Everything's connected. Kinda like a loop.

This is Steven Hauschka.

He does this really, really well.

This is Sarah Hauschka.

She does this really, really well.

Coincidence? I think not. I actually got to ask her one time, and sure enough: The adorable and fantastically talented Mr. Hauschka is the beloved nephew of the adorable and fantastically talented Ms. Hauschka. Is it fair for one family to contain so many gifts? Yes, because they are so great at sharing them with the rest of us.

And best of all? When my face-painting, jersey-wearing, chest-pounding, maniacal Seahawks fan of a husband watches the games, I get to remind him how it's actually all about knitting. I particularly like to speculate aloud about whether Little Stevie (I call him that because he's so cute I just want to stick him in my pocket) has any special handknit football-kicking socks. So tomorrow, on what my Phillip refers to as "The Greatest National Holiday",  I'll be working on knitting 22 more of these (please note team colors):

These are the swatches my Madrona students are going to practice steeking on. That's right: I am knitting 72 swatches so that other people can cut them in half with scissors.

And that, my friends, is what you call Full Contact Sports.

Careful what you wish for

Operation Relentless Dustbin continues! My kitchen, surprising nobody, contains some of the scariest drawers and cabinets in the house. I go back and forth between terror ("No, not the tupperware cabinet, no!") and denial ("It's only revolting if I open the doors...").

By way of self-motivation, I asked myself this question: 

If I could pick the worst cabinet in the whole kitchen, only one, and have someone else do it, which one would it be? Answer: The Undersink. I would seriously love not to tackle that cabinet. Like, ever. I wish someone would, though, because it's totally the worst. Every time I open it, I completely gross out. I can't find anything, it's crammed full of the filthy and the useless, and maybe I'm imagining it, but it kinda smells weird, too.

So with my Big Girl Pants firmly on, I decided to give myself the gift of not hating the Undersink cabinet. I dug around until I found my rubber gloves, which helped a lot, and emptied the whole mess out onto the kitchen floor.

And that's when I found out that the smell was not imaginary. Underneath the groaning heap of cleaning clensers, spent sponges and bent brushes, all hell had broken loose:

Yep. My sink had developed a leak, which the particle-board floor of the cabinet could not withstand. I sopped up a smelly, 3" deep puddle from the now-concave cabinet floor. The particle board was about as structurally sound as a brownie, and far less appealing. I did what any stout-hearted and powerful person would do: I sat on the kitchen floor and cried. And then I called the plumber.

And while I waited for him to arrive, there was nothing to do but start de-junking. I filled an entire laundry basket with empty cleaning containers for recycling. And then I wiped and dried the flood dreck from all of the containers I was keeping.  There is something surreal about cleaning the outside of your Windex bottle with Formula 409. Just saying.

But by the time the plumber came, I was done cleaning, and done (mostly) feeling sorry for myself for living in a house plagued by plumbing emergencies. The adorable Vitaly (from Ukraine, whose wife who wants to learn how to knit!) replaced my failed plastic drain with a shiny new metal one. He asked me to explain the different kinds of knitting needles to him, which I was happy to do. I taught him how some knitting is flat, and some knitting is tubular. And then I completely blew his mind by showing him how knitted tubes intersect just like plumbing pipes. We totally understood each other.

Once the sink was fixed, there was nothing for it but to demolish the soaked cabinet bottom. Which I did easily, with the aid of a butter knife. The subfloor underneath the cabinet (also particle board), is of course, swollen from the water damage, but after a couple of days with a fan blowing on it, I decided it was dry enough to move back into. And other than to quit crying, here is the only clever thing I did:

I hung up all the remaining spray bottles on a tension rod. Not an original idea, mind you, but a pretty good one. And having been reunited with my groovy hot pink rubber gloves, I installed a clothespin to appoint them a permanent place of honor.

Am I glad that I had the guts to face my Undersink cabinet fear before the whole kitchen washed away? Of course. Do I wish I'd never looked in there at all? Damn straight. But I think I can safely say the bar is now set for scary cabinets. I doubt I'll find a more disgusting, expensive, enthusiasm-dampening hellscape anywhere else in my house.

O God, I hope not.

Economy Size

You know what's hard about living in a small house?  Stocking Up.  As the child of two Great Depression survivors, I was raised to believe that one should keep things on hand in quantity, whenever possible.  Cough-HOARD-Cough the important stuff, because you never know what's coming.  But space is at such a premium in my house that I've never felt I was doing a very good job in that arena.

Case in point: Bath Tissue. We run out all the time. Not just on a per-bathroom basis; I'm talking whole-house dearth. It's not uncommon to hear one of us yelling to anyone in range "Which bathroom is the roll in?!?" Pathetic. I blame myself, of course. It's not that I have far to go to get to the store. It's not that I'm unaware of the fact that the four of us run through it at a prodigious rate. It's not even that I mind buying it. I just can't seem to think of it when I'm at the store. So by the time the bath tissue situation reaches the red zone, I find myself in the paper aisle of the store, in an unreasonable hurry to get the goods and get back home.

It's in those soul-crushing moments that I have wished, O have I wished, that I had room to store the biggest collection of bath tissue imaginable. But then I remind myself, there is only space for 6 rolls on the bottom shelf of the bathroom linen closet. So that's what I get, promising myself to remember sooner next time. Maybe I can invent a Bath Tissue Gauge that lights up like the one on my car's dashboard when the gas is getting low. An Idiot Light for the bathroom...or something.

But now that I'm deeply imbedded in a personal war on clutter, something incredible has happened. You may recall that I have challenged myself to empty, de-junk and reorganize one drawer, shelf, or basket every day. In the great military tradition of giving wars motivational names, I've dubbed this endeavor "Operation Relentless Dustbin". And it's going surprisingly well.

The other morning, Phillip watched in genuine amazement as I de-barfed one of our 3 (okay, 8) kitchen junk drawers. "Why do we have three melon ballers?", I asked him. "What's a melon baller?" he answered. I'm not really confident he's clear on the concept of melon, but I kept one and jettisoned the others. The drawer was done before the coffee. My spouse was deeply impressed. Not enough to offer to enlist in my fight, you understand, but hey, baby steps.

So pumped by my husband's encouragement was I that the next day, I tackled the bottom shelf of the bathroom linen closet. Where the bath tissue lives, when we have any. And do you know what I found?

A 24-in square cardboard box, hogging up most of the room on the bath tissue shelf. How had I never noticed this before? What could be in there, that is so precious to us that we have never disturbed its slumber, even at the expense of adequate basic supplies?

Stuff, it turned out, that I remembered packing TWO HOUSES AGO. That box was a time capsule of our bathroom, circa 2005.  Yep. And a lot of it was actual trash. I must have packed it at the end of the move, when all perspective had been lost. So all this time, I've been living in Insufficient Bath Tissue Hell, in order to devote space to a box I did not know was there, full of crap I did not need.

It will surprise none of you that I ended up cleaning all of the shelves in the closet that day. Like Sherman on his march to the sea, I left nothing behind but scorched earth. And then guess what I did? Yep. I went to the store and procured the Mother Lode of bath tissue.

How's Operation Relentless Dustbin going for you? Care to enlist?