Keeping House

I have my share of domestic talents. I can sew, and cook, and make things pretty. But, as you have no doubt observed, fair readership, the gentle art that eludes me entirely is cleaning. I just don't have the knack. I have often stared at a dirty counter and wondered how to make it clean. I mean that I always have had the sense that other people had an easier time, some innate understanding that I lack. My husband mentioned in a loving fashion once or twice that he had also observed this lack in my abilities, and although cleaning isn't absolutely top of my list of things to excel at, I did wish I could get better.

Fairly recently, it occurred to me in full epiphianic glory that I know how to learn things, and that the things I learn do not always have to be in the form of abstractions. I've been in graduate school most of my adult life, and finding myself out of it, I've had some intellectual energy to burn. Why not systematically set about researching and synthesizing knowledge about the parts of my life that had previously befuddled me.

In January I set my full intellectual and creative powers toward learning to clean. I began with Amazon, and sought the perfect cleaning book. I found it in this form:
It's extremely practical, assumes you don't know how to clean a counter effectively, and most importantly, the authors are even more toxophobic than I am. It's green as can be. It's not very pretty though. So I use it in this form:
The first thing I learned was that there are simple techniques that are more effective than others. The second thing I learned is that honest to god, if you do a bit of cleaning each day, your house doesn't get super messy. I decided that I simply could not trust my instinct on this issue (it's failed me for thirty some years on this one) and created a regime. I'm very good at following regimes as long as they're entirely of my own making. Here is my regime:
(Matryoshka image "borrowed" from somewhere or other. I've got a real thing for matryoshkas. So sexy. So stern. So motherly. So sweet.)

Now, May seems to me to be quite a domestic month, and I have decided that here on my blog it will be housekeeping month. I have quite a lot to say on the subject, and promise to keep in craft-related. Things one can make. Concoctions. Pretty implements. The like. And please, offer me advice.

Gratuitous kitty attacking feather duster pic: