Most people used their extra hour when Daylight Savings ends to sleep or go to breakfast or take a hike. I used mine to . . .
. . . clean out the pantry. My pantry is really my old laundry room/closet. It wasn’t big enough to hang up anything to dry. It has shelving on the upper part of the long wall. It’s right off the kitchen and has hardwood floors. For the first four years in my little house, I lived with my awkward laundry room, which was noisy and too close to the family room and the TV. My youngest would start her laundry at 10:00 p.m., drowning out the news, which wasn’t so bad back then. I’d like something to drown out the news, two days before the election.
I added onto my house in 2015 before my youngest went to an expensive private college and before the cost of water, gas, electricity and insurance went way up. I thought I had all this extra money. I guess I should be glad I did it when I did it, because now I would think twice about spending that kind of cash.
I added a sewing room, a 3rd bathroom, and a big laundry room with a door to the yard and a nice porch. As serendipity would have it, one of my adult children moved back home and is now in that sewing room and has the 3rd bathroom as their own.
But I digress.
The old pantry is now the cleaning closet, and the vacuum barely fits inside, along with light bulbs, vacuum cleaner bags, shoe polish, brooms, cleaning products, paper towels, Kleenex boxes, plastic zippy bags, a Swiffer Wet Jet and all the accoutrements of cleaning up.
The pantry is rather large with shelving on three walls and a bookcase on the fourth wall with the door. Inside I store dogfood, birdseed, rice, sugar, flour (all in Tupperware containers as rodent prevention), canned goods, popcorn, granola bars, pots too big for my cabinets, paper plates, plastic cutlery, water bottles, flashlights, a fire extinguisher, extra Tupperware containers, canning jars with lids, a mixer, a food processor, two crock pots, and my spices. The problem was the floor was entirely covered and it was hard to walk in there.
I dragged a stool into the pantry, turned on my meditation playlist on YouTube and took my time sorting, removing cardboard packaging, filling jars and plastic bins, sorting containers with no lids and lids with no containers, throwing out expired food, and generally having a good time for one hour. When I was done, it still wasn’t noon yet. I’d already gone to the grocery store and walked my dog. It felt like I was on Pandemic time again, where I could while away the day sorting and cleaning.
If you’ve read this far, then you might enjoy watching the videos where people fold laundry as a way to soothe your frazzled nerves. It was much healthier than scrolling through Facebook.
Today, I even had time for that!
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 