A ghastly garage

Tonight I told myself I'd go home and get my garden cleaned up. I have compost etc in my boxes that has been infiltrated by grass, so a nice night to dig them out, mix in some seed and put some on our horrific lawn. I got changed, went to the garage and was completely and totally overwhelmed. Something had to be done. I'll save the garden for later, it was time for my 10 things!

I'm almost ashamed to post the pics.


While, at first glance, this may not look terrible....what lurks beneath is scary. And don't judge on our flag on the ladder-it got soaked and ripped off the house in the flood storms! So it was drying out.

An area of much anxiety is these shelves. There is so much STUFF on there, I took one pass and removed about a million rusty old nails, random plasic bits and other things. The layers of dust etc on here I could not tackle, our garage needs a full day of work.


HEH?

I guess frogs do catch flies, even ceramic citronella ones..but aren't they supposed to eat them? This guy is surrounded by a bug graveyard to make your skin crawl. EWW.

So this sad little pile is the beginning of the garage. In here you'll find such items as:

• a used shop vac bag full of grime and dirt that spit it out at me when I moved it. Not great for the allergies
• 3 neon green plastic things that look like frisbees but are decidedly not.
• Various plastics such as Driveway salt, 4 water bottles, 2 nalgene bottles (not a fan of the BPA so out they go)
  
• A variety of things that we recycled...now in the trash never to be used. Period.
• a few computer print outs of directions, zumba classes and others.
• A sad lonely gardening glove.
  

Well, it's not perfect. But it's a start!!!!

Freezer Freakout

I have a food buying problem. I accept this. I see things on sale, I buy them. I plan menus each week and buy all new stuff, not leveraging what I have in the freezer. I'm working on this. So, to kick off my '10 things' posting, what better way than to address this issue? I decided to start with my upstairs freezer-that's right the upstairs freezer. The downstairs freezer is for another day. That's where I keep all my expensive fancy grass fed organic meat...so hopefully there isn't much down there to purge. But I digress.

Every time I open the freezer in my kitchen, I'm faced with the scene below:

While this may not look disastrous, it causes me much stress. Why?

• I have no idea what the hell is in here
• My system of meat/fish on top, veggies etc on the bottom is shot to hell
• How OLD is this stuff????

So today I decided to do something about it. I rolled up my sleeves, dug in there and tossed my first 10 things:
1. 1/4 bag of hashbrowns (I used these about a month ago after God knows how long. They were pretty tasteless...and yet they made it back to the freezer)
2. 10 mini raviollis (I'd say these are at least a year old. Who saves 10 mini raviolli? I must have been planning on tossing them in a soup)
3. 3 stuffed shells (? I think I saved them for Nigel to eat when I was away. Clearly this never happened)
4. A random piece of torn cardboard (awesome)
5. 2 turkey dogs (I think..these are 1 of 2 items I went 'what the hell are these')
6. 4 sausages (They may be breakfast links. They may be sweet or hot. Who knows! It's anyone's guess!)
7. 1 chicken breast on bone (Well that's unexpected as I NEVER buy on bone. Must have been on sale sometime a long long time ago)
8. 1 bag edamame, shelled (This is at least 1.5 years old. I haven't been to the asian market since)
9. 1 bag edamame, non shelled (see above)
10. 1 bag asian bun (We love gyoza, a fast dinner on the go. But I bought these and they take about 40 mins of steaming-that does not work for the 'dinner on the go'. I tried microwaving them and ruined them the first time...so they have just sat....)
11. 2 fish patties (I don't eat breaded frozen fish. Where did these COME FROM?)

Can you identify these items from the list above?If you said 'What the hell are these, sausages or hot dogs' you would be correct. Nice color right? EW.

So, my little list of 11 above yielded the following scene on my kitchen table:While Monty looked on, horrified at his mama:
But, the good news is..after all this work, I was able to get my freezer back to some semblance of organization. Meat and mains on top, veggies and others on the bottom. Now to figure out what to cook with it all.........