This is my seriously scary (though less so now, thank you chorewars…) kitchen of doom.

It’s open to both the living and dining room, and as such, the clutter from the living room (also known as “the husband’s work crap”) spills over into it via the channel under the cupboards.  Not to mention the fact that we have to keep everything on the counters rather than under them, in those bottom cupboards/drawers, because there is a serious Mouse Problem in there.  As in, anything we put in there becomes an immediate Mouse House, replete with ripped up bits of insulation and lots and lots of the nastiest poo pellets you can imagine.

I wish I was exaggerating.  I’m not.  We’ve tried glue traps and poisons and everything short of locking a live cat in them.  Doesn’t phase them.  They are the UBERMICE, genetically engineered with the intelligence of Einstein and the flexibility of Rubber Man.  They are sneakier than …uh…something really sneaky.  And OH MY GOD THEY POOP A LOT.  One would think they would die just from overpooping, but nooooo.

We are powerless.  We gave up our cupboards after the first set of 24 (!!!) glue traps came back with one to two mice apiece in them, and STILL we have mice.  One day, they will carry off one of the dogs to be their servant.  When we complain about this little mouse issue to our landlords (aka “the inlaws”), they tell us it’s because we live in the country and there’s nothing they (or we) can do about it.

Gee.  Thanks.

I clean things with bleach.  A lot.  For a reason.  *shudder*

All mice aside, though:  there are some other things to be done. That piece of fabric hanging there on the wall next to the windows is a test to see how the fabric looks in various light.  Under it is an open cabinet where we keep the kitchen towels and the mugs, since it’s mouse-free up there.  I’ve picked one of the two to make a curtain to hide the clutter, and the other fabric will be the curtains for the window.  Right now, there’s just a little swag thing, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but doesn’t look so hot.  (The whole lower floor gets very little light, so I was reluctant to cover the window too much.)

I’d like to also do something with the cabinets.  Paint them, restain them, something.  They’re that sexy 1970’s dark wood that sucks up the light and doesn’t even remotely match the countertops, which are blondewood-toned melamine or whatever that stuff is that artificial countertops are made of.  They’re also dirty as hell from sitting unwashed for a zillion years before we moved in.

We need a backsplash behind the sink.  One of the window trim pieces fell off the window god only knows when, and has been long gone since before we moved in, so I’m thinking about putting steel of some sort behind there, all the way up to the window.  Easy to clean, and relatively practical for the times when I’m working with dye and splash it on the wall.  There are blue spots in my yellow paint there now.  Go figure.

The cabinets on the right are starting to sag, too, so we need some kind of brace support on the nearest-to-the-camera side.  You can’t see it well in this picture, but they’re pulling away from the ceiling a little, which is kind of scary.

And the big thing I want to do is get a hanging pot holder dealie for the ceiling.  Hang a light or two from it (the one light over the sink doesn’t work, which is why the torchiere is in our kitchen), and get all the pots and pans out of the cabinets, freeing up space for some of the clutterybits that reside on the countertops.  I think it’ll work — we’ve got 12′ ceilings in the whole first floor of the house.

Oh, and the floor.  OMG, the floor.  If we were staying here for longer than just a few years, I’d soooo get a new floor.  That cracked lineoleum that’s flaking all over the place?  Nasty.  Nasty to the point of being repulsive.  I try not to think about it too much.  Maybe I’ll get a big 5′ x 8′ rug at some point, maybe sisal or something, to cover the majority of it up.  The edges are all caked with waxed-on dirt, since the mother-in-law person used to use wax cleaners on the thing, virtually ensuring that the resultant mud would be cemented on for all eternity.  (No, seriously.  20 year old wax is like hardened glue — there is not a cleaner/wax remover/stripper/anything that will take off the muddy wax buildup.  It is now a feature of the house, and may be the only thing holding the kitchen together.  I have a secret fear that, if I was to find the magical floor-cleaner that would turn back time and remove it, the whole house would collapse like a house of cards.  And it’s probably not all that unfounded.)

That said, I’m still decluttering like a MAD FIEND.  Got rid of another four garbage bags’ worth of stuff since the Big Closet Clear-Out of 2008, in fact.  Almost 400 items out the door, ranging from old button packages to paper files that are out of date and/or unnecessary, to lamps that don’t work….and everything inbetween.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the Quakers, or the Religious Society of Friends.  While I don’t consider myself all that much of a Religious Sort(tm), the basic tenets of caring for the earth, caring for each other, and living simply really, really appeal to me.  I used to think I wanted a big house with lots of space, and now that we have one, it’s really kind of a pain in the ass.  There’s always something that needs doing, and having lots of space means needing a lot of stuff to fill it up, and while the acquiring of Varied And Sundry Crap isn’t all that hard for me to do, I don’t think it’s healthy having all this stuff around me all the time.

