A few months ago, Mel spent the evening making some home-made applesauce with the apples from our tree in the backyard. He used his grandmother’s recipe. The apples are tart and small and delicious if you have a lot of time to work with them. He peeled and chopped about 40 apples and we ate all the applesauce for dinner. I remember my grandmother having containers and containers of home-made applesauce. I wonder how my ancestors managed to preserve so much food. For the last couple of years, I have been working to try to put some food away. I am shocked by the volume of food that is required if I want to eat it during the winter. I buy what I consider large quantities of things–a bushel of tomatoes, a flat of strawberries, and they disappear as I make jam or sauce. That is kind of what happened with the apples. I have been judging myself by a tough standard, I realized. I am the first woman in my family to continue in a career after I married. The women I admire who were fantastic at putting food away were housewives. If it were my job to put food away, I imagine I would be a fair bit better at it. I picture them never really sitting down, but then I think of the handwork my grandmother did–always making something–and I realize she had to sit down for that. And she watched her soap operas. I am not sure her life was quite as full as I thought it was. She had some down time I think. I spend my time in front of a computer. It is ironic that I work and feel lazy because I can’t do all the tasks women from previous generations...
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I have been on a major organizing kick. I have been buying magazines for a couple of years that mention “organizing” on the cover. I got a quote from a professional organizer. And we decided to give it a go ourselves first, to see how far we could get. I bought a book that I liked and I have been following the author’s steps of: Sort Purge Containerize Equalize I worked in my office all last week and got it up to speed, and this week I am working in the boy’s room. It’s a big job. I worked on Xander’s side of the bed on Sunday and we got a good start. I’m going to try to do one side of the room each day. Today I worked on their Lego table. I had looked at it yesterday and I’d been asking them how it might make sense to organize it. Emerson said by color and shape. I was driving by Target and I had some time so I went in to look. I found some plastic bins in 2 sizes. I got 12 small bins that stack and 6 large bins that stack. I thought we could use the small bins for the Legos themselves and the large bins for unfinished work and projects since they are always working on something. I also got a label maker, as recommended by the book. I brought everything home and went through the mess of Lego. One of the hardest parts of getting everything organized is letting go of feelings of inadequacy or shame that I haven’t done this sooner. Anyway, I sorted every Lego into a box by color, and the organization system started to emerge. I got my label maker and labeled every container and every section. The label maker was very satisfying and fun. I tried to think about what might work and how to make it a useful system. I was lucky that I had a block of time when the...
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