The Last Day of the Penultimate Month

 We did it! Wait - *checks date to be absolutely cetain* - we did it! 

It's not a particularly auspicious day for it. It's grey and wet and dreary in the extreme. I took the minimum dose of melatonin last night and still felt like the air was thick and dense all morning at work. The principal asked me to find her a book and I couldn't - for a completely justifiable reason, both copies were checked out, but I like her and crave her approval (probably an unattractive teacher's pet remnant) and I wanted to put the book in her hands. The other librarian was a bit snippy in an email, or at least I thought she was, it's entirely possible I was misreading her tone. Anyway.

I got groceries and went to the bakery and got Starbucks for Eve who was schooling at home today and visited with my parents. Eve texted me while I was there to say they had screwed up her Starbucks order, so I went back and got the proper one.

Usually I come home Monday afternoons exhausted, do very simple dinner prep and head to my room to cocoon and read. Today my stupid beautiful new kitchen actually made me want to cook.

Before:

After:

I know it's not exactly Extreme Home Makeover, but it is a marked improvement in my eyes, particularly the vastly superior lighting. I was also really done with the twenty-year-old yellow walls. I do feel it's a bit too much green with the counter tops now, but we'll be changing those at some point. 

So I cooked some stuff and baked some stuff. In addition to wanting to cook in the beautiful kitchen, I also hate messing it up, so it was a bit of a conflict and I had to work to stop myself from not cleaning stuff up before I used it. 

Then I cleaned out more cupboards. I have too many spices. Spices are great, but I'm going to have to come to terms with the fact that I don't have space for three jars of lemongrass, eight different kinds of curry powder, five tins of five-spice powder (maybe I just read the recipe wrong) and am I ever going to use this Dukkah? (Yes I will, I WILL use the Dukkah, apparently it can be used as a magic seasoning dust for a fried egg.)

I think I'm going to get rid of these salt and pepper shakers that I took from my childhood home when I moved to university thirty-one years ago.

I was keeping them on the top of the back of our old range and they weren't my main ones, but I would use the salt shaker when seasoning something on the stove - the pepper shaker is useless, it has two holes and we only use a pepper grinder, but, well, they go together. The new range has no back, which is kind of a good thing, because if there is a surface things can be set on, I am a dedicated setter-upon of said surface. And I am a sentimental person, but I'm also out of kitchen space and trying to learn to let go of things. 

I am always full of hope that I will keep blogging daily for a while now that I have momentum, but I'm sure we all know how that goes. Thank-you for Blo-ing this Mo away with me.