More Observations on an Emptyish Nest

With two out of three out of the house quiet has ensued and good content and humorous content has been harder to come by. I do occasionally still say empty nest when in fact I do have a daughter who is a freshmen in high school. This means we’re not exactly “empty” in the true definition of the word, buy hell, it’s close enough. And on a side note I do have to avoid saying, when the daughter appears in the den from time to time, “Oh you’re still here?”

Observations

• Milk – I now find myself sniffing the milk before I use it because we aren’t turning it quite as fast as used too, and frankly, I’ve been burned a few times. And when you choose wrong in the “Might be OK” game… bad stuff happens.
• Groceries in general – I need to make some adjustments to my home replenishment system. With the Demand Signal being down. I still wander the grocer’s aisles making my habitual weekly purchases of things I think I need until… This has created some overstock situations in the home pantry. Mrs, while poking around in there recently asked “Do you check in here before you go to the store?” Not thinking I mistakenly said “yes” it was the handy answer at the time. SNAP. Trap sprung, and boom, it was game, set match.

  “Umm, is there some shortage of tomato sauce coming or do you have a recipe in mind that calls for 23 cans?” Experience would tell me to shut up, but I’m a man, and rarely draw the same conclusion from identical experiences. Yeah, rather than just shut up and let it go, I defended myself with “I checked, I just don’t want to run out.” Like throwing a ball of string past a cat

  “Really? three bottles of soy suace?” “I’m making something”, not sure what but something, “5 cans of enchilada sauce” “Yeah Mexican night (or rather planned Mexican night, haven’t actually had it in 2 years)” 3 bags of tortillas, two of which are growing shit in them, onion colony down there, 2 cans of Ovaltine, 15 little cans of tomato paste, and 5 tubs of turkey breast lunch meat going bad in the fridge”
  “Your point?”
  Thankfully, the world righted itself with the annual Yom Kippur food drive, which this year I contributed about 5 bags worth of stuff, and not just yams and anchovies.

• Laundry So in the past I’ve always found the underwear and sock drawers to be reliable. When I decide to wear underwear, it’s always there for me. Now we’ve had couple mornings where this has been little problem. Don’t worry I don’t go commando in my suit, like many men and I guess a few women too, I have two sets of undies in the rotation, the good set, which I prefer to wear, these are the ones that fit best and which still have most of the original fabric intact. These are the “new” ones meaning undies I’ve purchased since I moved to Minnesota in 1995. The less preferred ones are the ratty old ones, many of which are waist band or two behind my current preferred size. A simple breeze would cause many of them to disintegrate into dust, like antique textiles. Anyway, I’ve been down these a few times because apparently there is minimum poundage requirement before the state of the art hydroponic, supero-matic, all organic HE washer and dryer can be used to wash clothes. No small loads saves water I’m told. If that’s the case I need to buy more underwear. She would suggest, to deaf ears, that perhaps I could cull my collection of vintage skivvies and upgrade to something more fashionable and say.. modern in construction. Seems wasteful to me. We men get kind of attached to our old undies.
• Dishes. Same thing here, only instead of underoos insert coffee mugs and spoons. I don’t know why the universe works this way but if you buy 12 place settings of tableware, within 3 weeks you will have 15 butter knifes and 8 teaspoons. It’s quite bizarre, I don’t know how spoons turn into knifes but I have no other explanation for why I can never find a spoon, but we have shitload of butter knifes. Odd odd odd. We don’t run the dishwasher until it’s full, same save water thing, and these days that takes about a week. We run out mugs and spoons in about 3 days because some of my roommates use mugs for things other than coffee. Uncool dudes

  Many a morning I have to ask myself do I hand wash a mug or.. well there is this rationalization that says, “these look clean, I wonder if she just didn’t empty the washer” we do at times use the dishwasher as an auxiliary cupboard. No harm in that. In college I dressed out of my laundry basket for 4 years. So I look at the cups, examine them for spots, maybe run my finger across the rim… seems clean to me..

  Of course a week later I see my daughter eating ice cream out of a mug. Common occurrence at at our house. She then puts the mug and the spoon on the floor. The dog licks both of them spotless, she puts them in the dish washer, shuts the door, sees me and says “hi Dad” and walks up stairs.

  Blech. Listerine and coffee, a poor mix.

And so the adjustments continue.