This week is a mighty blur thanks to an even mightier service project I piloted for my neighborhood elementary school and the A2 PTO Thrift Shop.

A series of successful donation drives by AAPS school groups this fall and winter resulted in a mountain of donated goods for the shop. It's a good problem to have, but a problem none-the-less. All that stuff needed to be sorted so it can be sold. This is where I came in.

Never one to pass on an opportunity to get in way over my head, I chimed right in and signed right up. By signed up I mean I told the shop manager I could provide her with a volunteer team, and we could get all of their stuff sorted.

I promised we would dig through the mountain of stuff, get at all the great, golden nuggets for the good of the schools, discard or recycle what it all came packaged in, and then put all the goods into some sort of reasonable, usable order. I went to a meeting on Thursday night and said this same thing to group of women who sit on the organization's board. And I told them we would do it Monday - less than four days away.

I can't recall if I thought to myslef or said it could all be done one a day. That is unclear at the moment. I suppose if I got enough people lined up for a whole day that could have happened. But on a couple of days notice? Not sure about that either. At the time I said we would do it - that we could do it - I was not even sure of what it was we would be doing, who would be doing it, when it could happen, let alone how long it would take.

Having made a promise such as this, it prompted action. And in a long, impoverished, grey (although the sun did shine today, I swear I heard about it while I was in the warehouse) month like January, I really needed a project and a project needs a deadline. And this it did have: Monday indeed became our sort date. So, in the good company of generous, hard-working, fun-loving volunteers from my community, off a-sorting I did go. You can read more about the sort and how it went on my blog: Ann of Ann Arbor. Yes, we did it. It took two and a half days but, we did it.

Elated and slightly fried from my extreme volunteer adventures, all of this was leading into how I hadn't really cooked for my family this week. About how I was slacking off on my responsibilities as a mother. I was so preoccupied with and exhausted by the physical, social and organizational challenges of the sort, my extreme volunteer event, that planning our family meals virtually fell by the wayside.

But as I started to think more about it, I realized there had been no falling off at all. Like many hard-working mothers I know, some unconscious, subconscious planning made up for the lack of time and energy at the end of the day that it takes to make a sit-down dinner for us. It's as if "dinner radar" or "pantry GPS" kicks in and helps you find your way to that decent meal when time is short, hope is lost, and there's no money for take-out. I love that feeling!

With no conscious plan in place for anything other than the next day's big event (which I was planning and cooking for on Sunday night as the football game went to the very last minutes), it all played out as if by design. Spontaneously. With nothing wasted this week and no big grocery expenditures either.

There was leftover chicken dumpling soup from the lunch I brought for the volunteers in a crock pot on Monday. This was transformed with additions of rotini, bacon and red pepper into a creamy pasta dish to go with baby greens.

Last night, the contents of my freezer (including edamame starters and a main course of boneless, skinless chicken breasts, skinny French green beans, and Thai rice - yes, FROZEN rice was a convenient impulse buy at Trader Joe's) all came to the rescue with fresh ginger, soy sauce, Hoisin and a little more chicken broth again.

Tonight, I made a French version of a hamburger - seasoned with finely minced garlic, onion and dried thyme, dredged in flour, and sauteed in butter - with a wine-deglazed sauce. My younger child proclaimed it the "best burger" ever! I guess so, being "sauteed in butter" as it was!

With butter for these burgers, Hamburger Helper was definitely not needed. It all came together in the end each night, facing a dinner-time crisis at precisely the "witching hour", taking on the challenge and meeting it head on. I felt I was channelling some positive, working-mum meal-time heroes - superheroes, they are - from all around me this week. And that felt like pretty good company too.

It turns out I can throw myself headlong into extreme volunteering and still get a reasonably priced, appetizing dinner on the table even if I only have hamburger on hand to help me out.

I think I'll plan to do this spontaneously much more often.

Ann Farnham is a mother of two, community volunteer and personal organizer who throws herself into her work - paid and unpaid. Follow her at Ann of Ann Arbor.