National Clean Out Your Pantry Day

We're either way ahead of the game, or way behind. No matter, we tend to play loose with holidays anyway. But we decided Sunday was Clean Out Your Pantry Day, regardless of when other people might think it is.

I didn't take any before pictures, but just take my word for it when I tell you it was filled with car parts, tons of "yard sale junk," old unusable jars, expired food, paint and paint supplies, tools, and copious amounts of spiderwebs. Also, some mouse poop.

But it only took a couple hours of Keith pre-organizing and the about 2 hours of the rest of us helping sort out what was Keep and what was Toss. We still have a lot of expired food to throw away. We had a contest to see what the oldest date we could find--- this was the winner:


There was a little discussion about how something AS OLD AS I AM survived so much packing and unpacking or if it was acquired somewhere along the way or what, but it clearly says, "79." We almost kept it for historical value, but decided to toss it. The runners up included mustard pickles, canned steelhead, and a wide variety of jellies from the early 90s. Keith and I have a personal policy of not eating anything older than 5 years.

So, the pantry after:

Everything top shelf center is getting tossed down the RV dump once we fashion a funnel to help with disposal. Not looking forward to that task. Good news is all the jars on the left (and what we have left after we dump expired food) should be plenty to can what we're going to harvest out of the garden this year. We'll need lids and rings, but we should have enough jars.

I also found some pretty neat older jars, so I decided to do a little photo essay of them. All you need to pull of something like this is a pump house and an empty field.

Last week my friend Melissa ordered 12 of my greeting cards, which was very exciting. My first big sale! W00t!

Never mind the messy wrapping, I had to catch the light!

This week at work is hectic because the newspaper is changing sizes again. Boring, tedious resizing. Late and early hours. Hey, what am I complaining about---more money to build our tiny house with!

On the Tiny House Front: we decided to go with lumber from the mill where my mom works. It's cheaper and there's little to no chance of sunstroke or snakebite. My dad's friend Dave is getting a unit of plywood from up north soon, so we're going to try to tack on a unit for ourselves to his load. We still have decide on the exact orientation of the house (to maximize the sun, especially during the winter) and then we'll start digging the holes for the footers. Keith says he wants to have it built by Labor Day. Sounds pretty ambitious to me! We might be able to acquire some barn wood from Keith's employer. It's definitely coming together.

But, this weekend----this weekend we're taking some much-needed KBAB time. We were planning on heading over to Missoula to see some friends but when we called to see if they'd be home we found out they're going to be on the Selway this weekend. So Keith and I are heading out Thursday night (with the dogs, of course) to camp for a couple days and then we'll meet up with them when they come off the river on Saturday. I think it's been over 2 years since we've been camping (I can't remember--that's how long ago it was) and it's been since before we moved to Portland that we've seen our friends. So we're really looking forward to this weekend. Keith is already sorting gear on the back patio.

On Sunday we're taking my sister's car up to Coeur d'Alene since she'll be home from NY on the 12th. At least an 8-hour roundtrip and we probably won't even get to stop and shop at any used building supply places, being Sunday and all. Good thing we're relaxing beforehand.