carrots and me peas and carrots - so frozen vegetables had to be boiled - not a problem, it goes quickly. I made it into major cooking and a major mess.
I put up a medium pot - a couple of quarts - of water to boil as the recipe said to drop the mixed biscuit batter onto the boiling stew. Uh oh, says cook 10 minutes with no cover and then 10 minutes covered but that should be okay as we would have the soup before we needed it anyway. I mixed up half the recipe as it was just for two. I dropped the batter into the boiling water by the spoonful - per the recipes. I actually got the right number of dumplings - per the recipe. I then stepped away to cut up the now defrosted chicken.
I hear a noise at the stove and look over - the water is boiling over even though I turned it down to medium. I run over to see as it is the burner that has a bad thermostat and it sometimes goes to high when one is cooking at a lower temperature. No, the water is boiling over and the dumplings are, well, messy. I grab a large pot and slowly and carefully pour it all into the larger pot - after all - the problem must be that the pot is too small for the water and the dumplings. No, that is not the problem and the water is soon boiling over again. I finally get the stove to a low enough temperature for the water to be simmering and not boiling over.
I made the rest of the dinner. Husband comes down for dinner and I am still cooking as in addition to be late starting and working around the groceries it is taking much longer - and more pots - than I expected. The entire sight when he comes down is sort of like the end of “Woman of the Year”. For those who do not know this movie Katherine Hepburn does not know how to cook. She is coming back to her husband played by Spencer Tracy who she left a couple of days into the marriage and now she knows she made a mistake and has returned. She is a writer for a newspaper and is the Woman of the Year of the title and does not know how to cook or keep house. She attempts to make coffee (in an drip pot as was used then) and make waffles. When he comes into the kitchen he sees her struggling and sits down to read the newspaper. When it gets to the point that the coffee is shooting out the top of the coffee pot and the waffle has an air bubble in it that is about to burst and she starts crying he finally goes and shuts everything off. Well that is what the entire kitchen looked like tonight. (If you have not seen this movie - this one scene alone makes it worth while and is one of the funniest scenes ever filmed.)
My husband is surprised that he does not smell biscuits baking when he comes down and sees what is going on. Dumplings? Well, I figured we were using the biscuits as same anyway and I found the recipe on the box... He was disappointed. I tell him that if it is awful I will start over and make the biscuits - after the decades we have been together he takes this sort of thing passably well. (I suggested to him that he look at it as if we are newlyweds and I am still learning to cook and making a mistake - it would make us feel young again - he did not appreciate the idea. So in the end I had 3 dumplings and some small pieces instead of 5 and at least they were cooked through and we could eat them.
But - the problem was the mess. The stove was covered with goo that was the Bisquick and water that boiled over. The stove needed to be cleaned as a result of this. (Well, it needed to be cleaned anyway.) Luckily I managed to pick up most of the goo with paper towels and a large spoon and toss it out. I took the burner out that it had cooked on as it needed cleaning too and then I saw that It had oozed under the burner pan and I had to clean underneath also. “Oh well, there goes my night” I thought - not even sure I would get to write a post tonight.
I washed the dishes and other pots then dumped the large pot from the dumplings out in the toilet bowl - the stuff was too liquid for the garbage and too solid for the sink drain. I then set the pot to soak in the sink next to the dish pan I use to wash the dishes and started on actually cleaning the stove - having just sopped up the goo from it. I dropped the decorative rings around the burners and the burner pans (not their foil liners - they were tossed out) into the dishpan which still had hot soapy water in it to soak. I cleaned the stove - with lots of spray cleaner and paper towels.
When that was done I turned to the burner pans and rings. I had to go at them with steel wool and got them mostly clean. They are currently air drying in the dish washer (remember it doesn’t work and I use it as drying rack). The skillet from dinner still needs to be cleaned - it is cast iron and needs to go on the stove afterwards to heat to get water out of it so it doesn’t rust, so I figured that I would let the stove parts dry a bit first while I started the second load of laundry (I managed to get the first load started before starting to wash the dishes) and wrote this post.
Well, the stove needed cleaning anyway and now that is a job that can be checked off the list. I had spare foil pan liners for it and climbed up in the closet and got them out - ready to go into the burner pans when they go back.
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK -
Put stuff away as soon as you get it home.
The entire mess tonight would have been easier if I had put away the groceries when we got home. I would have at least the space to work. I still would have ended up making a mess and having excess stuff plus the stove to clean, but I would not have had to drape a towel over the groceries so that if water dripped on them they would not get wet - as they would not have been next to the sink.
I have since put away all the groceries.
Thursday, November 24, 2016
ORGANIZED THANKSGIVING?
