still truckin'

so, i'm on day 2 of Project Eat All the Old Shit in My Fridge. i had an egg last night that expired in july, which i figured was just fine because i accidentally ate an egg at sherry's apartment that was three months old, plus it was in china and somehow chinese eggs seem more ominous. it was ok, if a little rubbery. the egg i ate last night was just fine, too. just going to show you that the expiration date on food is really angled towards mass consumption and doesn't mean you have to throw everything away.

today for lunch (at 4 pm, i got distracted) i had some old beets with old garbanzo beans and somewhat flaccid persian cucumbers on top of (new) baby spinach. i am concluding that beans have the life span of about 100 years. i also threw in an underripe avocado, but that barely warrants mentioning.

why the experiment, you ask? well, i think most of us do this sort of thing when we've been busy/out of town and there ain't shit in the fridge but old food. i'm not just trying to be weird or cheap, although i know i can be both (cut to my friends and family cheering). i do hate wasting food and dumping nearly whole packages of english muffins from june into the trash (even i have standards... they were nasty to begin with or you know i'd be eating one right now, toasted) and two bunches of gross stank chard from about eight months ago. i never thought to question sell-by or expiration dates until several years ago when i happened upon a miracle half-gallon of milk that just never went bad. it was fine way beyond the sell-by date; i think i hit two months. yes, i know. only i would keep drinking milk two months past its date and proclaim it to still be good. but it was! and actually, i'm sure my dad would do the same.

that apple doesn't fall far from the tree, does it.

well, my grand experiment is over. two whole days (meals, actually) and my lazy cheap ass has already gone to the store to re-stock. my sister-slash-roommate is getting back into town on friday and in anticipation of her eye-cutting, loud sighs, and straight-up lectures, i decided to toss all this nasty shit and buy some new stuff. (not like it ain't her chard that went all disgusting, but you know how people get.) can't wait to see how long salt pork lasts! i'm betting over a year. i'm making a big batch of meatballs tonight to eat and freeze (i made a mess for trevor over the weekend and got jealous they weren't in my freezer) and at some point this month or next i'm going to make ants climbing a hill with my newly purchased bean thread noodles, and some sort of creamy pasta with that salt pork. yum.

last night

"so then steve jobs is back."

"yeah, he's back."

"what about that other one, the fat one?"

"steve wozniak?"

"yeah, him."

"he's not around. but he was on dancing with the stars!"

[laughter]

"no way."

"totally. and my sister saw him rolling down the embarcadero on a segway!"

[extremely raucous laughter]

"shut the fuck up! only in san francisco, i swear."

bounty-ful

I have a hatred for wasting paper towels. Paper anything, really. My sister and I believe there is a deep-seated cause for this, namely our father’s insane quirks which included his Only Four Squares! Rule for toilet paper and You Always Use it At Least Twice Rule for Kleenex. Yes, I know. Believe me, I know. You could argue he is from the hippie generation and an original conservationist. You could also argue he is one of the most frugal humans on the planet. Either one fits.

So here at the office, where we use normal household Bounty paper towels and not the brown-or-white industrial kind, I have started this bizarre habit of paper towel-hoarding in my cube.

I don’t find drying your hands to be a sufficient usage for paper towels, so if I used one just to dry my hands, I bring it back to my cube and either stuff it into my bag (so no one sees how bizarre I am), or try to disguise it in plain sight for later use, like folding it into coaster size and placing it under my coffee cup. I pretend to care about my desktop surface while actually disguising my ridiculous OCD. Generally, I allow a maximum of two bunched-up, plain-view paper products on my desk top (including Kleenex used for wiping my eyes after eye drops, a result of Lasik), so there is usually a used Kleenex or something hanging around (eye-wiping only, even I have standards). Right now my desk features one paper towel “coaster,” one bunched up napkin, and a folded Kleenex stuffed under my key board. Yes, this is getting to be alarming. Maybe I should start tucking a hand towel into my waistband so I can wipe my hands /blot my eyes dry without further wasting trees. Think that would fly below the dress code radar?

One a side note, in reading Apartment Therapy and its related spinoffs, please note the little re-use tricks such as these that are gaining popularity for hipsters and yupsters from Silver Lake to Williamsburg. Washed-out yogurt cups to house different sized nails and screws? Been going on for decades in my parents’ garage. Stacking little slivers of soap together and “making” a new bar? Definitely. Re-using paper towels is the next big thing! There’s going to be some nifty little owl-embroidered paper towel reuser up on Etsy in a minute, I bet you.