Four Checkmarks

After a late start and putting together a casserole for lunch (leftovers for dinner), I finally started on my "Preparation for Thanksgiving" list.

The Amish Cabinet by the garage door - cleaning this out was an easy process.  Some things had made their way to the back and needed to be pitched.  Some consolidation of tea bags, lemonade packets, and individual additives for bottles of water eliminated some of the boxes.

Another task was going through some of my recipe boxes and pitching some of the recipes that I never use, that were pulled from magazines, or just didn't work for us helping me to add a broken recipe box to the trash bag too.

The good news was that I cleared up enough room in the cabinet to give some space to various cups that had been making their homes on top of the refrigerator.  It will be easier to find cups for the little kids now since they are on the lower shelves of that cabinet.

Next step was removing all of the refrigerator art from the front and side and cleaning those two surfaces, then adding the older pictures to the photo box, pitching old items (Landon's baseball schedule and Blaine's work schedule from 2015), then rearranging everything.  Gary helped with removing the accumulation from the top of the fridge and finding new homes for some items.

While I was in the process of working on the fridge, I sprayed the interior of the stove with oven cleaner and let it work.  Removing all of that was an intense chore, one that I really dislike, but the oven looks much better and is ready for more baking and meal preparation.

The final task was the top drawer of the hutch.  More pitching of things, moving pens and notepads to the icebox, sorting through manuals that came with small appliances and determining whether we still used them or not.  By the end the drawer was more organized, there is some extra room, and it is much easier to open and close.

That is all.  Not bad for just a half-day.  I forgot...I went through a photo album from Mom's and pulled out pictures that had no meaning for any of us.  The Wooly Bear Festival, Algonquin, pictures of covered bridges, pictures of singers at the Carnation Festival.  No one we knew.  Nothing to hold onto for memories because there were no memories triggered from any of it.  I had quite a pile of pictures to toss in the trash bag by the time I was finished with that album. There were some neat Christmas pictures, pictures of the girls when they were showing cattle, pictures from our camping trip to Lincoln State Park.  I also enjoyed the pictures of Auntie Mae and Uncle Bud's 66th birthday, especially since I am now 66 too.

Maybe not much progress today, but enough to make a start.  As Gary always says, I can't do it in one day, nor would I want to.  But I can chip away at the list and eventually be happy with the end results.