Thanksgiving, as I sit here and write is tomorrow. Thanksgiving was very important to me growing up. Since my family (and I) are Jewish most of the mainstream family holidays (Christmas, Easter) were not our holidays and we did not observe or celebrate them. But Thanksgiving was different - it was for all Americans (and any one visiting the country also).
When I met my husband (who is Roman Catholic) and as we progressed through dating to marriage we started celebrating each other’s holidays with the each other’s families. That left Thanksgiving as the only holiday both families wanted us for. We tended to go to his family, but sometimes went to mine. We got married and this continued. Then came the year his sister got married - a week or so before Thanksgiving. We did not want to go to dinner with just his parents and grandmother, but did not want to leave them alone and go to dinner with my family. What to do?
I then made a suggestion that shocked and surprised my husband - “Let’s have both families here for Thanksgiving dinner”. I then found the real difference between the two families. It was not being from different “old countries”. It was not the difference in religion. It was - his family ate out for almost all holidays and mine ate home for almost all holidays. The concept of making dinner for and having 10 people shocked and scared him. My mom used to have that and more for family holiday dinners and to do so was what I expected out of life. He was further concerned as we lived in our apartment then - “Where would we put everyone?’ We had a long living room and I figured we would get (we ended up borrowing from his parents) folding tables and set them up end to end to make one long table.
Both families agreed to come. We were a little rocky that first year. We overreached. Luckily we started the night before. We planned on making our own stuffing which used chestnuts - I never knew that under the shell chestnuts had a skin, which also had to be removed - it took forever. We put together some food dish or other and had it on the counter. I dropped a glass - the food was covered in glass and had to be thrown out. But we did it. Lack of serving space? Cover the portable clothes dryer with a table cloth, push it in the corner of the living room - bar. People had a problem walking past each other at the table, but it all worked out. I even saw a different side of my, always seemingly austere, grandfather - someone made an inadvertent double meaning comment (meaning off color in the unintended meaning) and my grandfather laughed like crazy with everyone else and so did husband’s grandmother.
It was so successful that we continued for 25 years to make Thanksgiving dinner for the combined families. We got much better at it. The year we moved to this house we moved in October. I promised that we would make Thanksgiving dinner - even if we ate off of paper plates. (The china was on the table for the dinner.) The problem we found we had was that the dinning room was square, not long and we had to deal with fitting in tables. Until we bought a dining room table some years later we came up with plywood pieces which clamped to our old kitchen table and made a huge square table and had to be assembled and disassembled each year.
The only thing that stopped us, finally, from continuing to make Thanksgiving dinner was bed bugs. Since we no longer feel comfortable having anyone in the house we no longer have people in. Since then my family eats dinner at my sister’s house and his family goes out for dinner. We eat alone. In the 8 years since then we have eaten Thanksgiving dinner in a chain buffet or made dinner for the two of us. (One has a lot of leftover turkey when one makes dinner for two.) The chain buffet closed this year. That left us looking for an alternative. There was one possible place that we could sort of afford, but we had never been there and reviews online were not the best. So this past weekend it was “officially” decided that we make dinner at home.
Now to keep organized over the years I made lists. Starting the second year we made Thanksgiving I wrote them in a spiral notebook. At first it not only included a list of what we would have, but also lists of what each item would be cooked and served in. Over the years since the menu mostly repeated I knew which items would be used for cooking and serving. I knew that, as odd as it sounds, the first thing to start cooking when we got up Thanksgiving (late) morning was the potatoes for mashed potatoes. The first year we had found out that there was a large local deli which was open on Thanksgiving and we could order the turkey cooked and ready for a hot pickup in the afternoon - my sister and her husband (and children) would pick it up for us on their way here (we paid) as they went past the place anyway. Over the years the place shut down and we started getting the turkey from their other location - closer to my sister than us. Not having a turkey in the oven left room for everything else.
At the height of our hosting Thanksgiving I would start cooking on Tuesday having already cleared the dining room as much as possible - including moving small pieces of furniture to our studio on the other side of the kitchen. I baked Venetians (aka rainbow cookies). They had to be baked and put together with the jellied centers on one day, left overnight with a heavy book on them and then chocolate melted and frosted it on another day. I would make beef vegetable soup (PA Dutch recipe) on Wednesday and bake an apple pie and brownies (brownies were from a mix). Wednesday night we would put together the sweet potatoes (no marshmallows, Colonial Williamsburg recipe) and bake the pumpkin pie. Thanksgiving day we would make the rest of the items and bake the sweet potatoes. A couple of times I made and baked rolls from scratch and once a baked a tea bread (CW recipe again) from scratch. Sometimes I made biscuits instead. Nieces and nephews however like the can popping open however, and we mostly made rolls from refrigerated dough. (These rolls are no longer made by the popping can company or any other.)
Each year I would look at my list of dishes from the year before. We would discuss it and possibly make changes - Would something new work? Do we need more of less of something. More of something? Did his sister want salad? Was my sister vegetarian that year? Did my niece decide she was kosher that year and would bring her own food? (Did not last beyond 2 years.) We would adjust the menu. But year to year it remained organized. My sisters, mom and I were used to working together on getting out the food and clearing up and husband’s sister made her best efforts to help. As nieces came along they helped - young children like to help - but nephew preferred the living room and playing. I would do the dishes, etc. after everyone left. In the apartment by hand and here in the dishwasher. Here in the house I would also wash and dry the tablecloth and napkins overnight. Since we stopped having the family in, the dish washer has broken so I am back to washing by hand. When we went to/go to sleep at night on Thanksgiving everything has been washed (or was being washed in the dishwasher). It does take a few days or a week to put it all back, but all is always cleaned that night.
Our guest list would change - it got smaller when my dad died, larger with each niece or nephew, a boyhood friend of husband’s who lived out of town, was down for the holidays a couple of times and joined us for dinner. Husband’s sister’s mother-in-law was added to the guest list for several years before we stopped. We first heard that his sister and her husband were going to adopt a child at dinner one year. My niece had her first “food” - applesauce - at Thanksgiving dinner one year.
I have the recipes in the computer. I used to use a cookbook program, but it needs a parallel printer directly hooked up to the computer on a specific port, so it is no longer usable. It used to be great, it would resize recipes and calculate the revised ingredient list and had a shopping list feature. I had put in the location of foods in our supermarket and I would have a shopping list printed out in the order I needed to find the foods. When I saw its life coming to an end I printed all the recipes and scanned them back into the computer as pdf files so I would not lose the recipes. I have to calculate ingredient quantities for changes in servings and make my own shopping lists, but I still can print the recipes out. One advantage to this when making an assortment of items, is that when an item is done being prepared, the recipe is tossed out. Helps keep track of what is done and what needs to be done.
So if we have been so organized and good at it, why has this year been such a mess? We did not decide until the last minute that we were making dinner for ourselves. (We had kept waiting for the magic restaurant to appear for us to go to for dinner.) On Sunday while in Costco we saw turkeys for 99 cents a pound. We were not going straight home and did not want the turkey sitting in the car for hours so we did not buy one.
Tuesday we had a list of what we would make and needed ingredients. - some our traditional ones, some husband picked to make it easier for me. We set out to food shop. In my mind we would buy items which did not need refrigeration (since they were more Thanksgiving related they might sell out) and then get a turkey at the Costco near us. Husband had planned to buy the turkey first in case we had a problem finding one - but did not tell me why he was buying it first, so I pushed to get it later. We bought stuff at Walmart and the supermarket next to it. (I may or may not have mentioned that our Walmarts do not have the supermarket Walmarts commonly have and there is a separate, unrelated supermarket next to the Walmart we normally go to.) We then set off, not to the Costco near us, but to the one we normally go to (which we like it better than the one near us) to get the turkey.
Horrors! There were no more 99 cent a pound turkeys! The only turkeys they had were $3.29 a pound as they were organic. Panic! My mind went to what we could have instead of turkey. I remembered we bought 2 ham portions - one for Christmas and one for whenever - when last in Lancaster, PA and I figured if stuck we would have “French Turkey” which is ham. Husband drove to a specialty food store located near Costco which had opened here this year - a chain from Connecticut. We had been very disappointed when we went to see this store after decades of hearing about it - very expensive, but I followed him into the store. He moved so quickly that I lost sight of him before I got to the store. I kept thinking I was seeing his red winter jacket - but when I got to where I thought I saw him it would be an employee in a red apron. I finally caught up with him at the turkey case. They had LOTS of turkey - even better and - important at this point - was that the turkeys were not frozen. We picked out one that is probably too big for us, and brought it home. $1.69 a pound, not the 99 cents we planned, but not $3.29 either.
Today Wednesday we went to the supermarket to buy the items which we did not buy yesterday as they need to be refrigerated and we did not want to drive around with them yesterday while getting the turkey. We ended up changing the menu while there. I had planned on baking him a pumpkin pie. He decided we should buy one instead. I make it for him with less sugar and no pie shell (believe it or not the latter part - no pie shell - is from Libbys and uses its basic pie recipe). He decided it was too much trouble, so we bought a pie and I ran around putting back things such as eggs which we were buying to bake the pie. What had settled the matter was a free apple pie for me with the purchase of his pumpkin pie (or vice versa). Both treats for us which will be eaten over many days as we are limited in eating sweets.