I know, I know.  Be grateful for the abundance.  And I am.  But there’s abundance and then there’s excess, and the two are profoundly different things.  We’ve been to the Excess point for a long time now, and when I started de-acquiring things to the dumpster or to friends, or selling off the excess in various venues, I’m noticing I have more energy.  A *lot* more energy, even.  It’s like I can start to breathe again, which I think I’ve said before, but it’s true — when there’s Too Much, the walls close in and I don’t know what to do next. It’s the paradox of choice — Choice is good; too many choices are confusing and disheartening.

Just in the past six months, I’ve gone through and gotten rid of just about 75% of most of my major clutterpoints:  yarn and craft supplies, clothing, kitchen junk, books.  People look at me like I might actually be insane when I tell them I sold off 75% of my yarn, and like I have lobsters sprouting from my ears when I tell them that more than half my books are gone now.

But seriously here — with the money that I got from selling off my yarn, I bought upgrades for my Other business.  Stuff we really needed, that made our lives easier and our work more enjoyable.  With the space in my kitchen created from ditching all the old stuff, I’ve been able to get a bunch of stuff off the counters that we DO use, which equates to more space to actually COOK in there, which equals a Happier Husband and a healthier way of life for us both.  (McDonald’s is evil.  Cooking at home means I know exactly what’s in that food we’re eating.)  And now, with the books (which is where I lose a lot of people who can’t imagine every decluttering their libraries) being sold as used on Amazon…I’m using that credit (which is considerable, let me tell you.) to buy things for the house, as well as buying books that I’m actually going to read.  (And once they’re read, they’ll go back up on Amazon as used, trust me.)  I’m actually finally getting a new comforter for the bed, a coffeemaker that doesn’t leak water all over my counters, and some baking stuff I’ve needed for a long time, AND that loaf pan I was obsessing over a few months ago — for essentially *free*.

AND I get the FREE SPACE.

It really IS kind of awesome, even if the whole decluttering thing gives some people fits.

My things ARE NOT ME. I’ve known that, intellectually, for quite some time now.  But knowing it in your head and knowing it in your heart — that’s two different animals.  The crap I surround myself with is supposed to reflect me, us, our lives together…or it’s supposed to be functional, allowing us to live our lives.  It’s not a substitute for life, or a replacement for having a life.  It’s not part of me — if it was ALL gone, I would still be me (and me with a clean slate, no less).

Realizing that fact has made it about a zillion times easier to shovel out from under the protective blanket of Crap that’s made its way into my life.  And once it’s gone, I think I might actually be even more willing to make a LIFE rather than a STOCKPILE.

Subject change:

Remember the scary picture of the tub a few days ago?  The one where the tin man crawled into my bathroom to rot and rust?

I got out the heavy-duty chemicals yesterday, and dumped a bunch of it in the tub.  I haven’t done the walls yet, but I rubbed a little bit of it on them so you could see the difference, for contrast.  (I’m doing those today.  It’s a multi-day job, since those chemicals can burn off your eyebrows if you’re exposed for too long.)

There really *is* porcelain-colored plastic under all that rust.

Who knew?

It’ll take today’s wall wipedown and tomorrow’s once-more-with-feeling on the tub itself with the Evil Chemicals Of Doom, but then I’ll have my tub back, thankfully.

Note to self:  broken or not, it needs a once-over at LEAST once a week, probably more often.

Does anyone know if waxing the walls will help prevent the iron from sticking?  I heard that somewhere — that a thin layer of TurtleWax would keep them from turning into Orange Iron Central, but I’m reluctant to try it if it means I have to then wash wax off the walls, too.

Back to the declutterybits.

Yes, I know it’s been awhile since I managed to update.  Christmas totally whipped my butt there for a while.  And not because I was doing a whole lot of Christmasy Fun Stuff, either.

No, it’s because I foolishly thought that it would be a fun idea to handmake all my holiday gifts this year.

*facepalm*

Y’know how there’s that saying, “It seemed like a good idea at the time…”?  Um, yeah.  When you’re a knitter, primarily, let me just say this:  That time had BETTER be sometime in JULY.  Because if it’s after that?  You’ll either a) not make it, or b) give yourself lobster claws where your hands used to be from the insane amount of stitches that fly off your needles for the four weeks preceding Christmas.  Seriously.  Ow.  My wrists still hate me just a little bit.

