Never Waste a Step

Justin's great Grandma Palmer (trivia: whose last name provided Justin's middle name ~ Justin Palmer Smith) used to say, "Never waste your steps".  After now living in a house with two separate flights of stairs, I think of Grandma Palmer almost every single day as I run up and down these steps no less than 100 times a day and I totally get what she meant by those words. 

When Gene traveled to Tri-Cities to find a house to buy, it never occurred to me that there was a really important item missing on the "must have" list for buying this house. You see, there is no bathroom on our main floor.  One must choose to climb stairs before commencing their business or one can choose to fly down stairs and save the climbing for afterwards. The bedrooms and all the dirty laundry are on the top floor, and the washer/dryer are in the basement. And when the dirty laundry becomes the clean laundry, there's another two flights of stairs for every laundry basket.

I've been thinking a lot about never wasting my steps pretty much ever since I turned 50 ... which was slightly over a year ago.  I mean this in a literal sense because my knees started aching ever so much more after we moved here but also in the not-so-literal sense.  Sometimes when I'm thinking I should go to the store, my second thought is could I live another day without going to the store?  There were times this last summer that we were running so much that I didn't make it to the grocery store for almost 3 weeks at a time.  We could pretty much live on the food we've stored away for a few months without having to make a trip to the store.  Do I want to live on canned chili and powdered milk?  Oh, hell no!  But I have to admit that sometimes it's kind of fun to see how long I can put off those things I hate doing so much, like going to the grocery store.  I have come up with some pretty funky ideas for dinner and there's always a can of peaches to top it off!

I don't know why this has been on my mind so much lately ... maybe it's the aching knees or maybe it's the change in seasons.  Or maybe it's because I should have gone to the store this morning. But I still have about 2 cups of milk left in the gallon jug and plenty of eggs to make it til next week along with grapes & celery and one old head of purple cabbage in the fridge.  I think I'll skip the store and use that time to make some home-made bagels today while the laundry is finishing up and I'm bustling between floors in this big, old house.  It'll give me a chance to think about Grandma Palmer and my dearly departed mother-in-law, Adelle, who would be so proud of me for making home-made bagels, while I'm doing something useful and not wasting my steps ....