I had planned on clearing out the dining room yesterday and today - in particular the items for the RV which sit under the dining room table in RV season and get stored in the RV for the winter, but did not have a chance due to the running around shopping. We keep our dining room table, without the boards to the table, against the wall when not in use. (This was done in the 1700s and is very convenient allowing use of the empty space in the middle of the room for other projects.) I will pull it into place in the middle of the room and stack the RV stuff (and any weaving stuff, etc. stored in the dining room) against the wall out of the way.
I did polish the silverware we will use. It has been some years since it was polished and the heating of the house to kill the bed bugs did not help. I have been picking out for us the less tarnished looking pieces. Surprisingly it did not take as long as I remembered to polish what we needed - and I put the pieces in a zip bag to keep them relatively free of tarnish. Perhaps I will finally get around to polishing the rest of the silverware and lining the drawers they are kept in with the special fabric to prevent tarnishing to protect it. In the meantime, the pieces I have polished will be returned to the sealed bag when we are done with them.
Somehow the dining room will be ready. I will get up tomorrow and put the turkey in the oven and go back to sleep. Everything will come out okay - worse comes to worse, it is just us.
My best wishes to all of you who are in the U.S. for a wonderful Thanksgiving.
When I met my husband (who is Roman Catholic) and as we progressed through dating to marriage we started celebrating each other’s holidays with the each other’s families. That left Thanksgiving as the only holiday both families wanted us for. We tended to go to his family, but sometimes went to mine. We got married and this continued. Then came the year his sister got married - a week or so before Thanksgiving. We did not want to go to dinner with just his parents and grandmother, but did not want to leave them alone and go to dinner with my family. What to do?
I then made a suggestion that shocked and surprised my husband - “Let’s have both families here for Thanksgiving dinner”. I then found the real difference between the two families. It was not being from different “old countries”. It was not the difference in religion. It was - his family ate out for almost all holidays and mine ate home for almost all holidays. The concept of making dinner for and having 10 people shocked and scared him. My mom used to have that and more for family holiday dinners and to do so was what I expected out of life. He was further concerned as we lived in our apartment then - “Where would we put everyone?’ We had a long living room and I figured we would get (we ended up borrowing from his parents) folding tables and set them up end to end to make one long table.
Both families agreed to come. We were a little rocky that first year. We overreached. Luckily we started the night before. We planned on making our own stuffing which used chestnuts - I never knew that under the shell chestnuts had a skin, which also had to be removed - it took forever. We put together some food dish or other and had it on the counter. I dropped a glass - the food was covered in glass and had to be thrown out. But we did it. Lack of serving space? Cover the portable clothes dryer with a table cloth, push it in the corner of the living room - bar. People had a problem walking past each other at the table, but it all worked out. I even saw a different side of my, always seemingly austere, grandfather - someone made an inadvertent double meaning comment (meaning off color in the unintended meaning) and my grandfather laughed like crazy with everyone else and so did husband’s grandmother.
It was so successful that we continued for 25 years to make Thanksgiving dinner for the combined families. We got much better at it. The year we moved to this house we moved in October. I promised that we would make Thanksgiving dinner - even if we ate off of paper plates. (The china was on the table for the dinner.) The problem we found we had was that the dinning room was square, not long and we had to deal with fitting in tables. Until we bought a dining room table some years later we came up with plywood pieces which clamped to our old kitchen table and made a huge square table and had to be assembled and disassembled each year.
The only thing that stopped us, finally, from continuing to make Thanksgiving dinner was bed bugs. Since we no longer feel comfortable having anyone in the house we no longer have people in. Since then my family eats dinner at my sister’s house and his family goes out for dinner. We eat alone. In the 8 years since then we have eaten Thanksgiving dinner in a chain buffet or made dinner for the two of us. (One has a lot of leftover turkey when one makes dinner for two.) The chain buffet closed this year. That left us looking for an alternative. There was one possible place that we could sort of afford, but we had never been there and reviews online were not the best. So this past weekend it was “officially” decided that we make dinner at home.
Now to keep organized over the years I made lists. Starting the second year we made Thanksgiving I wrote them in a spiral notebook. At first it not only included a list of what we would have, but also lists of what each item would be cooked and served in. Over the years since the menu mostly repeated I knew which items would be used for cooking and serving. I knew that, as odd as it sounds, the first thing to start cooking when we got up Thanksgiving (late) morning was the potatoes for mashed potatoes. The first year we had found out that there was a large local deli which was open on Thanksgiving and we could order the turkey cooked and ready for a hot pickup in the afternoon - my sister and her husband (and children) would pick it up for us on their way here (we paid) as they went past the place anyway. Over the years the place shut down and we started getting the turkey from their other location - closer to my sister than us. Not having a turkey in the oven left room for everything else.
