Pesach countdown -- 4 Days to Go, Part II

Time has been very strange. Tomorrow my sons who attend college in California will be coming home. They will be here for Shabbat and then they become slave labor because on Sunday we will finish cleaning for Pesach and we will switch our kitchen from everyday life to Pesach readiness.

I have actually been taking it kind of easy in terms of cleaning this year. It's not entirely deliberate -- I damaged the knee that wasn't already hurt and some kinds of movement are, quite literally, a pain.

Since my knee is generally less painful in the morning than in the evening, I have been trying to do the  bulk of the cleaning and other preparations in the morning. This morning, it was time to defrost the freezer:

Because we have been getting rid of food (mostly by eating it), there wasn't an incredible amount of food in the freezer. (You should see it at the end of the summer when it's full of stuff from the garden!) When I replaced the food, there was still a lot of available space:

The food on the top shelf is for Pesach use. Of the rest, some will be eaten in the next couple of days, but most will be sold with our other chametz. The freezer would be fuller, but I haven't replaced the two cases (a year's worth) of Girl Scout cookies that arrived a couple of week ago.

Also, because we won't be preparing and eating any meat dishes between now and the start of Pesach, I enlisted some help and moved all the meat dishes, utensils, appliances, etc., out to one of the shelves in the garage that we cleared off at the beginning of the week:

Tomorrow, I hope to start moving the milchig dishes out. If not, the slave labor college men will do that on Saturday night.

We did yet another sort of the items in the pantry. A few more things went into the donate and give away piles. A very few things will be added to the shelf of things that will be sold. And there are still a few things left -- we still have to eat over the next few days, after all:

But the cupboards are looking decidedly bare. This is a good thing four days before Pesach.