Starting the year with a clean house

I made the mistake of looking under the stairs when I went to get Christmas decorations. Nine years of dirt had accumulated. I decided that part of my break would include a thorough cleaning of my house – top to bottom.

I spent four days cleaning every drawer, every cupboard, every closet, every nook and every cranny. It was therapeutic and I realized time and again why I love my home.

In the process, I recycled lots of paper and plastic that had been shoved here and there. I couldn’t remember any of the reasons I might have wanted to keep old campaign literature. It’s all gone. Next campaign, I’ll toss it immediately.

I also set aside five boxes of items for the Harbourside Rotary garage sale that will take place Saturday, February 18th at Central Middle School. The ‘What was I Thinking?’ category includes a lox box which I used once to make my own lox. I picked it up in California when sailed down the coast to Mexico. Someone served homemade lox and I just had to have that box for myself. If I was a fisherwoman who intended to catch and cure my own salmon, then a lox box might make sense. But, in my time sailing, I caught a total of three fish – not my forte!

I’m donating a tofu maker too. It took me a while to figure out what the cedar box with holes in it was. I had to search to brain cells to remember. The tofu maker came likewise from my sailing days. I was a dedicated vegetarian and determined to live a self-sufficient life aboard. I ground my own flour, baked my own bread and made my own soymilk. Tofu seemed a logical extension of making soymilk.

I also found a hand-crank wheat grass juicer. I was never very good at growing wheat grass – it all seemed to go to mold before it could be harvested. Besides, I never acquired a taste for the juice. But I had to have that juicer nonetheless.

In the small appliance category is a hand blender a friend gave me. He came to visit and wanted to make something. Not liking my old reliable blender for some reason, he went out and bought the hand blender. It has languished long forgotten in the bowels of a cupboard ever since.

There are other treasures too and I hope my discards will help my Rotary Club make money to support the many good works we do.

Then there was the food! It’s interesting what happens to rice pasta that’s left for several years. And I found a container of nutritional yeast from my sailing days (1996 – 2001) that contained additions that looked suspiciously like mice droppings even though a thoroughly sealed container makes that impossible. There were cereal boxes my husband John got for entering some long ago half marathon; crackers that were years past their best before date; preserves that were once something other than green; and, unmarked, freezer-burned left overs. My compost bin has lots of extra work to do!

Once the ‘behind the scenes’ cleaning was done, I did an extra special “normal” cleaning. My plants are free from dust, new curtains are hung, windows and mirrors are sparkling and the mildewed caulk around my kitchen sink that was forever bugging me has been replaced.

My good intention is to make this an annual ritual – using cleaning as a way to get ready for a new year. I plan to resist any impulse to buy stuff I don’t need and will never use. It should be easy because I have everything one person could possibly want. But, I am sometimes tempted by a Lee Valley Tools or Ikea catalogue or a “you must dial immediately to get this offer” infomercial.

I have given up on my fantasy of making everything from scratch and won’t be tempted by similar gadgets. But if you want a tofu maker, a wheat juicer or a lox box maker and plan to be in Victoria on February 16, come down to Central Middle School. My discards may be just what you’ve been looking for.