Read My Refrigerator...I Mean my Palm...

I came to the brilliant conclusion today while cleaning out the refrigerator that you can learn a great deal about a person by looking in his or (more likely) her refrigerator.

If that's the case, please take everything you learn about me from the pictures in this blog post and disregard it.

And while we're discussing refrigerators, I'd like to pose the question: Why do we have to clean them out? We don't go in them and walk around. Theoretically, we should just reach in, place an item on the shelf or remove it, then shut the door. I can't for the life of me figure out how the refrigerator gets so dirty. I mean, except for the obvious occasions when SOMEONE doesn't put the top back on something and some ELSE reaches in for it and spills it. That I can understand. Theoretically.

Can you guess how I spent part of my day?

I have decided I need to make a schedule, albeit an informal one, for housework. If I don't, then I will NEVER do it, always making the excuse that "tomorrow is another day" in true Scarlett O'Hara fashion. If I make some sort of plan, then I have that routine that has driven my life for umpteen years and I won't feel so out of sorts. Not that I typically have a problem sitting around doing nothing... wait, yes I do. I'm a woman of activity. But mostly fun activity, which gets us back to me needing a schedule.

(I don't know what's wrong with me today. I'm not over-caffeinated or anything...)

The items in the picture above were on the top shelf of my refrigerator, the one most convenient, the one that holds the most-used items on it. Hmmmmm. Pina colada (already mixed - how lazy is THAT?), bloody mary mix (two bottles), THREE different bottles of wine. Even the half-and-half and whipped cream are for making frozen buttery nipples. You might deduce from this picture that the people who live in this house are a bunch of drunks. Please do not make that deduction. One of the bottles of wine is left over from the gymnastics championships in April, one is all that remains of my retirement gift basket, and I can't remember about the other one. It only has about half a glass of wine in it, and I need to go finish if off RIGHT NOW so I can get that bottle out of the fridge.

This is the second shelf, and I guess it could be referred to as the health food shelf. Sugar-free pudding, Cool Whip Lite, fat-free Greek yogurt, low-fat pasta sauce, blueberries. Oh, and those cute little bottles of flavored tequila that Hubby and I brought back from a cruise in I DON'T REMEMBER WHAT YEAR but it was more than two years ago, and I can't bring myself to throw them away. I also can't bring myself to drink them, although if memory serves correctly, I remember saying that tequila was smooth enough to pour over pancakes. Never tried it, though.

For the most part I only photographed the items I kept, and this time it wasn't because they had forests growing on them. (Seriously, I didn't have any really spoiled items in the fridge, a major shock to me.) But after I took this picture, I tossed the bread and butter chip pickles. I'm more of a kosher dill pickle girl, and I bought the bread and butter chips for Hubby. There's a woman at the golf course who makes her own sweet pickles, and he was wondering if he could find some that tasted like hers (she doesn't make them often enough to keep up with him). I thought bread and butter pickles were similar, so I bought some for him to try. I wish I had a picture of his face when he ate one. He almost turned his whole face inside out. So those went in the trash along with the three DIFFERENT jars of nacho cheese that were opened at undetermined times. (I take that back on the no mold statement earlier - I didn't look into any of the jars of cheese dip, so I can't be certain about that after all.)

If you're keeping track, and I hope you aren't, you may notice that the picture above has the THIRD container of Parmesan cheese in my refrigerator. I think every time I make a pasta salad I buy a new jar. The Bud Light Lime belongs to Rozmo, left over from when we spent the night at my house on BRAG. I gave up beer almost two years ago, and Hubby wouldn't be caught dead drinking a Bud Light Lime. Not nearly manly enough. But I couldn't bring myself to pour it out either. Maybe some day I'll lose another 35 pounds and treat myself to the beer.

More healthy stuff, from the vegetable drawer. I don't know what that bottle of G2 was doing in that drawer. Maybe that's the only place I could find to put it at the time. Hubby prefers red seedless grapes, I prefer green ones.

This is all the stuff from the door. Sometimes I get the fridge all cleaned out and am patting myself on the back when I realize I didn't go through the items on the door. Then I tell myself, "Screw it" and shut the door because the new has worn off the activity. This time, though, I dutifully went through those bottles and jars too. We have two bottles of several things - ketchup, mustard, Heinz 57 - because every time we go somewhere in the RV, I buy a new "cute little" bottle for the trip instead of taking the one from the fridge. No, I don't know why either.

There is something magnificent and beautiful about a clean fridge. I must not have enough Monk-like characteristics, because it is perfectly fine with me that there are two Diet Pepsis on the second shelf and three more on the fifth. What was NOT perfectly fine was that after I took this photo, Hubby put three beers in the front of that fifth shelf. And two of them were upside down.

Like the door, sometimes I forget to clean out the freezer side. I threw away several containers of what I THINK was homemade chili, but since I can't remember when I made it, I tossed it. Please don't feel sorry for us because our freezer has very little food in it. It's better that way. And most of those plastic bowls (Cool Whip, cottage cheese) have ice in them. Hubby freezes it and puts it in Libby's water bowl outside. Isn't he thoughtful?

I apologize for taking 5 or 10 minutes out of your life to read about my cleaning out the refrigerator. You may now return to your regularly scheduled lives.