I’m still sitting in dust listening to drills drone and hammers pound, still waiting for our bathroom project to finish. This is Week Five, and Earl and I have had to make an adjustment in our time schedule. In fact, we probably have another couple weeks to go before it’s all done.
While we wait, we’re working on our next project: the pantry. That is, we’re working on it mentally and nutritionally. After the holidays, we plan to remove all the shelves, paint the pantry, and rearrange the shelving for better use. What we’re doing now is emptying the shelves by eating what’s stored on them. We figure the more we eat, the less we have to move.
And, since we’ve been buying food at Martin’s Wall of Value for a couple years, there’s a lot to work with. We try to use at least one, and sometimes two, items from the pantry every night. For instance, last night I made corn muffins from one of those half-sized boxes Jiffy® makes. You probably know the kind; you probably have several boxes on your shelves too.
Other nights I’ve used up the pasta side dishes, the instant rice, the soup mixes, the beans, and some of the umpteen cans of tomato sauce we’ve hoarded. I now put olives in our salad; in fact I recently put black olives in a pot roast dish.
In the beginning, I used to look at the date on each item to see whether it was out of code or not. But when I found most of the food was past its announced prime, I gave up. We’re still here and neither of us has gotten sick from the canned mushrooms Earl brought back from one trip to his parents’ home in Tennessee.
We’ve also called a moratorium on buying more food, just because it’s on sale, and we figure we’ll have eaten ourselves through almost everything by year’s end. Hopefully, we’ll be showering in our new bathrooms by then too!
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