But the real triumph began last night. I have eight drawers in my kitchen full of nothing but junk. Well, also pot holders and corkscrews. But by and large it's a mass of unassorted Stuff accumulated over 30 years, and the thought of it has always made my spirit fail within me. I *know* civilized people keep their cutlery in clean cutlery holders in clean drawers, not in jars on the counter, but I find sorters useless. I still have two of them, mind, but they hold things like bamboo skewers and lobster cutting shears and nut crackers and other knick-knacks reminiscent of the luxurious life at Bedford, now gone forever. I can't even begin to think of weeding them out because, because, you never know when they'll come in handy. (Like that lovely tin Fearless Leader and Riko sent me elegant biscuits in a decade ago, that I finally decided was just taking up space. And now I buy these rice crackers that say 'store in an airtight container after opening' and do I have one? Not any more, and my crackers bend like cardboard after two days.)
So I started a little 'I don't see me doing this' project. The top left drawer is now clean and sorted and the top right one half so, for certain values of sorted that include putting lightbulbs with other lightbulbs and batteries with other batteries and gathering rusty screwdriver heads together in the hopes that a screwdriver will turn up in some other drawer. But I found the knob to the cover of my stock pan, that lost its screw ages ago and so came out, and I found a screw that more or less fits it, so I can use the thing again. And I found a bunch of allen keys, none of which alas are the hex key needed to tighten my bike's brakes, but useful for other things. As for the lobster shears and crab picks and such, they'll just have to go out on the front lawn in the hope some affluent passerby will want them.
*Swifters have two problems. One is the smell of the cleaning fluid. The other is the curving handle, presumably designed so the swifter can be hung on a wall, but which, because I can catch things in places that I couldn't manage if I were actually trying to do it, always grabs my sleeve or my shoulder strap or you name it. Makes me want to scream.
