I've been cleaning the house today. I tell people that I'm doing that and they probably don't believe me. “He does that every week!” Okay well maybe it's only to me that weekly cleaning seems ghastly and unusual, but all the same, I sort of rotate shifts. This time I've done laundry, vacuumed most of the house, and washed about half the wood floors. I have to split the wood floors into segments and alternate, otherwise at the end of my cleaning process I would undoubtedly enter a trance and proceed to install carpet.

One of the maintenance tasks that is somewhat more rare is pantry maintenance. The refrigerator gets cleaned out maybe once every few months- mainly trashing errant vegetables or half-eaten jars of things. The pantry only gets attention maybe once or twice a year at most. For example, I just discovered that I'll be eating MRE-style Indian food for a couple of days to beat some dangerously close expiration dates.

I eyed a jar of olive tapenade I've had forever. For some reason my food-smiting has always passed over this particular jar, but this time I picked it up and checked the expiration. March... 2003.

Those of you who've been reading this blog longer than is healthy may remember this post back in 2004 in which I took photographs of my refrigerator and pantry. Looking at it now makes me giggle to myself. What did I ever do without a dedicated alcohol cabinet??

But by referring back to these photos, I was able to determine that it isn't just the olive tapenade that is still with me from 2004. There is also a jar of pesto sauce, a jar of pickled artichoke hearts, and a container of brown rice- all illustrated below.

I sang Danny Boy as I chucked them all into the trash. I'd take a photo of my current pantry but it's looking slim.