WOMEN AGES 50+ FOR OCTOBER 2023

Yesterday morning I stopped at Home Depot to pick up a couple of plastic roofing panels to put around the chicken run & coop to keep the wind and rain out in preparation for the upcoming winter storms. I already had several in place, just needed a couple more. In the past, I'd find an employee on the floor and they'd cut the 8' panels in half so I could fit them in my car.

I was surprised yesterday when they paged an employee, he walked up grumpily and said "we aren't allowed to cut panels for people." I asked him since when, and he said that was always the rule and he'd been there 4 years. I said I'd speak to the manager.

Found her, and told her employees had cut them for me twice this summer. She said it's not allowed for liability reasons and what were the employees' names so they could be retrained. I didn't remember their names and wouldn't have told her anyway. The way she emphasized "retrained" several times made me think of a North Korean "retraining" camp, lol.

So rather than lecture her on customer service, I left. Now I'm wondering - are employees at fabric shops allowed to cut fabric for customers or are they under the same liability issues if handling scissors?

In the meantime I have plenty of heavy duty plastic sheeting and wood so I screwed together a frame, stapled plastic onto it, and it will work fine for a while. So the roofing panels weren't very critical. Gave me a chance to use problem solving skills.

\Regarding freezing food: With main dishes like stew or beef stroganoff, we're more likely to eat it again if we fully cook it all, and then freeze what's remaining in meal-sized freezer bags--we're having stroganoff tonight, in fact, that we made on October 1. I ate a smaller bag of it last week for lunch, this bag will feed both of us, and we have one more left. One effort, seven individual meals. Tonight is just a matter of making egg noodles to serve with it, then adding light sour cream to the heated mixture.

Oh - and I made focaccia this morning. Last week, we took the last of what we had in the freezer and made individual pizzas from it, so I'm making some to go with tonight's meal and will freeze the rest. It's super easy to put together, but it's a long-rise dough, so it needs a whole day to rise twice and then bake. The first one I made lasted four months in the freezer, cut into three pieces of bread per bag, and was terrific as garlic bread or just a meal accompaniment.

With salmon patties and meatballs and other individual types of main dish servings, they flash freeze really well before cooking, on sheet trays in the freezer, and then we put them in freezer bags. That goes for cookies at the dough stage, of course, and I learned when I was doing lots of bread baking that bread dough freezes very well prior to the first rise. Freezers are just a lifesaver.

On other domestic notes, Egg wasn't thrilled with me running the vacuum cleaner early this morning, but I pulled up the bathroom rugs and got them in the wash first thing, while I was still putting my coffee together. While I had the rugs up, I wanted to vacuum and mop the bathroom. Then after that, since I had about 45 minutes on the vacuum's battery charge, I got the high-traffic areas vacuumed, plus the kitchen and the mud room.

I got triggered on the subject because I ran across some clickbait yesterday on the dirtiest thing in your house. Turned out it was bathroom rugs. Between people's hair, pet hair, dampness which creates a great atmosphere for bacteria, mold, mildew etc., skin cells, the usual dust mites, and dander, and then add the fact that most people only wash the rugs about every second or third month, they get pretty yucky.

I do tend to forget about bath mats, even though I wash my bath towels every time I use them. I had so many issues over the years with yeast infections when I was younger, as well as urinary tract infections, that I got in the habit of never reusing a towel. Corey only throws his towel in the wash once a week, and I don't argue, it's his choice to make, not mine. Sheets, because there are the two of us and we tend to shower daily, I wash every two weeks. In the summer, if they seem a little funky, I'll wash them once a week.

I know I'm not exactly little Susie Homemaker, but I think of myself as reasonably clean. Do you have a schedule for certain tasks like those?