As many of us have discovered, one of the side effects of the pandemic quarantine is hyper-organizing.

For example, my son is stuck home for the summer with lots of kids who need constant sorting out.  He’s organized a whole crafts room, plus a system of separate individual snack bins for them.  He moved on to cleaning and sorting the pantry and storage shelving units, plus all the other rooms, including his office.  That’s on top of all the other outdoor projects and repairs.  It’s inspiring.

Closer to home, E’s handcrafted open cabinet above the stove is now a display case for some decorative kitchen items, freeing up room elsewhere for more organizing, as you can see.  Now she’s hard at work on the next phase of the kitchen project, something involving more lumber and tools and stinky substances.  Like my garden, it’s a never-ending process that keeps us occupied at home and off the streets.

In between there’s baking.  We’re overstocked on E’s homemade breads, so she moved on to pastry confections.  These are sweet strawberry croissants.  We’re perfecting the art of improv cooking with what’s on hand, as I suspect many of us are these days.  We need all the org projects just to work off some calories!  Or is it the other way around?

All of this sounds so normal and mundane, but it’s a symptom of a very abnormal reality all around us.  We’re among the fortunate ones who are able to just stay home, keep busy, and survive.  Thousands are not so privileged.  I know it’s not easy, but it’s a matter of life and death.  Sad that we’ve lived to see a situation where people have to choose between staying alive or paying the bills.

Anyway, back to the mundane.