I am obsessing.

And what I’m obsessing over isn’t even something all that important, since I have one of these already, just not this brand or type.

Oh, but seriously. I’m obsessing over a Typhoon Vintage loaf pan, after seeing a similar one on a blog I often read. And since I got a set of pink mixing bowls as a wedding gift (of this same brand and color), now I really, really want the loaf pan.

See, one of my goals for this year deals with learning to make bread. By hand. Not in the bread machine, since that’s kind of cheating, but honest-to-goodness, kneaded and loafed-up bread by hand. Because no matter what anyone says or doesn’t say, homemade bread is one of life’s great pleasures. It’s like alchemy of a sort. There’s the flour and the salt and the water and the yeast, and miraculously, through workings of your own fingers, bread emerges.

And ooh, is it ever tasty.

So why not make it myself? Learning how seems to be worth the final result. And I think buying this pan (which isn’t all that expensive, really. About $20 or so.) gives some added form to the function.

I think I just talked myself into it. I’ll beg my husband for valentine’s day, maybe….

Now, onto the weekly meme. We’re up to “E” for Everyday. It asks the question, “What do you do every day?”

I’m a big stickler on beds. I really feel like the beds need to be made. And there’s a practical reason for this, other than just the fact that it makes the bedroom look about seven zillion times better.

See, I have this husband. And this husband has the bizarre tendency to turn himself into a pretzel while he’s unconscious. And since he’s most often unconscious in bed, there are covers to contend with. Which means that by the end of an average night, we end up with a LEGENDARY tangle of covers.

And by “we”, I really mean “him”, because usually, by the end of an average night, he is wrapped in a twisted pretzel burrito of covers, and I have approximately four inches of Sheet Triangle with which to keep warm. Add in the four dogs, most of which are large and wait for us to fall asleep before assaulting us with their furry, sleeping selves, thus binding up even MORE of the covers underneath an 85-pound labrador retriever’s ass — well, you can see where I’m going with this. I either make the bed every morning, or when I get into bed the next night, I will have literal centimeters of a single blanket, and it’s six degrees outside. Six. Which means inside temperatures at this place sometimes hover around 60 degrees farenheit. And that’s too cold to be sleeping without toasty blankets.

By making the bed every day, I’m able to keep the burrito thing to a minimum. They’re still burrito-wrapper covers when I get into bed with my unconscious husband, but usually by the time I collapse, he hasn’t had nearly enough time to be wrapped double in them, and I can grab a corner and yank hard enough to actually get enough of the blanket to stay warm. For a while. All bets are off around four a.m., but by then, I’m out cold.

I swear, if he wasn’t so gorgeous, I’d kick him out of bed entirely.

The other thing I’m endeavoring to do daily, soon, when I get that far down on my list of oals for this project, is to follow Real Simple’s Speed Cleaning Guide for three weeks to see if it works for our family.

Have you seen it? It’s supposedly a miracle-worker. Much like the whole FlyLady thing, but more spread out over the whole house. Though I can see the wisdom in doing both — you can’t really clean clutter, you just have to get rid of it so you have the space to live within. But if you’ve been doing the whole Flylady decluttering bit for a while, I think it might be the simplest 19-minute-cleaning system I’ve ever seen.

Granted, it’s going to take me longer than 19 minutes, to be sure. (There are three bathrooms and four bedrooms in this place, not including the laundry room and the studio, both of which get horrendously dirty from time to time.) But if it keeps me from having a house that kind of looks like a small tornado might have hit it and left dirt in its place? Totally worth it.

I really should take some before-and-after pictures for posterity’s sake. It gets so bad in here — so cluttered and wrong, that I fully expect an episode of Cops to be filmed here sometime soon. Jimmy Hoffa’s probably in one of his parents’ junk closets in this house.

Anyway, that’s my Everyday. Make the beds, do the dishes, try to do some laundry. I’ve added “cook dinner” to that list on every day but Thursdays (evening meetings), and I’d like to add more than that, just as a pre-emptive strike against the Crazy that is our house’s clutter.

We’ll see how it goes.

(edited to add this:)

OMG…I just clicked on the comments at the Real Simple site (where the 19 minute speedclean thing came from), and the comments are making me gag a little.  Like this one:

miss clean
These SIMPLE solutions are for someone with NO children, NO pets, and NO husband. What size home are we cleaning here. A box. It takes my maids (3-5) approx. 6 hours weekly to clean my house which is 4000sq. ft. I pick up daily, work at home, with one 16 year old child, and NO husband. NOT possible. Is this a joke? This is the most insulting thing I have ever seen in print. Who ever wrote this needs to get a different job. 11/27/06

*blinkblink*

The “most insulting thing I’ve ever seen in print”??

How about having three to five maids for six hours a day for a four thousand square foot house, and then BITCHING that someone else’s plan is oh-so-wrong?

I am suddenly reminded how spoiled we are, as modern women, and how screwed up our society is to think that we *need* four thousand square feet of space to house all our crap, requiring three to five maids to service our posessions.

I think my new prayer will be to ask God never to let me have so much stuff that I have to employ five people for six hours a week to maintain it all.  The *only* reason we’re in this house is that it’s company housing, and I didn’t have a choice.

It all makes me just a little sick of heart.