January Junk

I love January.  Normally.  This month has thrown the Pellin clan another curveball on the health front.  My sweet MIL took a tumble and fractured her pelvic bone, and although it's challenging and certainly sucks, she's luckily one of the strongest people I know so we know she'll get through it OK. 

On the homefront I'm trying to resist the urge to de-clutter everything in sight the way all the January magazines are screaming at me to do.  The kitchen drawers alone could eat up all of 2013.  You see, not to brag, but I'm kind of an overachiever when it comes to kitchen junk drawers.  I have three of them. 

Drawer Number One was designated a junk drawer from the beginning, so it has one of those plastic organizer tray thingies in it, each compartment overflowing with Post-Its, dried-up Sharpie pens, Sharpie pens that actually write, nail files, picture hanger brackets, batteries, old photos from the refrigerator, fridge magnets with no magnetic strip (so are they still, in fact, magnets?), business cards from people we will never call, and a few ancient Hershey's kisses that even the kids won't eat.  In other words, essentials.

Drawer Number Two started out as a place to store small cutting boards and bulky kitchen utensils like the ice cream scoop and such.  They're still there, buried under piles of appliance manuals, tax receipts, receipts from my dad's old medical bills, and about five of those 20%-off coupons from Bed Bath and Beyond, some of which haven't actually expired.

Number Three was merely a dish towel drawer until about a year ago when I apparently decided it wasn't living up to its capacity potential, so I started tossing in gift-wrap ribbon, bread-tie twisties, ceramic stovetop cleaner, Scotch tape, masking tape, the grill lighter, Olivia's Girl Scout cookie forms, and Nate's pocket knife.  Now, whenever I need a dish towel it becomes a precarious exercise in which I use my left hand to hold back an avalanche of these items while slipping out a towel with my right.  I've gotten used to it, but when hubs or one of the kids goes to reach for a towel I have to scream "Nooooo!" because they don't know the system.

I also should mention my purse.  It's a problem.  Back in the spring I was diagnosed with "frozen shoulder" when I inexplicably couldn't raise my arms above my head or reach behind me without totally locking up.  It wasn't so much painful as baffling.  After an MRI and a series of muscle relaxers and PT appointments, it gradually improved.  But one of the ongoing changes my doc prescribed was scaling down my huge, overstuffed purse, which at the time was about a third of my body weight.  And friends, that is not light.

I compromised on a medium-size crossbody number that I can wear hands-free, but it's turning out to be entirely too small.  I can barely zip it up what with my wallet, four lip balms, two lip glosses, pennies, napkins, concealer, more pennies, four tea bags (you know in case I want to brew a pot while sitting in traffic or waiting for an oil change), five Splenda packets (for all the tea, apparently), an empty checkbook with shopping lists written on the back, a checkbook that holds actual checks, and a mysterious white powder, probably complements of one of the Splenda packets.

I'm exhausted just thinking about it.  I'll just have a cup of tea instead.