Standing In The Middle Of The Kitchen, Screaming

      That's what I'd like to do.   Instead, after a particularly vexing Kitchen Avalanche, I said a set of very bad words indeed, then dug in and sorted out one small corner of the long, narrow cluttered galley kitchen here at Roseholme Cottage.

      I am not a neat housekeeper.  I am oddly orderly; a lifetime of poor eyesight has me in the habit of always keeping things in the same place.  Open any cabinet or drawer (except the junk drawer) and it's organized.  But on the macro scale, there are heaps and piles and little if any open countertop space.  The pandemic has only added to that -- the various shortages and the inadvisability of spending too much time indoor with random strangers means I keep a lot more food and supplies in stock than I had been previously.

      So the kitchen gets piled up.  Add a (much smaller) set of snacks for Tam and her supply of soft drinks, and at times it teeters on the edge of minor calamity.  This morning, one corner tumbled over, breads, a box of bakery cookies, chips, plasticware and an unused set of large, disposable, freezer-to-microwave bowl slipping floorward.  A few items managed to make the whole trip.

      There was no easy fix.  I temporarily relocated the large stuff, excavated down to a thin strata of expired-in-2021 individually-sized snack bags, summarily disposed of them, sorted out fallen recipes (this is the cookbook corner, or it was supposed to be), got to bare countertop and put the area into some kind of order.  The bowls went elsewhere.  They looked like a good idea a year ago, but they haven't worked out.

      Who knows, maybe I'll tackle the longer stretch of countertop on the other side of the room later on.