The rain came today, the first proper one of the season, and I let it do what rain should do in September — fall all day, drum on the roof, turn the garden a darker green. I didn’t fight it. I spent the morning at the kitchen table with a pot of tea and the notebook where I’ve been keeping my grandmother’s transcribed recipes, adding the measurements I’ve worked out for the ones that were too loose to trust. Her “a handful” of flour is, as it turns out, about two-thirds of a cup. I’m glad I didn’t find that out the hard way.
This afternoon the weather gave me an excuse to do the indoor job I’d been avoiding: the junk drawer. You know the one — the place where the loose batteries and the mystery keys and the twist ties go to retire. I emptied it onto the counter and sorted everything into piles, threw out a shameful amount, and put back only the things I actually use. It’s closed now, tidy and quiet, and every time I open it for the next week I’ll be unreasonably pleased with myself before I get used to it again.
Since the day was all about sorting the useful from the not, I got to thinking about the same problem in the terminal: the du command, which shows how much space folders are taking up. Run du -sh * in a directory and it lists each item with its size, so you can see at a glance what’s eating the disk instead of guessing. It’s the junk drawer principle — you can’t tidy what you can’t measure, and sometimes just seeing the numbers is enough to know what has to go.