The First Delaying Tactic -- Passover

Passover (or Pesach, as it is generally known in my crowd) caused some major delays in our de-crapification process. Nevertheless, I might have posted about the engrossing procedures of getting ready for Pesach if my computer hadn't decided to crap-out (nothing to do with de-crapification) right about the beginning of the holiday.

Digression: Why do we call Pesach a holiday? Merriam-Webster offers this definition of "holiday": a day on which one is exempt from work. Excuse me for an hour or so while I laugh hysterically. For the observant Jew, Pesach is the most work-intensive holiday (using another M-W definition -- "holy day") in the calendar.

First of all, we clean. The idea is to get rid of all the chametz in our possession. Chametz is anything made from the following grains: wheat, oats, barley, rye, and spelt. That includes most breads, cereals, cookies, crackers, etc., etc., etc. When I started looking for chametz in my house, I found some.

There was the refrigerator, of course:

Tortillas, leftovers, some kind of soup, bread, buns, enchilada sauce, and more...

And the refrigerator door:

There may not be much that is, strictly speaking, chametz, but there are open containers of various things that we will use up or discard. And stuff for feeding dogs, which we will move to the refrigerator in the garage. Which is also, naturally, full of food:

Oooh! Bagels and pizza crusts!

And we mustn't forget the freezers. The freezer compartment in our daily-use fridge had more goodies:

Ice cream! Frozen pasta! Mysterious things wrapped in foil!

Hmm.... A bag of oats, lots of nuts. Some squash?

Going through all these spaces at least makes planning meals for the week or so preceding Passover really easy. Though my family all remembers the year we found 3 boxes of Bisquick in the pantry and then had pancakes for breakfast and lunch every day until they were gone.

And there is the big freezer, where we store bulk buys and the things we make and freeze ourselves.
Oh, my. Look at all those Girl Scout cookies. And all those peaches from our tree that we froze last summer. And the tofu and the big paper bag full of bagels. And all the other stuff.

But wait! There's more! Like on top of the refrigerator:

Media Guy's Cinnamon Toast Crunch! Dried cranberries! Other cereal that no one will claim!

And in the pantry:

The pantry actually doesn't look so bad until you realize that we had already cleared out the pantry and put stuff we were going to eat or give away onto the kitchen counters:

And, last but not least, there are the food storage shelves in the garage:

And I almost forgot the cabinet where we keep our baking supplies:

Lots of chametz there, obviously. Now, how to get rid of all this chametz-dik stuff? Some we were able to eat before it had to be gone. Some we gave to food pantries, like all these unopened boxes of crackers and pasta and other things:

Some was given away to non-Jews who could use it. And, inevitably, a few things were thrown away, given to the dogs, or sold.

Sold? It may sound like a legal fiction, but the rabbis figured out a long time ago that sometimes it is a severe financial hardship to get rid of all the chametz you own -- especially since you have to buy new chametz again after Pesach is over. So they figured out a way to sell the chametz to a non-Jew for the duration of Pesach and then buy it back afterwards.

That means I did not have to eat or give away all the Girl Scout cookies that were in the freezer. Good thing, too, since the Girl Scout cookie sale always seems to deliver the cookies about a month before Pesach. So that I can indulge my secret passion for Thin Mints year-round, I sell them through my rabbi and buy them back again after Pesach.

So we got rid of chametz and cleaned the house. And this is what I actually like about Pesach, despite the work of getting ready:

1) The house gets clean!
2) We get rid of things that we are unlikely to eat and thus have been cluttering up the shelves.
3) The house gets clean!

Once all the chametz is cleaned out, we remove our regular dishes from the cupboards and bring in our Pesach dishes. I don't have pictures of all that, though I did have to clear off shelves in the garage in order to have room for our regular dishes:

It's always interesting to see how much we can cram onto the shelves.

As usual, a cat checks out the shelves for stability before we fill the next level.

Once everything -- food, dishes, etc. -- is out of the kitchen, we line the cabinet shelves (with paper towels, usually) and counters (with Contac paper), clean the appliances rigorously, cover the stove top with foil.....

But wait! There's something missing!

What happened to the stove?

Like my computer, it crapped out. The night before the first seder. And we had 10 people coming for the first seder, 20 for the second seder. And the third night of Pesach was Shabbat. I had 3 festive dinners to prepare without a stove.

Fortunately, while we discovered that the oven was non-functional after we had cleaned and kashered it and prepared it for Pesach...

... the discovery was made almost 24 hours before the first seder. The Wizard and I went online and researched ranges, found a local store that sold ranges and that opened at 6:00 a.m., and set our alarm clock. We bought the new range by 6:30 a.m., picked it up and installed it ourselves, and had a working Pesach-dik stove by 11:00 a.m.

The traitorous non-working range was put outside by the front door. As our guests arrived, we told them that we now had a chametz-dik stove and a Pesach-dik stove. Some of them almost believed it. That stove has since been given away to someone who didn't care that the oven didn't work.

The Good Thing was that we didn't have to kasher and cover the new range.

And now Pesach is long past, our kitchen is more-or-less back to normal, and we cleared out a lot of STUFF in the process. And here's another thing I like about Pesach. When we start bringing dishes, etc., back into the house, I make things earn their keep. For example, here's the pre-Pesach contents of one kitchen drawer:

There is stuff there that we haven't used in a long time. Like the pumpkin scraper and the combined spoon-fork thingies and the melon ballers. Things we don't use went back into the bag. If they don't get pulled out and used within a few months, they are gonzo. Yet another way to de-crapify!

Next time: My choice of Back to the Grind, Re-Doing the Bathrooms, or Our Garden.