if the goal is a cleaner home, leaving shoes outside goes a LONG way to not tracking dirt inside.

I have inside shoes and outside shoes.

I have inside shoes and outside shoes.

Me too. Right now I'm wearing a pair of brown boiled-wool slippers with magenta and cream embroidery and beading, and very insubstantial soles. They are so comfy!

Funny that I like beading and embellishments on my shoes, but not on my clothing.

(Loves Liese to pieces).

I follow the adage of an (very) old Kevin Costner movie (from back when I liked him, Hec), American Flyers. "When you get it up, keep it up."

As long as I police clutter on a daily basis, things stay manageable. It's when I let it slide a day or two and turn around and the dining room table or the breakfast bar is a mountain of junk mail, electrical parts, nail polish and random unclassified flotsam.

I had to reheat my dinner the other night because cleaning up the pots, the stove, the counters, backsplash and sink after cooking took longer than expected. We usually do cleanup before we sit to eat--then it's ridiculous not to wash two plates, cups, forks, wipe down the table and sweep underneath it. Wash as you go (we have no dishwasher) is a simple rule, but it doesn't allow accumulation which attracts more of the same. It takes some dedication to get used to it, but once the practice is in place, it's self-perpetuating with little effort.

I can barely keep my shoes on at work, never at home.

We've adopted shoes off at the door since moving to PNW, and it does keep the floors cleaner.

The above post was by way of saying, my sink is always shiny. And I like it that way. StY used to come in late, have a bowl of cereal and leave the bowl and spoon soaking in the sink. Waking up to that single blot on my spotless sink soured my whole morning. Disproportionately so. Of course, I could be a little OCD about some things.

Right backatcha, Bev.

Yeah, the SO cooks that way, and it drives him crazy that I don't. I enter the kitchen, there is a huge cloud of ingredients and pots, and food emerges. It's not fair to the whole "he who cooks need not clean" policy, though, because cleaning up for him is super easy and for me, super hard. So I'll have to learn. But it is helping to try to get the sink cleared out at night.

I have inside zori and outside zori. I'm calling them shoes. It's going to have to do.

So I'm more or less on Day 6, (I skipped the post-its. I hate post-its on the mirror.) so it's hotspot day. But I have several. I guess I'm going to call dining room table? Because that's the most heinous, and also the closest to being workable right now, and then I'll have kitchen/dining room done as contiguous spaces.

When I first built the house, I started what I called defensible space. That was the master bedroom and bath, and then I worked outward. But the idea was that I would always try to get that clear so that I had a nice place to sleep and wake up. It worked for a while, and then my laundry sorter broke and I stuck that under the bed and the laundry everywhere and that was my excuse to stop being tidy in there.

Anyway. Okay, dining room table hotspot. I'll go do that right now. Only, where is the right place to put the undealt-with mail? I don't know. This is the problem.

But it is helping to try to get the sink cleared out at night.

It is so NICE to wake up to an empty sink! (Well, since Tim stays up for hours after me, it's usually an empty sink except for one spoon that he used to eat ice cream out of the carton with.)

I need to create a cleaning/maintenance schedule, and I keep thinking I should look into the FlyLady zones, but her site is so twee. And purple!

Anyone want to do my laundry for me tonight? I've been putting off that chore since last week, but I have nothing left to wear for tomorrow, so I must wash. Feh.

I've just been having a nostalgia tour of my college band's website. Shakesville just posted a YouTube link to the Oak Ridge Boys singing "Elvira," which was a big song for us to play in pep band, so I wanted to see what they're doing now, twenty years later. Turns out, they still play at Al's Run (a charity race in downtown Milwaukee) and rehearse at the same time we did back in the day, but they're much more structured in terms of organization. Also, it looks like they don't get as much cash back at the end of the semester as we did (we didn't get any class credit, since Marquette doesn't have a music program, but they would give us a small stipend depending on our attendance throughout the year, and our length of time in the band--my freshman year, I got about $50 in May, but by senior year, it was $250, which was nice).

I find that constant cleaning doesn't work so well, so I use the horror of what an upcoming visitor will think of my apartment to motivate me into big cleaning sprees.

Only, where is the right place to put the undealt-with mail? I don't know. This is the problem.

This is a problem for me as well! I realize the answer is not to have undealt-with mail, but still.

I can't be barefoot anymore (or for the time being? It hurts my feet), and I'm not going to have indoor shoes beyond flip-flops, so. On a side note, I'm not sure why flip-flops make my feet hurt less than being barefoot, bit they do.