Heavy metal.

Here it is Tuesday and I'm just recovering from the weekend. Yessirree Bob, there was some heavy metal to be moved, and I'm the one that moved it.

What happened? Well, I mentioned after Christmas that Santa, bless that jolly old elf, had given me a new set of bakeware as a present. And the box was still sitting in the living room. Why? Because the house is a disorganized wreck, that's why, and there was nowhere to put the new stuff.

I'm not blaming anyone but myself for this, by the way, certainly not when it comes to cookware. I do most of the cooking and pretty much all the baking around here, and I have a bad habit of chucking things into closets and cabinets willy-nilly when I'm done with them. My wife organizes, and over time I disorganize, leading to chaos. I'm like a one-man entropy.

She was NOT going to straighten up the closet again, the one off the kitchen where were keep the bulk of the cookware, as she did four or five years ago. And as you can imagine, with ol' Jack Entropy here, it had gotten to be a total wreck in that time. So I decided that, hell or high water, that closet was getting straightened, cleaned, and the old junk pitched last weekend. And I did so. And it involved moving a lot of metal. And any metal is heavy if you have enough of it.

It's always a hassle to do this kind of project because you quickly run out of places to stash the stuff as you remove it from the closet -- if you had other places to stash it all, you wouldn't need the closet. Soon staggering piles of metal and whatnot were nearby, along with rolls of trash bags, cleaning tools and supplies, paper goods, and whatever other crap had been shoved in there when company was coming. It was awful.

I did toss some old pans -- cheap muffin tins from Walmart that rusted on the first use, black bakeware that required fiddling with time and temperature on every recipe, tools that had been superseded or had parts missing -- and among the non-cooking tools I separated the wheat from the chaff, and moved some other items to more appropriate storage areas in the house, like my poor beleaguered cellar (you're next, cellar). Then I found a nice, safe place for the things that were going into that closet. Now, if I can only keep it that way, the closet will be a shining example of smart organization. Yeah, Jack Entropy's on the job.

My other heavy metal experience was shaving with a fresh disposable razor on Sunday. Ooooh, such a nice smooth shave it was too. How clean my skin was! How sleek! How ... bloody my neck was! Crap. Looked like I'd had a run-in with Sweeney Todd. A safety razor isn't supposed to strip the skin that way -- you may have noticed "safety" is right there in the name. It shouldn't just mean "safer than shaving with a chain saw." It probably wouldn't have been like a scene from Halloween if I didn't have such paper-dry winter skin, though.

Next weekend I think I'll focus on plastics or cardboard and leave the metals alone. Something lightweight sounds good. And stick to the electric razor for a few more days.