Swiss Steak is on the menu tonight. I was looking through all my cookbooks last night, trawling for inspiration, and I happened across a nifty version of it in the Fix It and Forget It Lightly book. Even better, I had everything on hand to make it. I was able to throw it in there quickly, with a minimum of fuss, and now there's nothing more to deal with.

This is good because I have to clean again today. It feels like all I do is tread water in that department. Everything I do today I'll be doing again tomorrow, the next day, the day after that, to infinity. And still it never really feels fully clean. To combat this? I've come to the conclusion that flat surfaces are the bane of our existance.

My family loves flat surfaces. They start out clean, flat, full of promise. Within a few hours they begin to attract clutter. And the clutter breeds. I've got a few civilizations lost under the stuff on the counter beside the stove. Whenever we make an effort to clean up it always feels as though we're conducting an excavation. Carefully go in, liberate unknown artifacts, identify, and then figure out whether all this could have been easily avoided by simply taking a leaf blower to it all and dumping it straight into the trash.

Pack Rats? Not really... yes. We are pack rats. We hate throwing stuff out until we have to; we acknowledge the worthlessness of the stuff. We are powerless over it. We have to nearly throw a revival meeting to get ourselves psyched up enough to get nasty with our own habits. Isn't knowing the problem one step closer to kicking the habit?