Tub of Pasta

I suppose there is a fine line between a "hoarder" and one who simply "stocks up" on things. I have seen hoarders on the Oprah show. I am not that, however, I do like to have extra items on hand that I use all the time. That part of my personality comes from a childhood in which I didn't know when I would get another..whatever it was, and from the fear that I will need something and have used the last one. I am sure it is a disorder either way you look at it. I just find something very comforting in opening up a cupboard and seeing it full of toilet paper from Costco.

Back to it.

One of the things I choose to stock up on is pasta. Seriously, can you ever have too much? I guess we will get to that in a minute, but it is a good pantry staple item to have on hand for last minute dinners or whatever. Before I got married I had a pretty well stocked pantry which I was quite proud of. Some would say that it looked like my very own mini-mart...but it made me feel secure (note sentence above on childhood).

Flash forward to getting married and moving in with Chris. Our first house was this rambler which he was remodeling and planning to sell. Not a permanent address by any means. The kitchen really didn't have much in the way of storage so we did a make shift pantry slash storage area in the garage. Oh, two things about the garage 1. There was veeeeery little light out there 2. There were critters at one time enjoying my supply of pantry items so I had to put everything into Rubbermaid totes (important fact to the story).

Rubbermaid totes are opaque. Who knows what is in there? Frankly, if I can't see it I must not have any, right? Welllllllllll.

Flash forward again to the kitchen being complete and Chris, being the over organizer that he is wants to organize my mess of the garage pantry into the kitchen so I can find my stuff. I just hate doing that kind of crap. I want it organized but I want someone else to do the organizing. So we are going along and the very last thing was this big Rubbermaid tote buried under piles of pots, pans and whatever. I had already gotten the lecture about having too much of certain things. In my defense, I had such a hard time finding things that I assumed I needed more.... That is the set-up.

We get to this tote and he goes "what's in here?". I casually say "I don't know" and really, by that time my tone was more like "who cares". I was over it. Over digging through crap in the garage and carrying it into the house, over being lectured about over purchasing pantry items, just over it. "How many (insert pantry item here) do we really need Jannell?". Well gee, obviously I felt we needed 5 cans of each since that's how many we have! I ran out of responses after awhile so I just stopped responding. Back to the tote. He opens the lid and no lie, there must have been 20 bags and boxes of pasta in there! It was absolutely stuffed full. I started laughing so hard I was snorting because no sooner had the last lecture ended we opened this tote and it was so full of pasta it was comical. Comical to me anyway.

I didn't have to buy pasta for a long time and to this day, I get reminded of it.