I Know He Meant Well . . . .

I'm a little schizo on the organizational front. Part of me is extremely well organized, and part of me--well, not quite so much. For the unorganized areas of my life, I rely on routines that I've established over the years. I suppose it's what we'd call in the legal field "custom and practice."

For instance, let's say you're a nurse, and every night when you come home from work, you kick off your white nurses' shoes and leave them where they land--well, that's not all that organized, is it? But if by seeing those shoes sitting out where they don't really belong it's a reminder to you that you need to clean them and apply a coat of white shoe polish, then maybe your practice of leaving them laying around is actually reasonably efficient.

Some of my routines that keep things running smoothly are a bit like that. I admit that I certainly could be more organized, but the time it would take me to do that would seriously cut into my quilting time. In fact, I suspect the effort expended in the act of just BEING organized--not even in getting whatever job it is DONE--would probably take longer than doing the task at hand. And in those cases, yeah, I could do better. I admire those of you who keep notebooks and journals of what has to be done and when. But what I do generally works for me.

My husband helps out quite a bit. When the kids were little, it seemed like I never had any leisure time while he had loads. Now, we both have our chores, and his are equal to--or possibly even exceed--mine. (Shhhh! Don't tell HIM I said that, okay?!)

When I come home from work each night, I cook dinner and then I'm pretty much free to do whatever I want. HE does the dishes. I clean the house; HE does the laundry. (Mostly. Except a few things that I don't quite trust him to wash.) HE does some stuff out in the yard; I shop for groceries and whatever else we need. Pretty even, I'd say.

The other day, I guess he was trying to be helpful when he rearranged the stuff in the freezer out in the garage--it had gotten pretty bad and needed a good cleaning out. And it's my own fault, really. It's something I had been saying I needed to do for several months and hadn't gotten around to. But I guess he thought that at least if it was nicely organized, it would be better than leaving it "as is" until I got around to cleaning it out. But I have to tell you that his act of rearranging the freezer threw off my whole freezer organization method, which is generally a little similar to the kicking-off-your-shoes-when-you-get-home analogy. You see, my method for figuring out what might still be "good" in the freezer and what might be freezer burned or otherwise not quite so good was based on how far back in the freezer it was. NOW I don't know. I have absolutely no idea if the Lean Cuisine on the top of the stack is one that's been in there for two years or two weeks. Before, I knew that if I was pulling a hunk of meat out from the middle of the freezer, I should probably plan a back-up meal in case the meat turned out to be freezer burned. Or if I discovered when it was defrosted that what I thought was steak was actually stew meat. Now it's all a crap shoot.

I'm going to have to think about this a bit. I figure I have a couple options.

I can make sure I always have a $20 bill in my wallet so that if the planned meal, once defrosted, is inedible, I can send him off for fast food.

I can clean out the freezer and toss out most of it, keeping only the things that I pretty much remember buying in the last several weeks.

Or I can just ignore the whole thing for another four to six months and then toss out everything, because by then, none of it will really be worth eating anyway. I'm guessing this is probably the choice I'll end up going with. After all, I think this will probably give me a reprieve on cleaning out the freezer for several months, thus allowing me maximum quilting time.