THURSDAY 20 APRIL 2023 1120HRS BST

 

I've been on a year-plus long 'reconsideration' of all things household. It has been simultaneously interesting-thought provoking-eye opening.

What is a reconsideration period? Well, it's in large part a decluttering effort but it is mostly a reconsideration of what I use-need-don't use or need. Prompted, like all declutterings going on everywhere in the world today, apparently, by lack of storage meaning things are jammed in higgly-piggly any and everywhere. Making retrieving things I need to use next to impossible and often never retrieved owing to the exhausting effort required currently to move this and this and this just to get to that then move all the this things back.

I have multiple heart and heart related issues. Mild-ish, I like to say, but damned inconvenient when I'm having a bad-ish spell. I have spent a lifetime making the stoopid heart thingies as unnoticeable to the people around me as possible and I've managed well enough over the years. Although as I age I do notice some escalation, the health conditions are annoying more than anything and I actively work at keeping the annoyances to a minimum. I know my limits and arrange Life accordingly.

 

Organisation is the key to minimising the pita health issues - an easy to reach place for everything and everything returned to said easy to reach place after use makes for a much easier life. For everyone, not just me, if I don't have to ask The Resident Aspie to help me fetch-carry-retrieve something, Life is good. He's actually wonderful about helping when I need him to but he has on occasion mentioned his deep appreciation for my refusal to be one of those boring old gits with annoying mild-ish health conditions who constantly has to bang on about said conditions.

 

So not having this house well organised is making me crazy. 

 

OK, yes, the truth is I should have held out for a bit bigger house when we sold the former home to downsize. I should have held out for two bathrooms, a bigger-better organised kitchen, two big bedrooms (at least!) and a 'box room' I could use for a stock room. I should have held out for a working fireplace we could convert to a multi-fuel flat-top stove (heat, light, cooking in a power outage).  

Should have. Did not. sigh

If I had a spare £20K lying about I could just about manage to make this house 'work'. 

I do not have a spare £20K lying about. And so far my weekly £1 lottery ticket is not coming up trumps. sigh

The local charity shops love me. I did try flogging some of the things I've reconsidered, to no avail. 

 

The pasta making machine, WTH was I thinking - the damn thing can't be cleaned to a hygienic standard, the user is meant to use a bristle brush to knock the crumbs left by the pasta dough. Dough that includes egg, do they really think a germaphobe like me is going to EVER use that thing, EVER? Easier and much more sanitary to use a cutter-on-a-stick thingie that can go in the washing-up basin or (hahahahahaha, as if I'd be able to find room for a...) dishwasher. Paul gets his gluten-free pasta and I get the satisfaction of knowing I can sanitise the tool after a zen-like morning cutting pasta and hanging it on the rack to dry. The rack, btw, is a stainless steel thing I can also sanitise. It used to be a free-standing swing-out multi-rack tea towel rack, works a treat for dying pasta. Just saying.

Any road, during my reconsideration period, I came to understand while it is a wise homemaker thing to keep spares, it is wiser to box and label the spares then put the box(es) in the shed. And yes, part of the reconsideration period includes deciding which items I use enough to warrant having at all much less keeping spares of. 

Good-bye pasta machine, extravagantly huge casserole dishes, good-bye (and good riddance!) to inconvenient grating and peeling tools (the charity shop ladies tell me the tomato slicing holder went in a flash. They're still trying to convince someone to take the pasta machine). Good-bye to several never opened bottles of nail varnish I can't use owing to the medical need to be able to use a ox-sats finger unit 3xDaily. Good-bye to several sets of hair curlers, a too heavy hand-held blow-dryer, and good-bye to no end really of craft supplies. 

Good-bye to quite a lot of things but mainly the good-byes were to kitchen things. The deep fat fryer, the cake decorating set (I can no longer use thanks to Essential Tremor - easier to 'dust' with confectioner sugar and slather icing on baked goods needing more than a dusting). The multiple 8 place setting sets of crockery - really, do I NEED five sets of 8 place setting tableware, really? Two sets of four place settings and we're good and BONUS - less to wash-up:)

But HELLO grill racks that double as cooling racks! The only ones I sent to the charity shops were the ones too big for my worktop 'mini-oven' (that is the same size as my knee-height integrated one I'm now using for pots-pans-casserole dish storage). WHO KNEW - and you're completely forgiven for your immediate thought 'She didn't, blimey, what a twit!'. I love 'Bangers and Mash', even with the price rises on quality steak sausage, it's a lovely and filling money-saver meal. I am embarrassed to confess I was creating a grilling sheet from tin foil to grill the sausages but the damn things collapse when trying to turn the sausages and it was only last week (I really am embarrassed by this confession) it dawned on me a wire grill rack was what I needed. 