But I’m not here to bitch.  Really, I’m not.  It was a fabulous holiday, and all the gifts (other than the husband’s, which he knows about and knows it’ll be probably February before he receives it/them…it’s a big honkin’ project that he’s going to love, though…) were done by Christmas Eve.  I really can’t complain.  Everyone loved everything, so all’s well in Wifetown.

So I’m getting back to this Alphabet meme, with B is for Baking…

I am a fabulous cook.  No, really.  That’s not ego talking, that’s just a fact.  I can rock me a pan on the stovetop and find dinner in a bare cupboard full of shoe leather and old barbie heads, as long as I have spices.

But baking…?  Not so much.  Part of it, I think, is that our oven here is inconsistent at best (it’s propane, not real gas).  The other part is that I *suck*.

I can take foolproof baking recipes and be fooled.  Seriously.  Things from a BOX die at my hands, much less anything mixed up by me.  Remind me to tell y’all sometime about the time I tried to make blackberry cobbler without flour.  You may die of the giggles.

That said, I’m finding that practice, while not making perfect, is making passable.   I have a few recipes that I don’t screw up 90% of the time, so I make them over and over.  I’m working on expanding my repertoire a bit this year, but still?  Those same six recipes are pretty much the only ones I don’t hose up on a regular basis.

I figure I’ll keep trying as long as J keeps eating my mistakes.

And for getting this far and still being here, despite whining and long blogpauses, this is the best. soup. ever.   I thought I was going to have to extract the crock pot from my husband’s head, he was so into it.  (And I really wish I was kidding about that last part, too.)

Cheesy Potato Soup

serves about a billion (or 6 with good appetites)

16 oz. sour cream
2 pounds of potatoes, peeled and diced
3 cups of cheddar cheese
2 green onions
2 cans of cream of chicken condensed soup
1 can of cream of mushroom condensed soup
1/2 lb. cooked ham, diced
3Tbsp chives, chopped.  (Or 1Tbsp dried chives)

Cover the potatoes with water in a saucepan and cook them until tender.  Meanwhile, throw everything else together in the crock-pot and stir it well.  When the potatoes are done cooking, pour the potatoes AND the cooking water into the crock pot.

Cook on high for four hours or low for six.

Serve with fresh-ground pepper on top.  It won’t last long.

Happy New Year everyone!

Okay, this just royally pissed me off.

I’m a big fan of blogs, and of the ideas they give me. I don’t expect, ever, to be one of those types of women who can bake a pie with one hand while planting tulip bulbs with the other. I would LIKE to be, because I love this kind of thing, but realistically? I know that I’m far too focused on other things to be some kind of domestic goddess.

My choices come from me. My idea of what I’d like my life to be like. How I’d like to create that life for myself and my husband and our eventual family. And there are women for whom my idea of a perfect life would be a perfect hell, and vice versa. Such is the joy of feminism and our sisters and mothers who worked so hard to GIVE us those choices. The choice of what we would like to do, versus being forced into a role we’re not comfortable with.

It just irks me to no end that there are still hardline women out there pretending to be feminists who are merely spreading hate and fear that they’ll be shoved into a role they’re not comfortable with. You like your career? You like being single and buying your jelly at the market? Go for it. Have at it. Make yourself happy.

But do NOT tell me that I’m stupid or silly or somehow damaging women by my love of making a pretty cupcake, or sewing my own curtains, or even how meditative I find vacuuming when the vacuum’s working right. My life = my choices, and if Jane’s book sets unrealistic standards for you, don’t read it. That simple.

Leave me to my domesticity and my own expectations of myself. I’m realistic, but I strive for improvement. And what could be more “feminist” than that?

I have a feeling that this entry might get a little long.  They do that when I’ve been up for a day, caring for a stray dog that found its way to our house.  (Strays tend to find me.  I’m okay with that, especially when they come in the cutest little puppy-package ever, and despite the fact that we have three already and I only have two hands.)

Yesterday…er…well, the day before, technically….when I was in the bookstore looking for books on the whole Wifely thing, my first thought was to hit the self-help section.

So I did.  And while I found several shelves of books on relationships, ranging in topic from how to marry the perfect man and how to change the perfect man you married, all the way to how to dump a man and be okay about that — I really didn’t find much on how to be a wife.  What to do, how to act, what all goes into it.  That kind of thing.

The religion section, shelved in the next aisle, was a little different.  By way of comparison, there were twenty-seven books on how to be a devoted wife.  (And, I might add, precisely ZERO on how to be a good husband.  Clearly, the Christian publishing industry thinks that either men don’t read or that it’s the women that need all the help.)

I eventually scrapped the idea of finding written inspiration and retired myself to the cooking section instead, but I did spend some time looking at a few of the books, which seemed to me to be diametrically opposed to one another.

