Refrigerator Tetris

My lower back is still sore and I wasn’t sure how well I’d do wandering around in a grocery store for an hour and a half, but it turned out pretty well. I felt reasonably okay afterward and we now have plenty of food to eat. But there was a bigger challenge waiting for us when we got home: it needed to fit in the fridge.

One problem is all of the Thanksgiving leftovers buried in its depths. Turkey, venison, goose, small cobs of corn, some mashed potatoes… all sorts of good food that’s sitting on the shelves, lonely and waiting to be eaten. Sad to look at, really. If I’d been the one putting it all in smaller containers a day or two ago, I might have burst into tears, but if it hadn’t been done, there wouldn’t have been enough room.

The second problem is that Mom and Dad are heading up to the family cabin on Saturday and staying there until next Monday. (That date is dependent on the weather—if the forecasters are right and a storm carrying 8-10″ of snow hits the cabin next weekend, they might be home a few days early.) Thus, their ten-day menu needed to fit alongside the food that’s staying home that I get to eat, lonely and waiting to be… wait… never mind.

So we got the groceries home and into the kitchen, at which point Mom headed out to go shopping for something else, leaving me to put everything in the fridge, shift things here and there, shuffle and turn them around, move the butter to one shelf, then another, then back to its original spot, then precariously on the edge of a third shelf. I managed to get everything inside and most of the cabin food on one side so it’ll be easy to separate. As for the leftovers, well, they got buried even further into the back, so they may be stuck waiting even longer to be eaten. If it’s any consolation, everything is packed in pretty thoroughly, so there’s no concern about being lonely anymore.