Stocking up

Today has been the kind of day where we’ve been busy, but it’s a good kind of busy – where we’ve spent hours doing necessary chores, but still had time to just fall limply on into a chair and relax. We had to get up a bit earlier than we might normally (and by ‘we’ I mean ‘Richard’, because forget my brain ever letting me sleep in any later than 7 on a weekend morning these days), and headed off to check out a pair of desks someone is selling on Craigslist for a decent price. The still-living-out-of-boxes situation in our home office had started to get to the point where I was getting twitchy and irritable every time I couldn’t find something, so I’ve been haunting Craigslist for the past few weeks, hoping something would pop up that would make this particular new-house nightmare go away. It’s certainly not a requirement that we have desks that match, but it just so happens that this guy has two of them, which makes things easier in the long run. Plus, they come apart, so I am hoping that this means that getting up those front steps to our front door isn’t going to be nearly as painful as I am pretty much convinced it will be.

After checking out the desks and scheduling a time with the guy to pick them up later this week, we came home and spent an hour or so cleaning the house (which consisted mainly of Richard vacuuming up a rather disturbing amount of cat hair tumbleweeds, and me zipping around scrubbing toilets and sinks and random spots on the floor), and then, on a whim, I poked at Craigslist once more, continuing my up-til-now futile search for guest bed type furniture for our house. Except this time I stumbled on a pair of daybed-trundle combinations, posted just that morning for a price that made my jaw just about fall right off, so off we zipped to Davis to check them out. Luckily we can pick those up on the same night we’re going to get the desks. We did this, fully realizing that that evening is going to be a little piece of furniture-moving hell, since Murphy’s Law dictates that the weight of the furniture is always directly proportional to the number of steps one has to climb to get it to where it needs to go, but we figured as long as we’re renting the truck for the desks, we might as well use it for the other stuff too.

We were in Davis just in time for lunch, and it’s been a few months since we’ve had sushi, so we headed off to the all-you-can-eat sushi bar downtown, put our names on the list, and 45 minutes later, were satisfying the craving for raw fish. And then it was back home, to set up the truck rental for Tuesday night, and then sit down with a cookbook and a sheet of paper and make up a rather lengthy grocery list. A quick run to the grocery store, and when we came back, we took a tiny email-checking break, but then dove right into a four hour spree of cooking the likes of which we have never before attempted. This is because I checked out “Frozen Assets Lite & Easy” from the library, since we keep saying it would be handy to do a pile of cooking to stock the freezer so we’re less prone to coming home midweek and being too tired or too unmotived to cook. And lo and behold, unlike most of these sort of ‘cook once; eat for weeks’ cookbooks I’ve looked at, this one actually had a bunch of recipes that looked tasty, didn’t rely on a whole lot of already processed foods, and were low in Points.

Our kitchen is very tiny, and we did occasionally run into each other over the course of the cooking marathon, but eventually we worked it all out. There isn’t much in the way of counter space, but there is just enough for the two of us, if we’re careful. We chopped, we measured, we simmered and stirred, and when we were done, we had a rather impressive stack of tightly sealed freezer bags and one aluminum foil-covered baking pan in the freezer to show for all our efforts. We managed to tackle seven full recipes (each recipe says it makes 6 servings) in the space of those few hours, miraculously with only one additional trip to the store (because apparently when making out grocery lists, I cannot add). The few we managed to taste before stuffing them away into the freezer were pretty yummy, so I’m crossing my fingers that they come out of the freezer just as good.

The next few days promise to be a bit busy, since tomorrow there is brunch with friends and knitting group, and Monday there is work and an extra-long rehearsal for the women’s ensemble, and we’re picking up the truck on Tuesday to get all this furniture, and somewhere in the middle of all of that we are going to have to clear a path through the boxes and the random computer stuff in the office in order to have a place to put the desks once we get home. But a few minutes spent this afternoon with a measuring tape has at least given us a pretty good idea of where everything will go once it’s in here, and at this point, anything that will reduce the number of boxes that still are waiting to be unpacked is more than worth a little heavy lifting and frantic rearranging.