Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Entropy is Not Always Our Friend

My daughter Elizabeth is a librarian.  Even if she never again works professionally as one in an actual library setting, she is a librarian, which is to say, she cannot long stand disorder.  Add that to her Aspie brain and you get someone who goes ballistic when things aren't organized by the dewey decimal system.

Okay, not really, but it is true that it is highly dangerous to get between a librarian and disorder, as she will trample you without compunction.  This is being abundantly illustrated today with the following photo:

Disorder
What you see here are all the bottles we had in the garage--collected over the last year and more to put our mead, beer, and lambic in.  A while back I went through all of them and put them in orderly stacks in the garage, but that was some time ago and many things have been tossed in the garage since. Bottles were stacked and stashed everywhere, and she couldn't stand all that randomness.

So today she went into the garage and brought out all the bottles she could find.  Here they are on the floor of the dining room, and what she's doing now (I can hear bottles clinking downstairs as I type this) is rooting through all of them, tossing the annoyingly moldy ones into the recycling bin (we are grateful for people saving bottles for us, but if they aren't rinsed, they get way too moldy to bother scrubbing out), and sorting them by type:  still wine, sparkling wine, beer.

We brought 15 gallons of beer to the family reunion, and the fam did a great job rinsing out bottles as they drank the beer.  We were also able to salvage many beer boxes to put our bottles (empty and full) in, ready to make beer for my niece's wedding in August.  The still bottles will be set aside for the mead we have to bottle soon, with more coming later this year as we can afford the honey to make it.  The rest of the beer bottles and the sparkling wine bottles will be filled with the TWENTY gallons of lambic we've had aging for a year or so and is ready to be bottle conditioned--raspberry, peach, cherry, and blackberry.

She also has been organizing the Cupboard Under the Stairs (with apologies to JK Rowling), which is the coolest spot in the house and where we store all our potables whilst aging and after bottling. There are shelves in there that WERE stacked with assorted miscellaneous but are NOW with assorted specific.  This girl is death to entropy, I tell you!

Tonight's summary: 289 beer bottles clean, in taped and labelled boxes, ready to sanitize and fill with beer for Matt and Kristina's nuptials.  Kate the Efficient Housewife would approve, I'm sure.

She'll tackle the wine bottles tomorrow.  Come back for an update!

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