Super Bowl Sunday I was the designated driver for New Boyfriend and his friends. (And let me clarify that my loathing of football is still intact; therefore, I watched "Love, Actually" at my house for the tenth time while the boys watched the stupid game at someone else's house.) I have a Kia Soul, a car known as The Brave Little Toaster among my friends and which was not designed to haul around two large guys in the back seat. (NB, an average-sized fellow, fits into the front passenger seat quite nicely.) As the guys wedged themselves into the Toaster, one of them grumbled, "Jeez, Jaynie, do you drive this thing or live in it?" The back seat was nearly covered with books, some tools, clothes, plastic containers that once held leftovers, and a couple pairs of boots. And a piece of backsplash.
Yes, backsplash. From the kitchen reno in March of--gulp--2009. I had miscut a piece of backsplash and bought a new piece way back then...and it's been on the back seat of the Toaster ever since. Which means that there was, until yesterday, a big chunk of kitchen wall behind the stove with no backsplash.
Scotty shamed me into action. Yesterday--hey, he shamed me into action but didn't cure me of procrastination!--I dragged all the junk out of the Toaster with the help of my (now-retired) Wingman Randy. Then I measured, cut, and hung the new piece of backsplash. We dug further and found more house-related things in the back seat of the Toaster: the last four cabinet pulls for the kitchen cabinets, my wrecker bar that I'd long thought to be left behind on the roof of the house, the paint chip from when I matched paint to front parlor wallpaper, and two boxes of Keurig K-cups.
The cabinet pulls are now on the cabinet doors. The wrecker bar is in the bottom of the EMS box that I snagged from work in a surplus property giveaway, and my other tools and nails and sandpaper and the like are all neatly organized in the EMS-box-turned-toolbox. (I should mention that it's been sitting empty in my spare bedroom for four years.) The paint chip was taken to Wal-Mart and I brought a gallon of Dutch Boy paint home. Only the K-cups are still not in their proper place, but today I am going to clean out the kitchen pantry. Oh yes, I am.
It feels good to have all those little odds and ends taken care of...not to mention that the Brave Little Toaster is now also the Clean Little Toaster, at least on the inside.