which_chick | (no subject)

Today I cleaned the kitchen and what would be the dining room if I actually dined there instead of eating on the couch with either a paperback or the laptop (sort of an infinite paperback) open in front of me. This cleaning project included cleaning off the dining room table (which, so that you have some idea of the problem here, still had cards on it that I got during the hysterectomy thing) and the drawers in the sideboard. I also washed the kitchen floor and laundered all of the throw rugs.

Inside the sideboard drawers, I located a few Dances of the Old Capital... er... coins. One was a 20-centavo piece from Mexico, dated 1976. Twenty centavos was a fifth of a peso when I was a kid and twenty centavos are still a fifth of a peso these days -- but the Mexican government lopped three zeros off the currency in 1996. The other coin I found was a 3-Kopeck piece from 1970. It's got a hammer and sickle on it as well as the letters CCCP. For the younger folks among us, the Kopeck is from the USSR, a country that no longer exists. Ya'll can guess how much that one's worth. Happy fiat currency day!

I still need to clean off the *top* of the sideboard, but it is very difficult for me to resist stacking stuff on flat surfaces. I am a stacker. Give me a flat surface and I will stack stuff on it. *sigh* Apparently I only stop stacking stuff when it starts falling off and/or becomes so unstable that the cat keeps knocking things off. I am turning over the same old leaf again to see if I can get better at not-stacking-things-up, but past experience suggests that I will not particularly succeed at this.

I also made two loaves of bread. Note to self: You don't like freeform loaves and the recipe makes two loaves every time you go through the recipe. This is no longer a surprise. Buy a second bread pan and quit whining. They're cooling on the dining room table, which also has three houseplants and one cat on it. It is free from other things... but for how long?

I cleaned out the freezer! I threw away all the garlic skins that I'd accumulated in there and sorted through the ginger nubbins to find the least-shrivelled ones. I removed freezer-burned, aged vegetables. (What on earth made me put three green beans *back* in the freezer, I will never know. Perhaps I have been visited by green bean thieves who secretly visited and ate away at a respectably-full bag of frozen green beans until there were only three green beans left.)

As part of the freezer-cleaning adventure, I made some a very half-assed pie thing to use up the half bag of frozen berries (straw, rasp, blue, black) left over from *mumble* years ago when I did the fruit smoothie thing for breakfasts. I used more-or-less pie dough pastry which would be a lot more if I hadn't gotten bored with measuring and guesstimated the amount of crisco instead of measuring it. (Measuring Crisco pisses me off.) It had the right look-and-feel, though, so I am not worried on that front. Inside of that, I put the berries (about a cup, cup and a half) and a quarter cup of sugar and a tablespoon of cornstarch. I folded the dough overtop of the innards and pretended to crimp it. I poked holes. It's baking in the oven as we speak. I do not really think much can go wrong with berries and pie dough, so I am not overly concerned with the lack of care I've taken, here.

I need more trash bags and I am planning to buy same on the way home from Grandma visiting this evening. I need acceptable trash bags (Yes, there are such things as unacceptable trash bags. Usually, they are ones so thin that I can see through their grey plastic. I do not want to have to throw away only things that weigh less than a pound. Sometimes I have heavy or pointy trash that I would like to throw away. My trash bags should be able to contain all manner of trash items, not just kleenex.) so that I can address a few more of the flat surfaces that suffer from stacking.