Freezer Cleaning Project–Preparing for These Changing Times

What does one do with extra free time on the weekends now that coronavirus has so greatly limited our ability to go anywhere?  Well, with food available in limited quantities and becoming harder and harder to find, hubby and I decided it was a great time to clean out and organize all of our freezers!

We have 2 deep freezers…a smallish one in our laundry room and a large commercial-sized one in the garage…plus the freezer portion of our side-by-side fridge in the kitchen and the top section of our old back-up fridge in the garage.  You see, we buy a lot of foods in bulk with our large family comprised of mostly adults, and I rarely pay full price for meat…I stock up whenever I find it marked down.  But we’ve become rather sloppy putting groceries away over the last few months since my shoulder surgery, and we weren’t using our frozen foods most of last year when we were following a whole foods nutrition plan that was largely comprised of fresh vegetables.  As a result, we had no idea what was in those freezers…we just knew we had a lot of food, and that there was going to be a lot of meat scattered around.

It took the two of us most of the afternoon, but it was well worth the effort!  Both deep freezers needed some defrosting anyway, so we were able to kill two birds with one stone.  We emptied everything out of all 4 places and took a complete inventory on paper as we sorted and replaced everything into logical locations.  We took the van out of the garage so we’d have the garage floor free to use various bins and coolers to stage everything in the interim.  But we got it done!

Now that we have pages and pages of inventory written down and everything is neatly in its place, I have the cumbersome task tomorrow of entering everything into a spreadsheet so that it’s organized, easy to locate in categories, and easy to maintain going forward as things are used or added.

The big relief is that we have plenty of everything, and we no longer need to rely on hasty trips to the stores to try to locate something specific to make for dinner.  Everything seems to be out of stock, and picking up a list of 5 items might take you to 3 stores.  Not only is it an exercise in futility and a huge waste of time, but it also exposes me to unnecessary risks of catching the dreaded coronavirus as it becomes more prevalent in DFW.  And let’s not even talk about how there’s not a bottle of sanitizer to be found anywhere!

I’ve completed this project many times in my 25 years of marriage, but never have I had another adult to help me undertake the daunting task.  To get all 4 freezer spaces organized and inventoried in one afternoon is amazing…teamwork!

It’s comforting to know that if we end up with a stay-in-place order (and it’s getting really close to that now since they even closed houses of worship today and limited any one space to 10 people with 6 ft of social distancing), we will be able to feed our family for a couple of months.  And if we know people in need, we have enough to share.  With the way things are going, I am seriously beginning to doubt that my daughter will ever be allowed to return to public school this school year, which ends at the end of May. 

I feel very blessed that my husband has a secure job that is considered essential (he is the electrical project manager on a hospital expansion project), we aren’t lacking the ability to pay our bills, and we have sufficient food to tide us over for quite some time.  And our adult son is fortunate to still live at home.  If he loses hours at his job as an assistant manager at Sonic at any point, he at least lives rent-free, has health insurance through us, and will only need to maintain his car and phone payments.  And with so many grocery stores hiring extra people to stock, he could always pick up another job to hold him over.  My daughter is blessed to have been homeschooled until 2 years ago.  If necessary, we can return to that or use it as a way to continue her learning while public school is on hold.  My youngest son is blessed to still be homeschooled.  His life continues much as he’s used to it being before this. 

I know this is an unprecedented crisis in our country.  Who ever thought we’d encounter a pandemic in our modern lifetimes?  Clearly, our economy is going to suffer for an unfathomable time.  All the aid necessary to keep people afloat while everything is on hold will be costly.  Even with stimulus checks expected to be sent out to all American taxpayers shortly, what in the world will Americans spend it on but rent and food?  It’s hard to forsee a way out for so many.  This is when we must rely on God and pray for all those around us who will suffer through this historic event.  Let’s help each other as much as we can and do our part to bring this to a safe end for as many as possible.