finishing up

I leave in a few weeks for five months of travelling and, as my departure date nears, questions about whether I'm 'ready yet' are coming with increasing frequency. So frequently that I have a request: Can you all stop asking me that? I don't quite know what you mean but I can pretty much guarantee that those things I should be doing haven't even occured to me yet - that's the way I do things.

That's not to say I haven't started preparing for my departure yet. I have. I'm engaged in a mad frenzy of finishing up 'stuff' and I'm having a great time doing it. Fancy lotions, conditioners, and shampoos that I would normally use sparingly are being tossed about with complete abandon - bathing has become a most decadent affair. I'm gradually making my way through those 'hand wash only' items that languish at the bottom of my laundry bin waiting for 'next week' when I 'have more time'. And I'm working through the pile of books that have been given to me as 'must reads'; just about done Bruce Chatwin's 'Songlines', finished John Irving's most recent 800+ page excuse for a novel tonight and began 'Reading Lolita in Tehran'.

The one area that's proving challenging is the kitchen. I'm finding the strangest things in there: cans upon cans of palm hearts, bamboo shoots and baby corn (who eats baby corn?), way too many boxes of cooking chocolate to make sense, brown rice, basmati rice, risotto rice, millet, wheat berries, amaranth, gelatin, yeast, 3 bottles of molasses, 6 different types of vinegar, white sugar, brown sugar, turbino sugar, icing sugar, splenda, egg replacer, stevia, agar agar, arrowroot, guam, tapioca...I don't even eat these things. Which explains why they're still there, commiserating with each other on my shelves.

So far, work has benefitted the most from my efforts to clear out my cupboards. Last Friday I was able to use my inexplicable surplus of rice krispies and corn syrup to make vegan rice krispy squares and this Friday it'll be an apple walnut loaf which should finish off the homemade applesauce ambitiously stocked away in my freezer. Next week? Who knows, but one thing is clear: I'm going to have to start getting creative. Send your suggestions for baby corn chocolate millet bread my way.