Relics of the Past

While moving into our new home I've discovered yet another reason why I was born in the wrong decade: shelf paper. After an informal poll of friends, I've discovered that lining my shelves is passé, a fact that caused me lots of angst while moving in. I'm not kidding. I spent several days agonizing over whether I could really handle putting stuff in my cabinets without lining the shelves first. People whose homes I admire and whose opinions I trust don't use shelf paper, so I told myself that I shouldn't waste time with such a tedious task. But I guess spending so many years living in apartments where lining the shelves became a regular move-in ritual made it impossible for me to break this habit. I comfort (and delude) myself with the thought that I came up with a compromise. Rather than buy the extra-sticky contact paper, I went for the plastic liner that I can just lay down on my shelves. It's thicker than the stuff that looks like lines of bubbled rubber, so when my vanilla leaks it won't go right through and stain my cabinet, but at least I don't have to worry about smoothing out air bubbles trapped under contact paper.

And there was one unexpected benefit of lining my shelves. After cramming my food closet (it's not a pantry) and my cabinets with only the food we moved with, I've been nervous that there just isn't enough room in my kitchen for food I'll buy. Then today while checking to see which shelves I've lined, I found a completely empty cabinet. No, my kitchen isn't that big. I'm just ditzy.

A few other thoughts on our new home:

The other day my husband said, "I love looking at the hills around our house because it makes me want to watch Empire Strikes Back." Although our new neighborhood isn't quite as desolate as Hoth or Finse, Norway, it is more rural than our last neighborhood. For the most part I really like the openness of it all even if I don't like the longer commute, but sometimes it feels a little more hick than I'd expect.

Whenever I go to Wal-mart or Target around here I have flashbacks of an experience I had in a Springville Wal-mart. I was trying to return an extra nativity set that I'd received, but by the time I made it in, it was only worth $2. In an effort to be helpful, the clerk suggested I could use it for the twelve days of Christmas. She actually said, "Each night you could leave a piece with some cookies or something--and um, I don't know how to say this any other way--n***ger knock." I guess she'd never heard doorbell ditch or "ring the doorbell and run" before. But maybe I'm being too judgmental.