"Januarloch" - the great January depression

After the holidays which were full of food, gifts and joy - up comes January.

New, plain and empty, probably a few pounds richer but a lot of bucks poorer. A time to get busy and creative on how to get rid of kilos and clutter, clean up your house and life in general (resolutions, anyone?) and go to the gym a lot. Or not.

Tomorrow doesn't look good either!

So while there's no more cookies or gingerbread for the time being, there are still some jeans in the back of the closet that some day I want to wear again.

In the meantime I had a sudden domestic attack that involved sorting through herbs & spices. Kid you not. Colin helped dump the Cayenne, Thyme and Fish Mix that were way past their expiration date and sorted the empty glass containers in order of their vintage. Can you imagine I have been keeping stuff in my kitchen cabinet that hit the 10 year mark? On a positive note I have not used that one in a long time.

It felt good to have accomplished a small and relatively unimportant chore just because it was so overdue. Now I was on a roll! Went to Jumbo (Swiss version of Home Depot) for some plastic containers and boxes.

The cookie cutters were next. (Why, you might ask? Because I have lots of them! All shapes and sizes. Not just hearts and stars. Airplanes, steam engines, letters, smileys, you name it. And they were all over the place in December.)

Then on to the fridge. That was a tough one. The freezer compartment aka indoor ice rink took several hours to thaw enough so I could remove large junks of solid ice. Which took another couple of hours to completely melt at room temp.

Meanwhile the groceries spent the night on our front door step. I actually woke up in the middle of the night and thought that this was maybe not such a good idea. A fox lives in our neighborhood. I have seen him sneaking around in broad daylight, attracted by our neighbors rabbits. Later I heard that he actually managed to snag one from the cage!! So I was prepared that the sausages, and maybe the eggs, would be gone in the morning. In exchange there would be a mess of shredded plastic and paper and egg shells. Turned out I was lucky.

The clean up hype has kinda worn off by now. Too bad. There's still some items on my ~~to do~~ accomplish list:

I posted the list on Facebook. Just to make sure I was forced to check all the items. I have another week or so. And I could use some encouragement. Please let me know what chores you have, and we'll ~~share our misery~~ tackle them together!

Next up: the baking supplies drawer. I went ahead and took the first step.

Here's the BEFORE picture: