Why we clean kitchens

I was ranting to M.H. about the criminally flawed eating recommendations that have been pushed on Americans since the '70s (and if you were reading Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes, as I am, you would be ranting about the same thing, so shut up) and I realized that rather than just sitting there, I could be ranting while cleaning out the kitchen cupboard that's been bugging me lately.

M.H. thought we might as well empty the whole thing out and start fresh, and after we did that, we realized that there were a couple of other cupboards filled with similar items, and we might as well empty those out, too, if we were going to be reorganizing.

You can guess where this ended: Three hours later, the entire kitchen was reorganized, a long-forgotten paper towel rack was installed, everything was shiny, and I had 22 new items to give to charity. A garage cleaning a few weeks ago yielded 40 more giveaway items, and I've also got 16 outgrown/opposite-of-outgrown items of clothing to give away. One trip to the Montana Rescue Mission, and I'll be ninety percent of the way to my goal. Since I took eBay out of the equation, getting rid of extraneous junk has been a snap!

But that's not the moral of this blog post. The moral of this blog post is that any book that gets you so fired up that simply talking about it produces the fuel for a three-hour organizing juggernaut is a good book that a lot of people should take a look at.