At the height of our hosting Thanksgiving I would start cooking on Tuesday having already cleared the dining room as much as possible - including moving small pieces of furniture to our studio on the other side of the kitchen. I baked Venetians (aka rainbow cookies). They had to be baked and put together with the jellied centers on one day, left overnight with a heavy book on them and then chocolate melted and frosted it on another day. I would make beef vegetable soup (PA Dutch recipe) on Wednesday and bake an apple pie and brownies (brownies were from a mix). Wednesday night we would put together the sweet potatoes (no marshmallows, Colonial Williamsburg recipe) and bake the pumpkin pie. Thanksgiving day we would make the rest of the items and bake the sweet potatoes. A couple of times I made and baked rolls from scratch and once a baked a tea bread (CW recipe again) from scratch. Sometimes I made biscuits instead. Nieces and nephews however like the can popping open however, and we mostly made rolls from refrigerated dough. (These rolls are no longer made by the popping can company or any other.)
Each year I would look at my list of dishes from the year before. We would discuss it and possibly make changes - Would something new work? Do we need more of less of something. More of something? Did his sister want salad? Was my sister vegetarian that year? Did my niece decide she was kosher that year and would bring her own food? (Did not last beyond 2 years.) We would adjust the menu. But year to year it remained organized. My sisters, mom and I were used to working together on getting out the food and clearing up and husband’s sister made her best efforts to help. As nieces came along they helped - young children like to help - but nephew preferred the living room and playing. I would do the dishes, etc. after everyone left. In the apartment by hand and here in the dishwasher. Here in the house I would also wash and dry the tablecloth and napkins overnight. Since we stopped having the family in, the dish washer has broken so I am back to washing by hand. When we went to/go to sleep at night on Thanksgiving everything has been washed (or was being washed in the dishwasher). It does take a few days or a week to put it all back, but all is always cleaned that night.
Our guest list would change - it got smaller when my dad died, larger with each niece or nephew, a boyhood friend of husband’s who lived out of town, was down for the holidays a couple of times and joined us for dinner. Husband’s sister’s mother-in-law was added to the guest list for several years before we stopped. We first heard that his sister and her husband were going to adopt a child at dinner one year. My niece had her first “food” - applesauce - at Thanksgiving dinner one year.
I have the recipes in the computer. I used to use a cookbook program, but it needs a parallel printer directly hooked up to the computer on a specific port, so it is no longer usable. It used to be great, it would resize recipes and calculate the revised ingredient list and had a shopping list feature. I had put in the location of foods in our supermarket and I would have a shopping list printed out in the order I needed to find the foods. When I saw its life coming to an end I printed all the recipes and scanned them back into the computer as pdf files so I would not lose the recipes. I have to calculate ingredient quantities for changes in servings and make my own shopping lists, but I still can print the recipes out. One advantage to this when making an assortment of items, is that when an item is done being prepared, the recipe is tossed out. Helps keep track of what is done and what needs to be done.
So if we have been so organized and good at it, why has this year been such a mess? We did not decide until the last minute that we were making dinner for ourselves. (We had kept waiting for the magic restaurant to appear for us to go to for dinner.) On Sunday while in Costco we saw turkeys for 99 cents a pound. We were not going straight home and did not want the turkey sitting in the car for hours so we did not buy one.
Tuesday we had a list of what we would make and needed ingredients. - some our traditional ones, some husband picked to make it easier for me. We set out to food shop. In my mind we would buy items which did not need refrigeration (since they were more Thanksgiving related they might sell out) and then get a turkey at the Costco near us. Husband had planned to buy the turkey first in case we had a problem finding one - but did not tell me why he was buying it first, so I pushed to get it later. We bought stuff at Walmart and the supermarket next to it. (I may or may not have mentioned that our Walmarts do not have the supermarket Walmarts commonly have and there is a separate, unrelated supermarket next to the Walmart we normally go to.) We then set off, not to the Costco near us, but to the one we normally go to (which we like it better than the one near us) to get the turkey.
Horrors! There were no more 99 cent a pound turkeys! The only turkeys they had were $3.29 a pound as they were organic. Panic! My mind went to what we could have instead of turkey. I remembered we bought 2 ham portions - one for Christmas and one for whenever - when last in Lancaster, PA and I figured if stuck we would have “French Turkey” which is ham. Husband drove to a specialty food store located near Costco which had opened here this year - a chain from Connecticut. We had been very disappointed when we went to see this store after decades of hearing about it - very expensive, but I followed him into the store. He moved so quickly that I lost sight of him before I got to the store. I kept thinking I was seeing his red winter jacket - but when I got to where I thought I saw him it would be an employee in a red apron. I finally caught up with him at the turkey case. They had LOTS of turkey - even better and - important at this point - was that the turkeys were not frozen. We picked out one that is probably too big for us, and brought it home. $1.69 a pound, not the 99 cents we planned, but not $3.29 either.
