I am not the most organized person.
Actually that’s not quite true. In some ways I can be tremendously organized. Planning a trip? I’m ok there. Making sure I have ticked all the boxes on projects at work and following up on a pile of emails? Also okay. Herding the necessary cats to schedule a get-together? Can do.
Where I run into trouble seems to be the organization of physical objects in space. It is weirdly easy to put something down and forget about it, or to come up with a scheme for arranging something that seems like genius at the time, only I forget what exactly the plan was between then and when I next need it, so it turns out not to be all that useful.
Oh, my books end up on bookshelves and my clothes live in the closet and I can usually…more or less…make a space vaguely presentable. But fucking hell my pantry is a goddamn nightmare.
Partly this is because the shelves are very, very deep, and so there is a tendency for things to get shoved to the back if they’re not used very often; I can only JUST reach to the very back myself, and I am relatively tall.
I have long since resigned myself to never being one of those people whose real-world house looks like something from Instagram, but the Pantry Situation has been vaguely irritating me for months and months. This is especially true when I think I am out of something, buy it, and then discover oh wait we had some all along but it had got to the back of the damn shelves…
But somehow this irritation has never really turned into action, at least not yet.
Last week I spotted a moth fluttering about in the ground floor space of my house, and even though I know we’ve had something of a gypsy moth epidemic here in Toronto of late, and I am pretty sure that particular moth just fluttered in from outside…I had a sudden horrible vision of something lurking back there.
And suddenly enough was enough, and I immediately went forth to search the internet for its favorite pantry-storage containers for dry goods, and within the space of a few hours I had placed an order.
Yesterday the containers came. This morning I washed all of them out with soapy water, and they are patiently air-drying on my counter, and I have attacked the first of the terrifying shelves and purged it of its contents, fairly ruthlessly discarding anything unidentifiable, of a terrifyingly-distant age, or that otherwise seemed to be unsuitable for consumption.
And even just from trying to empty this one shelf, my kitchen is a mess, you guys.
And for some reason I started this the day AFTER garbage day.
Sigh.
Oh well. It needs to be done, so let it be done.
I’m probably not going to restore any kind of harmony to my kitchen any OTHER way.