It has to go!

May 10, 2016 Stacey Sansom Cooking, The Children, The Dallas Move 0
We are down to the final stretch. We will just call it that. From today we have 34 days until the movers show up to start packing the remaining stuff in the house. That includes today. That is not much time remaining. As long as we have been at this, we will consider this, the final stretch.

So my job today and tomorrow is to get the stuff in the garage sorted and ready to be packed. A lot of the stuff was moved to the garage as a last ditched attempt to get it out of the house so we could get the house on the market by February 22, 2016. We did that. Half of our 2 car garage has a pile of boxes and mismatch of stuff that has collected out there. It is stuff that we might need access to that or that we still needed to sort through. It has stayed in the garage.

I will be honest with you, we have pretty much ignored it ever since because we were tired and well it was easier to just ignore it. I was so tired of dealing with it. Of course, here we are approaching the end of this and we still have to deal with it. Mostly we just have to finish packing it up. So here we go again…

Of course this means that I am also just ready to part with even more stuff. That is a good thing. 

Today, I opened up the pantry and pulled out the rest of our long term water storage. Ben did not realize that I had this much water stored. It is amazing what little storage containers do for your ability to hide things. Since we had deep shelves in the pantry, I was able to line these things along the back of the pantry shelves and put the rest of the pantry items in front of them. No one was the wiser about where my water storage was all these years. 
Ben always sent me out at the start of hurricane season (June 1st) and made sure that I had what he felt was the “required” water stock for the season. I always obliged him. It never hurts to have more water than necessary in a time when the power is out here. If the power is out, the water pumps can also go out in the neighborhood. It also means that we are switching to tap water. I am not a fan of unfiltered tap water. I have filtered water through our fridge for a reason. 
Needless to say, that we have been slowly working our way through our water storage over the past several months. This is what remains. Imagine roughly 12 more of these bottles. That is what we have drunk to date – give or take. I have lost count. It is probably more. At one point I think we had upwards of 32 gallons of water storage in the pantry and laundry room. I have never worried about water storage when I discovered that these were easy to store on the deep pantry shelves. 
The question will become…where will the best storage place be for water in our new house? Our new pantry will not have deep shelves. It will not be so easy to store the water in the pantry like that. I will have to give that serious thought. It might end up in the laundry room like part of our previous storage was. I will use better shelves than we had before of course. 
A couple of friends have volunteered to take this off my hands. 

There was a big push for everyone purchasing 1-month Food Storage Supply Kits from the LDS Cannery several years ago. It was many years ago. It was a 1-month kit for each person in the family. At the time we had young kids. I believe in following counsel but I am also reasonable and know what we are likely to use. There were other things that were advised to purchase as well. Like I said, I knew what I was likely to use.

This entire time, I have carried around the guilt of purchasing what I did and NOT USING IT! Seriously. Okay, I will admit that I have used a few things out of it. All of the apple slices? GONE! They were gone first. The rice? I have 1 can remaining. I am not even sure why the can is unopened. Probably because it was at the back behind all the wheat? I have used all the flour. I have thrown away all the shortening. It went rancid a few years back. I do not use shortening for anything but pie crusts 1x a year and for coating my cake pans. NOTHING ELSE! I have hardly touched the salt. The macaroni? Yep, untouched. The pinto beans? Yep, untouched. The wheat? Completely untouched.

That is what you see above. That is 10 cans of perfectly good wheat – 6 cans of red wheat and 4 cans of white wheat. Still in their cans and completely untouched. They have moved from room to room in my house as we have moved things around over the years. They have remained untouched. I have considered purchasing a wheat grinder over the years. I have. The cost is the hold up. The work is a hold up. I just have no desire or interest in grinding my own wheat. I could just get a wheat grinder for my Kitchen Aid Mixer and it is a slight cost savings. That could fix one hold up, but it does not fix my desire or interest.

Since over the years my dietary needs and restrictions have changed, the desire and interest in a wheat grinder have waxed and waned even more. Why put in the work for something that I might not even be able to enjoy? I just do not see the point. I buy my flour in small batches. I buy unbleached flour as it is. I cannot eat whole wheat flour. I cannot. What do I benefit from grinding my own flour out of wheat if I am not going to be able to eat it? I just keep going around and around.

So today I decided that it needed to go. I was moving and the guilt did not need to move with us. The wheat needed to go. The guilt needed to go. A friend came and took the wheat off my hands. She will enjoy it. Gail Hill will put it to good use and it will not remain unused for the next 20 years.

Shrug. Maybe I will buy a wheat grinder one day. Maybe I will buy wheat again some day. That day is not today.

The movers will not be moving those items. We will not be the strange Mormon family with a million pounds of wheat and water to move. Sorry folks, we are not that family.

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