It was a nice, loooong holiday weekend up there at the Houghton Lake Group Home. It was just the GG, me, Kathy, and Doug, and the weather was great, contrary to predictions and I had a great time and I’m not exactly sure when I’ll get there again. I can visualize about the next ten days with pretty good clarity, then it gets a little fuzzy. There’s something about China and some dogs and Fin Family Moominbeach a little later in June. Rumor has it that a cowgirl’ll be ridin’ into The Great White North for a bit in early August. And there’s something about Africa at the end of the summer that I don’t even want to think about yet. Other than that, I’m cleaning my house and learning php and some other stuff and trying to figure out how to obtain a few more small clients to reach a critical mass of freelance/consulting web jobs. (If you know of anyone, send ’em my way.)

Anyway, I know I’m likely to get into some kind of trouble for this but I got bored enough by this morning (a dangereuse thing) to pull everything out of the Group Home pantry and put it back in. It drives me nuts when I am out at the grocery store and buy something and then get back to the Group Home (or The Landfill or Fin Family Moominbeach) and find five copies of what I just bought. So, in an effort to save the rest of y’all a little grief, here’s a list of things that are *not* needed at Houghton Lake, as of this date and not in any particular order:

• graham crackers: *5* packages of them, 2 of which are open already (I didn’t check for staleness)
• aluminum foil: 3 packages
• spaghetti: 3 packages
• egg noodles: TONS
• penne: 1 package that I wish I’d’ve known about before I bought *more* for pasta salad
• macaroni and cheese: at least 3 boxes plus some packs of Easy Mac
• various sauce mix packets: *lots* of gravy mix, some french onion soup mix, and other random stuff
• marshmallows: only 1-1/2 packages but those things turn into rocks after about 10 minutes — so far, these seem okay though — they’re hanging in a plastic bag on a hook up on the left side of the pantry
• peanut butter: crunchy, smooth and low-fat, not all are full
• salad dressing: lots of ranch, a couple raspberry vinegar, of course if you like something different, knock yourself out 🙂
• cooking spray: 5 cans, various kinds, some are half-empty
• mayonnaise: enough to last ten years at my house
• garlic: garlic powder, dried minced garlic (BIG jar), minced garlic in oil (two jars)
• jam: a couple of jars that Kathy made (I had some of the strawberry/lemon on cinnamon-raisin toast and it is *dynamite*!) plus two industrial sized jars of grocery store strawberry
• shrimp cocktail: 2-1/2 jars
• tartar sauce: 1-1/2 jars

That is not an exhaustive list but covers things that we seem to have multiples of. If any of y’all are wondering about the existence of anything else in the pantry inventory, go ahead and ask me. I just might know. Or not… 😉

Love and looking forward to seeing y’all at the Group Home this summer, sometime in the fog of “what’s next”!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.