Hurricane Cleaning

Something like spring cleaning... but not.

In preparation for the hurricane, while we were stuck inside from the rain, we completely cleared off the kitchen counter and wiped it down.  This may seem like something that needs to be done often, which it is, but we removed all of the constant items like my spinning kitchen tool holder and my platter of tomatoes and cleaned underneath them too.

I also vacuumed the bedroom! all by myself, and I vacuumed a lot of the cat hair off of the futon in the living room.

We cleaned out the refrigerator as best we could, since it's fairly likely that our power will go out.  If it's off for 4 hours, we will need to throw away perishables in the fridge.  My flour and vegetables will be fine.  I think my pickles and roasted cherry tomatoes packed in oil and homemade whole grain mustard will be fine too.  Milk, soymilk, 8 eggs, 2 pint cartons of egg whites will all have to go, and we'll have no way to cook them.  This is a good opportunity to use things up, so we're making "hurricane pasta" with some tomato sauce and roasted vegetables that are lingering in the fridge, plus mozzarella cheese.  The plan is to grab a plastic bag full of icepacks from the freezer immediately when we reach the 4 hour mark, put it in a cooler, and take all perishables out of the fridge into the cooler - then eat them as soon as possible.

Today showed me that individual cleaning things don't really take that much time.  If we can try to do them more often, instead of all at once, we will be doing the same amount or maybe even less work and things will look and feel better on a regular basis.