Woe! It’s Wednesday

It’s been a busy summer and it doesn’t look like we’ll be slowing down come fall either.

I enter each season with lofty goals. Clean up my office. Organize my photos. Organize my closets. Clean out my cupboards. Organize my recipes.

I’m making progress on the recipes. I’ve been typing and searching online and I’m within a few hours of being done. I’ve moved all my recipes into Microsoft OneNote. I have sections for Beef & Pork, Chicken & Fish, Pasta, Breakfast, Desserts, Vegetables, Appetizers & Beverages.

It’s been a huge job, much more than I anticipated. Actually, that’s not true. It’s been better than I anticipated because of the resources online. Many recipes I can find on websites, copy and paste them into my files. Others must be typed by hand.

Some are so old, that after retyping it, throwing it away feels like throwing away an old friend. I have 4 of these typed pages on colored paper.

When we were newly married, our church had four or five Chinese Christian families who were members. The women were asked to share some recipes and they did an amazing day of cooking demos. We’ve made their fried rice and stir-fried beef so often that now they’re memorized. Here’s a picture of the Stir Fried Beef with Onions or Celery or Green Vegetables. Mrs. Kwok and Mrs. Young and Mrs. ….? hmmm, her name escapes me … anyway, you can tell the ladies took great time to write out their exact process. The oil splatters on our copy proves we followed it. And greatly enjoyed the product.

We moved away. Others did too. We lost touch with people. (Thanks to Facebook and other social media, some of them we found again. I’m now Facebook friends with one of Mrs. Kwok’s sons). I’m conflicted about throwing away this old stained page. It’s a connection to the past that will be severed forever. But it’s a thing. Things have no value. It’s the people that matter.

I think I needed to be reminded of that. People matter. I matter. You matter. We matter. Let the other stuff go. Even if I get to the closets and clean them out, they’ll soon be stuffed full again.

I think I’ll go spend some time with someone I care about.