Pick a packet
Today I was having a conversation with The Mom, and she told me that she recently cleaned out an "everything" drawer in her kitchen where she stored the extra little condiment packets that she had from meals. You know, the duck sauce, soy sauce, ketchup, etc. Apparently The Mom tallied up her collection and she had 47 duck sauce, 1 McDonald's sweet and sour sauce and 85 soy sauce packets. 85 SOY SAUCE PACKETS!! And 28 packets of the stuff you get with cut flowers that you are supposed to put in the water to preserve the flowers. Apparently, this stuff evaporates and disintigrates within the plastic packaging because The Mom said that the contents of many of her condiment packages had turned to goo or disappeared. So she just threw them all away and is going to restart her collection.The funny thing is that just this weekend, I realized that I, too, was starting a condiment collection in my little drawer. I have buffalo sauce from McDonalds, stuff from Papa Johns, plasticwater packages from Outback, chopsticks...plus the obligatory soy sauce and duck sauce.
Why do we collect these things? I mean, it's obvious that they give us more than we need everytime we get take-out...so we're not saving them just in case we need extra next time. Are we that afraid that our next meal is going to be ruined by an hourly worker who forgets to give us seasoning? If that happens, I do have my own bottle of soy sauce, just in case...
Or are we thinking that maybe one day we will cook something on our own that will be perfected by a 1/2 ounce packet of liquid seasoning from a local chain restaurant?
This made me think back about those little packets of flower preservatives. The Mom never puts them in the flowers. She hasn't for as long as I can remember bringing flowers home to her. At the places where you grab the packets yourself (they don't come pre-wrapped with the flowers), I used to always grab one or two packets and throw them inside the tissue paper, just so that The Mom would have to take them out of the wrapping and find something to do with them. Apparently, they all just went into The Drawer of Little Packets. Her excuse is that she always thought she would use them for another set of flowers. But here comes my previous point - you're going to get another packet of flower preservatives with the flowers you decide you do want to elongate the life of, anyway - right?
Now I have to look through my own little The Drawer of Little Packets. I wonder if The Little Packets have expiration dates on them??
posted by Steph @ 9:43 AM
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