Today Wednesday we went to the supermarket to buy the items which we did not buy yesterday as they need to be refrigerated and we did not want to drive around with them yesterday while getting the turkey. We ended up changing the menu while there. I had planned on baking him a pumpkin pie. He decided we should buy one instead. I make it for him with less sugar and no pie shell (believe it or not the latter part - no pie shell - is from Libbys and uses its basic pie recipe). He decided it was too much trouble, so we bought a pie and I ran around putting back things such as eggs which we were buying to bake the pie. What had settled the matter was a free apple pie for me with the purchase of his pumpkin pie (or vice versa). Both treats for us which will be eaten over many days as we are limited in eating sweets.
I had planned on clearing out the dining room yesterday and today - in particular the items for the RV which sit under the dining room table in RV season and get stored in the RV for the winter, but did not have a chance due to the running around shopping. We keep our dining room table, without the boards to the table, against the wall when not in use. (This was done in the 1700s and is very convenient allowing use of the empty space in the middle of the room for other projects.) I will pull it into place in the middle of the room and stack the RV stuff (and any weaving stuff, etc. stored in the dining room) against the wall out of the way.
I did polish the silverware we will use. It has been some years since it was polished and the heating of the house to kill the bed bugs did not help. I have been picking out for us the less tarnished looking pieces. Surprisingly it did not take as long as I remembered to polish what we needed - and I put the pieces in a zip bag to keep them relatively free of tarnish. Perhaps I will finally get around to polishing the rest of the silverware and lining the drawers they are kept in with the special fabric to prevent tarnishing to protect it. In the meantime, the pieces I have polished will be returned to the sealed bag when we are done with them.
Somehow the dining room will be ready. I will get up tomorrow and put the turkey in the oven and go back to sleep. Everything will come out okay - worse comes to worse, it is just us.
My best wishes to all of you who are in the U.S. for a wonderful Thanksgiving.
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 14, 2016
KITCHEN CABINETS - PART 3
Before we get to “the right cabinet” I am proud to say that my Christmas dishes and glasses are packed away in their boxes and the boxes put back in the basement gas meter closet. The items which were displaced to in both the left and right cabinets are now back where they belong.
The right cabinet is called same as it hangs to the right of the sink. It is the same size and shape as the left cabinet and is also 4 shelves in height.
The bottom shelf contains a hodge podge of items. I have the glasses we use for every day - 2 short, wide plastic ones for my husband and 2 tall, thin glass ones for me. Generally one of each is in the dishwasher, but when they are put away, this is where they “live”. I also have measuring cups. I have 2 each of liquid 1 cup and 2 cup measuring cups and 2 sets of dry measuring cups. I also have a larger size 1 cup measurer (meaning there is more space at the top above the cup) which is good for mixing 1 cup items in as it does not run over the top. I also have a “shot glass” (1 oz) measuring glass that allows measurements of small amounts of liquid - by 1/4 oz increments or teaspoons.
I have a spare set of soup bowls to my everyday dishes here also. The company changed the size and shape of same and when I complained about needing to replace a couple of bowls and not being able to get matching ones, they sent me 8 bowls. I am waiting until I break over half of the original bowls and then will switch them - 2 bowls to go. I have 2 larger bowls that match nothing which I keep in here and we use for salad at dinner.
I have funnels in here in 3 different sizes, one of which is a canning funnel with a larger out spout than the others - great for pouring tomato sauce, gravy and the like into a small pitcher or gravy bowl without making a mess. Two glass ice cream glasses and some plastic glasses (no breakable glasses are allowed upstairs and no food). The smaller 2 of the plastic glasses have lids which clip on and a straw hole in the lids.
The second shelf up has the glasses which match my dishes - stemmed and goblet, 8 of each. These are the glasses that I plan to donate to make room for our “good glasses” to move from the living room secretary so husband can put more DVDs there. It also has the bottom cup part of my stick mixer (the part for grinding and such).
The next shelf up has my middle set of dishes - not the everyday, but not the good china. (It is ironstone). It is not stored in quilted dish storage containers and can be used whenever I want it. In the past when we had people in, I would use it for smaller groups as it is service for 8. Similar to my everyday dishes, the cups hang from hooks at the top of the shelf. The matching sugar bowl, bowl and platter are on the shelf with the dishes. The matching milk pitcher is on the shelf above as the handle broke on it and I can’t use it until we fix it. The dishes were a set and that is why I have the matching service pieces. Again, I need to climb up to reach this shelf as I needed to do to reach the same shelf on the left side.
