I hired my sister to come and help me declutter. Was win/win for both of us, as we got to visit- I made headway in the house, and she got a free trip to the coast and some extra mulaah! Anyhow...one of her ideas was to box up the kitchen stuff I'd been stashing at the back of the cupboards (cuz I might need them someday- or when the kids move out they could use them)- put them away in the store room and DATE the box. Write the contents on the outside (The OC part of me had to do that myself as she has Messy writing! :>) We even wrote Kitchen canisters for Jacky, etc. Well, turns out 'Jacky' has lived away from home for the past four years, and she doesn't want those canisters. I've had things in those boxes for over three years- guess I can safely say I haven't missed them, and they can go directly to charity. BTW, we took several van loads of stuff to charity during that week, and she personally added a bag to each neighbour's garbage on collection day (We have a garbage limit). We are now close to moving back into the kitchen after an extensive reno and I can't believe how little I actually needed for the past seven months- and hope I can be ruthless before the new cupboards/drawers get filled.

Wow, I know about hoarding old appliances. My mom (an 82-year-old widow)has four refrigerators. One in the house, three in the garage. One is totally broken, the other two plugged in and running. The story of the broken one is amusing: she had these three refigerators plugged in in the garage and running. She used them for her "extra" stuff. Sh'ed buy stuff on sale and keep it either in the fridge or freezer compartments. She even bought extra Valentine chocolates. Anyway, one month her electric bill was over $700. Wow! My brother came over, did some scouting around and found one of the garage fridges (with a huge freezer) was running constantly. The thermostat had broken and it just never shut off. He unplugged it and emptied it, found all kinds of old stuff, even an eight- year- old frozen chicken! Yuck! But my mom didn't want him to throw out the darned refrigerator because the town had to be called and she'd have to pay to get the thing hauled away. And so it sits in her garage, just a pile of broken metal. She also had an ugly old hutch in the kitchen. I mean, she bought it for cheap about thirty years ago. It was all ugly and the fake-wood veneer was severly chipped off from various dings and general use. She had my brother put it in the living room,tipped on it's side. Now it's just a plain eyesore. I dread the day she passes away, we'll have to deal with her fourty years of accumulations. But that will be another post/ rant...

Wow, nice to see my friends from Smaller Homes here! I am sorry to hear of the loss of your Joe, Chris. I don't think I heard that before. I knew he was ill. Hope you are doing well on your own. Steph, we have been thinning out books, too. My text books have to go, as do my professional ones. DH needs more room on the bookshelves as he is now reading everything in hard cover! I have moved to Kindle because my hands won't hold books anymore. I have been in his office/library/music room a few times and have tried to declutter a bit. It is a challenge! We are buried under clutter most of the time. Just a thin layer, covering all surfaces, one layer deep! DH drops anything where he uses it, including any packaging it came in. So some mornings as I feed the dog, I go through the kitchen and toss garbage and recycle-ables into the correct bins. Then there are the things that do not have a good place to live, so they just sit out. I have worked at finding homes for things. I have three boxes of things to build sitting against walls - a shoe organizer, a CD shelf, and now a golf organizer for the garage. Meanwhile, I am back making final purchases for the always-in-the-future bathroom gut and remodel. We have both gone through closets and thinned our unworn clothes out, and I have moved a chest of drawers to where I can use it for our sheets, blankets, pillowcases, and stuff for packing for trips. DH is taking occasional business trips. I also organized all shoe-shine equipment into a hand-made shoe-shine box I bought at a garage sale 15 years ago! I had help one day in the basement and built two shelving units we had down there and started going through boxes and organizing things down there. I also got a great deal on a big steel cabinet with shallow drawers that was designed to hold microfiche cards. It has 12 drawers that are 18" front-to-back and 3 or 4 ft wide. It is very heavy-duty and perfect for holding stones. If we could move it, we could get it in the house and I could fill it with all the stone and glass and metal beads I have for jewelry-making. I could easily see what I have then! The only problem is that once it is in place, it will be too heavy to move and the place it will have to go does not have a floor down, just a sub-floor. We pulled up the yucky carpet in that bedroom after Dad died. So I think I have to wait until the bathroom remodel is done, since that is going to steal 6 inches or so from this room, and it does not make sense to lay a cork floor down before we tear out the bathroom wall and rebuild it. Last year, though, we did get new gutters and gutter guards and covered the soffitts and fascia with aluminum and vinyl trim and we replaced the last 4 windows! The bathroom project is down to choosing the bathroom flooring material, the shower pan, and buying the swanstone walls for the shower. I also have to finalize the toilet choice - ie: do I need to get one with the tank in the wall to give the shower doors more room to open, or is a regular toilet okay? So I am at the point where I need to call Jim, my contractor, and get his input and get scheduled. I have a new bath fan/heater fixture to buy, a new door to get, and just a few other really minor things. I am zeroing in on a color for the vanity. As soon as the weather warms, I can paint it. I have it all filled and sanded, sitting in the garage, waiting for the warm weather.

Cathy, I'm glad to make you laugh! Sometimes I need to go stream of consciousness to figure out what I'm trying to say and don't always bother go back and make a proper paragraph. :) BTW, making cheese is fun! PM, I didn't think to look in it before your suggestion, but I have a Betty Crocker binder style basic cookbook. It was a present when I was ... single digits? I'm thinking 7-8. My first cookbook of my own. :) I have a later edition of Joy, too, but don't always remember to open them. :) I'll definitely take a look for the frosting. 'Course, I knew why the recipe sounded familiar when I saw the name on it. :) Debrak, I'm not really a spaetzle maker--just someone who has made spaetzle. So then I thought it would be a great alternative to matzah balls for Seder since it's so quick to make and I found a good recipe as soon as I had the thought, so I did a few rounds of matzah spaetzle, too. I have to say that one of the most useful gadgets I've bought is the spaetzle screen thing. I've tried various traditional methods, including the colander with spoon, and piping, and they don't make the right size easily, and take too much effort for dozens of people. For $14, and not much space in the pot drawer, spaetzle using the thing becomes dead easy, bing, bang, boom. How I do it: Thick sticky batter. Big cooking spoon. Pot of boiling water. Pan or colander lined with paper towels. Skimmer spoon (big flat round like a wok spider and a cooking spoon had an ugly offspring--you could use a strainer or slotted spoon, but don't use a wire spider! I know a guy who...made a big mess). Put the spaetzle thing on top of the boiling pot. Use the spoon to put a blop of batter on the spaeztle thing. Use the scraper that comes with to pull the blop across like pulling sodium alginate thickened dye across a slik screen. Continue until blop is gone. Move the spaezle screen and use the skimmer to fish out the spaetzle (don't overcrowd). Transfer to paper to dry--make sure your paper towels don't shed! You could use a large flat mesh sieve and no paper if you have one. Too big holes and they try to squirt through while they're tender. Repeat until batter is finished, shifting drained spaetzle as they're finished to a container as you go. Reserve for soup, or put them in the oven to dry out a bit and pan fry them. If you're not going to use them right away (same day), it's better to oven dry them a bit anyway, or they'll revert to blob form. JC