 

Yeah. So, I used a thin and too long biscuit-cookie-cake cooling rack to grill the sausages Monday night...BLOODY PERFECTION, those sausages! Straight to Amazon and my proper size heavy duty racks arrive in a few hours. Quite looking forward to those racks, it comes as a two-pack and now I can send the too long-too thin to be multi-purpose cooling racks off to the charity shop.  

And another big hello to borosilicate glass casserole and mixing bowls that can go in the microwave or oven. I guard my collection of Pyrex (new and vintage, I have a difficult time passing up vintage 'Made in England' Pyrex, but who doesn't, eh?) - but I keep three each type only in the kitchen, the rest are boxed, labelled and in the shed. 

So far so good, really, and while the reconsideration period is still on. I feel I'm nearing the end. I've gone through just about every thing now, just a few more nooks and crannies to reconsider. 

Now all I need is a spare £20k, LOL - 'cause that isn't likely to happen. Oh well, a girl can dream, can't she?

sigh

 

 

 

Weds 19 April 2023 1036hrs BST

 

I logged on to natter on about my latest kitchen success. Opened 'create new post', typed the header (date and time post begun) and realised what day it is. 

 

28 years on from that horrific day. We were in Guatemala City (Crusty on secondment there and I quite stupidly thought 'Oh yeah, no worries, I'll take my young son to do a temporary (two year) rota in a country in the midst of a civil war'), TV was cable with the majority of the channels being US ones so I had CNN rolling the background when the news hit the wires. 

 

I was running the vacuum and caught a look at the television screen, sat down on the sofa and watched the horror unfold. Fox was in class at The American School, the admin chose to keep the children on campus for several hours to ensure their transport home was safe from any copy-cat attacks so he didn't come home until much later. 13 years old having lived his entire life as the child of a military contractor, he was fully aware of the potential for terrorist attacks against Americans but I remember him being in absolute shock at the attack on American soil, he said he thought things like that only happened in the past (Pearl Harbor). He knew about the 1993 WTC bombing but it didn't affect him the way OKC did. I remember him asking 'Why do people do things like this?' but it didn't seem to impact him the way OKC two years later did.

 

And later when the perpetrators were identified as Americans, he was hurt and angry and shocked, the Oklahoma City Bombing changed my son forever. He's 41 now and I think he would agree everything changed for him (and so many other young people at the time) - but he doesn't talk about it and I doubt it is at the front of his mind as he goes about his days. But it's there, deep in his soul, just as it is for so many of the young people who were thousands of miles from OKC that day, physically unconnected but completely emotionally connected.

A few hours later the photo of a firefighter carrying little Baylee Almon out of the ruined day care centre flashed around the world and the image is still with many of us who remember 19 April 1995. 

 

Her date of birth? 18 April 1994. She would be 29years and 1day this morning if McVeigh hadn't chosen the building she was in to make his statement against the world. She died in hospital that day instead. 

 

Six years later, Timothy McVeigh was executed by lethal injection - the first federal execution in 38 years. I remember that morning as clearly as I remember the morning in April. 

I'm 66 years old. I clearly remember where I was when Kennedy was murdered, when Nixon resigned, when Saigon fell, when Dan White killed Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone (I was living in San Francisco at the time). I remember 7/7 2005 London bombing and the 1993 WTC bombing and WTC 9-11 in 2001, I remember Tehran and Tiananmen Square and the Berlin Wall and...

I'm glad that I remember - these things (and I've left out so many in the above paragraph, so many) should be remembered. We're who we are, these monstrous things WILL happen again despite all the 'Never Again' vows we make in all the aftermaths of all these horrible things. We cannot, must not live in perpetual grief but on these sad anniversaries, we must take a moment of silence and pray, yes, pray for 'Never Again' even though we understand human nature means these dreadful moments will happen. Again. 

 

My thoughts and prayers today are for all those Oklahomans who suffered such a terrible spring morning 28 years ago and doubtless still suffer. God is with them - I believe that and I pray they do as well. 

 EASTER SUNDAY 9 APRIL 2023 0948HRS BST

ALELUIA

 

HE IS RISEN!

 

PEACE BE WITH YOU AND YOURS