The top shelf has, other than the milk pitcher mentioned, items I rarely if ever use. Again, similar to the left side, I need to climb onto the counter to reach this shelf. It has the juice glasses that match the glasses which match our dishes, a footed cake plate, a mold for making ice pops and 2 cylinder shaped pitchers. I think I can get rid of everything on this shelf when I get rid of the glasses below.
There you have it. The contents of 2 of my 4 kitchen cabinets. During the week I plan to store the good china used for Christmas and New Year’s Eves by my husband and myself. I will also start taking down the Christmas trees after Monday. I think I have found a new place to store the tree ornaments and other decorations in the house in the basement, rather than the garage. It will be interesting to see if they fit and where what is currently in that space will go.
See you next week.
The right cabinet is called same as it hangs to the right of the sink. It is the same size and shape as the left cabinet and is also 4 shelves in height.
The bottom shelf contains a hodge podge of items. I have the glasses we use for every day - 2 short, wide plastic ones for my husband and 2 tall, thin glass ones for me. Generally one of each is in the dishwasher, but when they are put away, this is where they “live”. I also have measuring cups. I have 2 each of liquid 1 cup and 2 cup measuring cups and 2 sets of dry measuring cups. I also have a larger size 1 cup measurer (meaning there is more space at the top above the cup) which is good for mixing 1 cup items in as it does not run over the top. I also have a “shot glass” (1 oz) measuring glass that allows measurements of small amounts of liquid - by 1/4 oz increments or teaspoons.
I have a spare set of soup bowls to my everyday dishes here also. The company changed the size and shape of same and when I complained about needing to replace a couple of bowls and not being able to get matching ones, they sent me 8 bowls. I am waiting until I break over half of the original bowls and then will switch them - 2 bowls to go. I have 2 larger bowls that match nothing which I keep in here and we use for salad at dinner.
I have funnels in here in 3 different sizes, one of which is a canning funnel with a larger out spout than the others - great for pouring tomato sauce, gravy and the like into a small pitcher or gravy bowl without making a mess. Two glass ice cream glasses and some plastic glasses (no breakable glasses are allowed upstairs and no food). The smaller 2 of the plastic glasses have lids which clip on and a straw hole in the lids.
The second shelf up has the glasses which match my dishes - stemmed and goblet, 8 of each. These are the glasses that I plan to donate to make room for our “good glasses” to move from the living room secretary so husband can put more DVDs there. It also has the bottom cup part of my stick mixer (the part for grinding and such).
The next shelf up has my middle set of dishes - not the everyday, but not the good china. (It is ironstone). It is not stored in quilted dish storage containers and can be used whenever I want it. In the past when we had people in, I would use it for smaller groups as it is service for 8. Similar to my everyday dishes, the cups hang from hooks at the top of the shelf. The matching sugar bowl, bowl and platter are on the shelf with the dishes. The matching milk pitcher is on the shelf above as the handle broke on it and I can’t use it until we fix it. The dishes were a set and that is why I have the matching service pieces. Again, I need to climb up to reach this shelf as I needed to do to reach the same shelf on the left side.
The top shelf has, other than the milk pitcher mentioned, items I rarely if ever use. Again, similar to the left side, I need to climb onto the counter to reach this shelf. It has the juice glasses that match the glasses which match our dishes, a footed cake plate, a mold for making ice pops and 2 cylinder shaped pitchers. I think I can get rid of everything on this shelf when I get rid of the glasses below.
There you have it. The contents of 2 of my 4 kitchen cabinets. During the week I plan to store the good china used for Christmas and New Year’s Eves by my husband and myself. I will also start taking down the Christmas trees after Monday. I think I have found a new place to store the tree ornaments and other decorations in the house in the basement, rather than the garage. It will be interesting to see if they fit and where what is currently in that space will go.
See you next week.
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 12, 2015
LET'S START WITH MY LITTLE KITCHEN
The kitchen - everyone’s kitchen and it’s uses are different. When reading books I am told that I must make work areas. I have no room for work areas do you?
Our kitchen is allegedly an eat in kitchen. We have a small table that fits the 2 of us, possibly a guest if we sit very close. Our kitchen is what is called a galley kitchen. This means that the work area of the kitchen consists of 2 sides of an aisle, similar to what might exist in a boat, hence the term.
I have a sink in the middle of the counter on one side of the aisle, with the only window in the kitchen above the sink. There is a non-working dishwasher under a counter top on one side of the sink and a counter top on the other side. Total length of the this counter is maybe 5 ft. There is the usual cabinet under the sink, 2 small and one “bread” drawer and small cabinet under the end of the counter without the dishwasher. Above the counter there is a wall cabinet on each end with 4 shelves in it which goes to the ceiling. Across the aisle from this is a range (freestanding stove and oven) with a wall cabinet over it, a free standing floor cabinet with a drawer, a thin wall cabinet over it and the refrigerator.