The self-help books were all about what you could do, as a wife, to make your husband behave better.  The blame was squarely on the shoulders of the men in the relationships — they didn’t clean up after themselves, or they didn’t attend to your needs, or one of a host of sins that they were making.  The “inspirational” section’s books took a different tack, of course.  Most of them were about the biblical idea of marriage, and what it entails in order to be pleasing to the God they were talking about.  Much of the book I looked through had to do with the idea of submission, and what the wife’s responsibilites are, and about how the husband is always right unless he’s asking the wife to do something that would be a Sin, capital-S.

Between these two very different volumes, I had the thought that marriage in this day and age is a confusing thing.  It’s almost like there are two different ideas of what marriage even is.   The secular crowd has the whole idea of partnership of equals, each pursuing his or her own goals and ambitions separately and partnering on the decision-making.  The religious marriage is one of heirarchy and responsibility to one another — the woman, agreeing to marry a man, is taking a job, of sorts.  And it’s a job where she will always have a “boss” in her husband.

It also occurred to me that the divorce rate in this country is insanely high.  They’re saying (the ubiquitous They Who Know Statistics, I mean) that it’s somewhere around 60% of couples married today won’t still be married when they leave this earth.  That’s a little scary, and putting the two-and-two together made me a little angry.

Partnerships are hard to maintain.  Equal partnerships even moreso.  Look at businesses that are partnerships if you need an example of that — sooner or later, one of ‘em is going to either leave or be profoundly disgruntled at the other’s show of power, since they were supposed to be equal.  Without a Final Say Person, decisions are either made by consensus or not made at all. After all, there are only two choices and no deciding votes.

So why are we encouraging married couples to put themselves in a position where there’s no deciding vote, without a religious framework to say who’s in charge?  Which led me around to the fact that there are entire legions of people who think that marriage is outdated as a concept anyway, and for secular people, not really relevant anyway.  The word “husband” has that whole animal-husbandry connotation, and most modern women wouldn’t want to feel “kept” or “shepherded” anyway, because we’re taught that we’re equals in everything.

So who’s wrong?  The people who say that women should be equals in a marriage or the people who claim that wives should be submissive and subservient in all things to her husband of choice?  (Not subservient as a person, but within the context of the marriage itself.)

I’d intended to vent here a bit about the idea of submission being distasteful — and franky, a little scary — to me personally, but the philosophy behind it is fascinating to me.  It all comes down to what kind of a wife I want to be and what kind of a life I want to live, really, in the end.

I’m still not sure what’s right, though.

I’m one of those people for whom a book can be made or broken by its first paragraph.  I’ll stand in the bookstore and read the first page of books I’m considering, and if it bores me, or at least doesn’t intrigue me at all, I put it back on the shelf and walk away, looking for something else to read.

So maybe this first post has a bit more significance to me.  I’m hoping to come up with just the right paragraph that will set the stage, tell my story, serve to introduce myself and this project.

It’s a lot of pressure.  I think I need more coffee.

In a lot of ways, I’m a first-time housewife.  We’ve been married for two years now, my husband and I, but for a lot of that time, I’ve been fighting against the internalized belief that I had to do something.  Make money.  Be productive and responsible in the world at large.  Have a career my husband would be proud of.  Somehow, I thought that taking care of him, the dogs, and the house, and preparing for and working toward having children wasn’t as good as if I’d been out in the world, bringing home a paycheck.

The other day, though, I sat down and looked around at my life.  I’m relatively successful, I work at home, and my body is falling apart.  We won’t even talk about the state of our house.  (Let’s just say that the dust bunnies?  Spawned.  They’re now dirt elephants and they keep trying to carry off the dogs.)  The whole point of my rearranging of my work so I could do it from home is lost when I’m working from home for eighty hours a week or more, and there are two weeks’ worth of dishes in the sink.

I have strengths and weaknesses, and goals I want to achieve with this project.  I’ll list them over there in the sidebar, under the “About the Project” page.  (Understand, this project and site are primarily for me to keep track and record my own process.  It might also apply to you, but I’m not trying to make this universal.  Feel free to use the information as applies, or not.  Either way.)

Through this blog, this Project, I really want to learn things.  Improve things.  Stop being ashamed to tell people that I’m a housewife or homemaker, or feel like I have to gloss that part over when people ask me what I do.  I want to focus on what’s important, my (hopefully soon) growing family and our lives.  I want to make my husband’s life easier the way he wants to do the same for me.

And I’m inviting you along for my wild ride.

Enjoy the roller-coaster.  I know I’m going to.