I'm Retired! Now what?

May 10, 2026

After a little babysitting and financial planning talk, it was time to get back into the deep dive house clean!  I really wanted to clean my garage, but in Texas the month of May is already too hot.  In this fine land there’s around a month and a half of winter when the temp is too freaking cold and about ten months of summer when everything is too freaking hot!  This leaves a week of fall and a week of spring.  So if you don’t get your heavy outdoor activities done during your one week of spring you have to wait until that one week of fall.  With that in mind I decided to forgo the garage clean and take on something even more interesting and daring, the pantry!

We don’t have one of those big walk-in pantries like some houses have.  Some houses come with a pantry which basically looks like a converted bedroom.  Our pantry is a linen closet at best.  It can’t comfortably sleep three, but it can still hold a bunch of stuff.  Apparently not enough though because the pantry tends to overflow out onto the kitchen desk.  Yes, we have a kitchen desk.  It was the old desk I had in my bedroom as a kid.  One day I went a bit crazy and sanded it all down and refinished it, thinking it might be a good desk for Margaret.  Indeed it was.  She stacks it high with canned goods, chips, crackers, and anything else that won’t fit in the pantry.

So as Margaret watched TV, I set out on a mission to explore the dark, depths of the pantry.  I thought of the adventure as being a little like spelunking.  Entering into the unknown!  However, my most perplexing unknown centered around the question, “Is the expiration date on food merely a suggestion?”  And more importantly, “Is two years over the expiration date really that bad?  How about three?”  I grew up in a family where the expiration date merely meant you had to rely on your own good judgement and natural senses, meaning we had to sniff the food to determine if it was fit for human consumption.  However, does raw spaghetti have any kind of a scent?  What does rotted, raw spaghetti even smell like? This was a minor concern compared to the bigger question of, “Why the heck does Margaret have six packages of spaghetti?  Is she planning on opening up an Olive Garden or something?” 

Speaking of pasta, I had to question the ten packages of Ramen Noodles I found as well.  Nine of which were expired by at least two years.  But did that mean they were hard and crunchy.  Well, of course they were.  They’re raw Ramen Noodles!  Can they expire though?  Do they go soft when they spoil?  To be honest, I didn’t even realize they were in there.  If I had, I would have harkened back to my bachelor days and gobbled them up before they had expired.  As any former single guy knows, Ramen Noodles is the basic meal plan for most proud bachelors and the stuff generally makes up 70% of their meals.  I did know a guy at work who used to eat them raw, right out of the package.  He claimed the experience was like eating crackers.  I’ll take his word for it.  I believe that guy is a policeman now.

In my own defense, the Ramen Noodles were hiding behind the ten boxes of instant Jello that had all expired three years ago.  I asked Margaret what possessed her to buy ten boxes of instant Jello all around the same time.  She simply stated that she had planned on making something with them and for some reason had lost her inspiration.  I was nearly inspired to put them all together just to see what kind of vast, jiggling creation I could create with ten boxes of expired Jello mix.

Of course all the Jello mixes couldn’t even come close to all the packages of dark chocolate, white chocolate, butterscotch, Heath, and M&M chips that had been stowed away for cookies that were never baked.  Indeed, I counted eighteen bags of the goodies!  I dared not look at the expiration date because I couldn’t bear the thought of throwing such scrumptious jewels away regardless of their age.

All the bags of tasty chips were just the crest of the baking goods on hand.  There were at least three boxes of baking soda.  I couldn’t find an expiration date there so I kept them all.  However, the four bottles of Karo light syrup did have expiration dates, with the youngest expiring two years ago.  Thinking of all the pecan pies I could have made from this mass collection of syrup nearly brought a tear to my eye. 

Then there was the question of the six expired cans of evaporated milk.  Wait a minute!  Doesn’t the entire thought process behind canned, evaporated milk revolve around the idea that it doesn’t expire?  With that thought in mind, I pondered over the six bottles of vinegar while trying to recall what I had read somewhere which told me that vinegar never expires.  Then I noticed a couple of jars of honey.  Maybe it was honey that never expires.  The old saying, “You get more flies with honey than vinegar” jumped into my mind, and that juggled the two items to the point where I couldn’t remember which one lasted merely a year or two while the other would survive a nuclear war.  With such a question in my mind, I just shoved both the vinegar and honey back into the pantry without looking for dates. 

Carrying on my exploration into the pantry’s lower depts, I ran across a couple of packages of sour gummies that the youngest grandkid had stowed away during a time most commonly referred to as who knows when, but after a few years, the gummies had lost their gumminess (if that’s a word).  Feeling a bit festive, I figured they could be enjoyed as hard candy during next Christmas, so I shoved them back into the pantry as well. 

2023 seemed to be the most popular expiration date I found during this cleaning endeavor.  I don’t know what was going on three or four years ago, but Margaret apparently loaded up on a bunch of stuff then.  The most celebrated find, regarding expiration dates, was 2010!  I don’t remember much about the item, but whatever the stuff was, it was old enough to drive a car!

My little adventure made me curious about how long items take to expire.  Where some items seem to fossilize in a matter of months, others seem to have a lifespan that would rival a Galapagos turtle.   The boxes of broth that had been sitting on the bottom shelf carried an expiration date of four years ago, and I’m thinking they might have been a bit more decomposed than the hot chocolate powder mix that had also expired four years ago.   In all reality, had I been in a bomb shelter waiting out a thermonuclear holocaust, I’m pretty sure everything in the pantry would have been considered fair game, regardless of the age.

While sifting through all these items I had to wonder just how much weight do these expired dates really carry.  The date isn’t technically called the “expiration” date.  The more friendly consumer message merely states, “Best used by” a certain date, meaning this might just be a ploy by the manufactures wanting us to buy more stuff.   I just have to wonder what I would have thought if my new 2026 Subaru had a sticker on it that said, “Best to use by 2028” meaning I was recommended by the manufacturer to buy a new car every two years.

There’s no doubt in my mind that my dad would have kept every last scrap, crumb, and drop in the pantry, regardless of its age.  During the years of my youth I’d seen the man scrape mold from the top of applesauce and enjoy every last bite of it.  My mother, on the other hand, held to the philosophy, “As long as the cans aren’t rusty, they’re good.”  Aluminum cans tended to play havoc with that rule.