I also have a small pantry closet with shelves which supplements the above for kitchen storage. It is located beyond the kitchen table, across the bathroom. Yes, I have a bathroom which is basically in part of my kitchen. When we sit at the table we are looking at the outside wall of the bathroom and the entrance faces the pantry closet. I have to turn on the light in my bathroom to see what is in my pantry closet!
The kitchen also serves as our main entry to the house. We have what used to be a den that we use as a studio, attached to the back of the house, behind the kitchen, so we walk through the kitchen to reach it. The kitchen also connects through the dining room - opposite the entry to our studio - to the rest of the house. I have never heard of a kitchen like this in any organizing book I have read.
I do suggest, as others do, going through your kitchen stuff and getting rid of items which you don’t use. I have no hard and fast rule about time - no one year limit. I am about to get rid of, for example, a set that is suppose to keep your eggs round when fried (in rings) and your bacon flat (a weight). I have never used them. We don’t eat breakfast. I don’t cook bacon. When cook eggs we do so for dinner and I make omelets. We had received decades ago a “fold in half, nonstick” omelet pan as gift. It sat around unused and was long ago donated to the Salvation Army or Goodwill. The egg set will soon be following it. On the other hand, I have a very large stockpot and lid which I used to use to make soup for Thanksgiving dinner and other meals I made for the extended family. We no longer have the family (or anyone) for dinner in the house (the story behind this will be written much later in time). Organizing books would say I should get rid of this pot. I hope to one day have dinners here in the house again and I would never be able to replace this pot with one I would be happy with, so I keep it. It is stored, though, not in my kitchen but in a very small closet in my basement. So my rule is that if I reasonably might use the item again, I keep it. If it gives me hope, I keep it. If I have never used it, it goes.
What do items do I have in my kitchen for use? Tune in next week. I have turned on the feature which lets you follow me - feel free to use it.
Our kitchen is allegedly an eat in kitchen. We have a small table that fits the 2 of us, possibly a guest if we sit very close. Our kitchen is what is called a galley kitchen. This means that the work area of the kitchen consists of 2 sides of an aisle, similar to what might exist in a boat, hence the term.
I have a sink in the middle of the counter on one side of the aisle, with the only window in the kitchen above the sink. There is a non-working dishwasher under a counter top on one side of the sink and a counter top on the other side. Total length of the this counter is maybe 5 ft. There is the usual cabinet under the sink, 2 small and one “bread” drawer and small cabinet under the end of the counter without the dishwasher. Above the counter there is a wall cabinet on each end with 4 shelves in it which goes to the ceiling. Across the aisle from this is a range (freestanding stove and oven) with a wall cabinet over it, a free standing floor cabinet with a drawer, a thin wall cabinet over it and the refrigerator.
I also have a small pantry closet with shelves which supplements the above for kitchen storage. It is located beyond the kitchen table, across the bathroom. Yes, I have a bathroom which is basically in part of my kitchen. When we sit at the table we are looking at the outside wall of the bathroom and the entrance faces the pantry closet. I have to turn on the light in my bathroom to see what is in my pantry closet!
The kitchen also serves as our main entry to the house. We have what used to be a den that we use as a studio, attached to the back of the house, behind the kitchen, so we walk through the kitchen to reach it. The kitchen also connects through the dining room - opposite the entry to our studio - to the rest of the house. I have never heard of a kitchen like this in any organizing book I have read.
I do suggest, as others do, going through your kitchen stuff and getting rid of items which you don’t use. I have no hard and fast rule about time - no one year limit. I am about to get rid of, for example, a set that is suppose to keep your eggs round when fried (in rings) and your bacon flat (a weight). I have never used them. We don’t eat breakfast. I don’t cook bacon. When cook eggs we do so for dinner and I make omelets. We had received decades ago a “fold in half, nonstick” omelet pan as gift. It sat around unused and was long ago donated to the Salvation Army or Goodwill. The egg set will soon be following it. On the other hand, I have a very large stockpot and lid which I used to use to make soup for Thanksgiving dinner and other meals I made for the extended family. We no longer have the family (or anyone) for dinner in the house (the story behind this will be written much later in time). Organizing books would say I should get rid of this pot. I hope to one day have dinners here in the house again and I would never be able to replace this pot with one I would be happy with, so I keep it. It is stored, though, not in my kitchen but in a very small closet in my basement. So my rule is that if I reasonably might use the item again, I keep it. If it gives me hope, I keep it. If I have never used it, it goes.
What do items do I have in my kitchen for use? Tune in next week. I have turned on the feature which lets you follow me - feel free to use it.
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