So you thought this was *only* a food blog? Nope… there’s more to magical living than magical food. And when the air starts getting crisp and the days shorten noticeably, I start moving toward my twice-yearly “nesting” phase. While most people “spring clean,” I find myself in the mood at the end of the summer, then again at the end of winter.

When I was still living at home with my folks, my Mom did the bulk of her seasonal cleaning in marathon bursts of activity and effort, usually over a weekend, almost always when I thought I had something better to do than help! Since I didn’t inherit my mother’s seemingly effortless ability to keep a large home spotless at all times, I have to pace myself a little more. Instead of a weekend-long muckfest, I prefer to pick one project every few days over the span of a couple of weeks. This keeps me motivated, as I see things spiffy-ing up steadily, and also heads off the deadly burnout that sometimes will stall me right in the middle of a big project. After a few areas are successfully taken care of, however, I find that there is a sort of momentum to the cleaning, and I wind up with the energy needed to do more than just a bit here and there, usually culminating around Halloween, when I put the finishing touches on everything in time for the new year.

Today, the bug bit me as I was puttering around my kitchen: my bar was a disaster area! It’s really a baker’s rack, and barely used as a bar, but that’s what I called it when we bought it, and so it remains until today. The problem is, it gets really dusty, and the three basket drawers that I thought were such a grand idea have turned out to be a polarized zone that attracts “stuff” and holds it there like a miser. After a while, it becomes part of the landscape, and I don’t even really notice, consciously at least, that even when my kitchen is sparkly otherwise, there sits this mountain of messy, right at the head of it! Here is the “before” picture.

For the curious, here’s what’s going on in this mess. (more…)