Step By Step By Step

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

How do you eat an elephant?

A bite at a time.

A journey of a thousand miles, yadda, yadda, yadda….

It’s trite, and you heard it a thousand time. But you know what? It’s true.

All of us — particularly those of us with ADD and of a depressive bend — become paralyzed by a task that’s too big and complex for our brains. You’re not alone.

But when you’re facing a vast quantity of yarn, all snarled together, if you keep trying to find the tip. So you cut it at a convenient place, start unraveling, and assume you’re going to mend it later.

When I was young, I often got tasked to clean the kitchen after my mom had cooked for a party of people. This might seem like nothing, except mom cooks by the fantastic mess method, as in when she’s in the middle of cooking she can’t be bothered to make sure the trash lands in the trash can, and used trays or oven pans just get balanced on the first convenient surface. There’s no rhyme or reason for it, and some of it seriously upsets me, like throwing organic refuse in a sink that lacks a disposal. I hate dealing with that, because particularly if it involves cooked anything — like bones from a cooked piece of meat — it’s sticky and slippery and gross.

After many times of doing that, not the sink, but cleaning the whole kitchen, I started to enjoy it, to the point I’d go directly to the kitchen instead of the party, and start cleaning. Okay, part of this was to avoid people, of course. I might be the very slightest bit introverted (she says, tongue in cheek at obvious understatement.) But that isn’t all. There was a method to it. First clear the sink, because I’ll need the sink to clear everything else. Start throwing obvious trash in the trash. Then take the cleared space by the sink and clean it, so you have a place to put clean dishes.

Then start taking one class of dishes. I usually started with glasses because that way the scrubby wouldn’t get greasy and scruffy from pans, and glasses would come out clean. Clean glasses first. Dry them. Put them away. Then wash and dry any breakables. Plates first, then bowls, then serving dishes. At this point you should be able to tackle the pots pans and oven trays, so put them in order, usually cleaner to dirtier and deal with it. People are going to be bringing stuff in while you’re doing this, so clean a portion of table or counter and tell them to stack stuff there. It will be easier, because you won’t be stepping over things by the time you get there.

You do it one category at a time, so you don’t get lost and discouraged. And often, while it seems like nothing is getting done, if you keep doing one little thing at a time, by the time the party is done, you have nothing but a handful of dishes to do, and the floor has been mopped and the entire place looks nice. (A warning for young women looking for marital prospects: this is not the way to get them. If you do this, the guys never meet you. Go to the party. Because otherwise their mothers and grandmothers will love you — such a nice girl, so organized — but the guys will never know you exist.)

That is what I revisit in my mind when I need to figure out what to do about anything. Even the biggest mess can be dealt with one step at a time.

And this applies to just about anything. For years I’ve been daunted from getting to this book I’m now finishing (somewhat hampered by a massive sinus infection recently) because it’s a whole world and it has so much stuff, and decades of accruing details, so how could I deal with it all? Well, one scene at a time. Sometimes a few lines at a time. And it’s getting done, though it’s taken me much too long.

Our national situation? Heaven knows I’d like to fix it all in one sell fweap so to put it. But it’s impossible to do that way without rivers of blood.

It might still come to that mind, but the thing is, it’s going our way, one step at a time.

Yeah, sure, we’re here washing the glasses, and people are dropping more glasses atop the trays, and it could all slide and break any second.

But–

But it’s getting done, one step at a time, restoring things to the way they should be, one step at a time.

I know it’s disheartening and it seems like they’re winning, but they’re not. We’ve already started turning this around.

It’s just going to take time. One step at a time.

I too wish it were faster. It’s going to consume a lot of treasure and time and, well, people’s lives, but it might be the only way to do that. We didn’t get in this situation in a single step. We won’t get out of it except: step by step by step.

Go to it.

107 thoughts on “Step By Step By Step”

      1. There is a term for this. Happens in new group dynamics too before group comes together to start whatever they are suppose to do. Worse in groups, but what happens, happens in a group of one, the individual. I call it “spinning”. Not the correct terminology, but makes visible what happens.

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  2. Clean the dishes, but don’t forget to point and laugh at everyone who is not contributing to a cleaner kitchen. You’ll still be getting stuff done, but it will force you to not be angry about it, and the mockery will do them good.

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  4. This is something that is always hard to explain to people, how I get so flustered when confronted by projects and issues.

    On a good day, I’m on a bicycle. I’ve got a map. I know there’s a clear-cut goal. But I can’t see it from here. I can only see the first turn into the mountains. I don’t know when the sun will set. Are those rain clouds on the horizon? And is that the sound of a tractor-trailer that doesn’t care who else is on the road at the time and all I am is just a really big fly to be squashed.

    On a bad day, I’m lucky if I can see where I’m going. I might have a map. The rain is proper Scottish weather, mostly vertical. And the tractor-trailer is electric, so I can’t hear it from as far away.

    And there’s no goal or clear endpoint.

    On worse days…well, there but for the Grace of God go I.

    It isn’t easy from my end of the world. And I dare anyone to say that it looks like it from their end.

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  5. For the last several weeks (before the fire), we had someone staying at our house who we were told loved to clean. We didn’t realize that he defined “cleaning” as totally rearranging everything that had been neatly put away, washing electronics (just a scale, but still, I was afraid he’d find something else, like our thermometer, or my tablet), washing dishes so that everything was covered in a thick layer of grease, then starting a load of dishes, walking off, and leaving both sides of the sink unusable because they were filled with dirty dishes and dishwater, getting into a locked closet that he was told absolutely not to get into, mixing our stuff with his stuff, and with the stuff in the closet that belonged to someone else altogether, etc. Drove me crazy. I’m not the world’s best housekeeper, but still . . .

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    1. There are a few people you just have to thank for their initial effort, then vehemently encourage them to go back to the party. (Some years ago, a supervisor finally threatened to apply a one-inch wrench to someone if that someone tried to assist with a project ever again. He generated a personal chaos field. This is a Bad Thing around aircraft.)

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    2. One should be picky about who lives in your home. Quite reasonable and proper to have rules and standards, enforced. If an adult cannot/willnot comply, it speaks to a lack of fundamental respect. Requiring an exit plan is reasonable, even for a fully cooperative temporary resident. (Launch plan)

      Most of my “bad luck” with roommates was poor choices on my part. Not requiring compliance to rules, not setting hard limits, etc. Also “don’t bring your outside drama into my home”. (Oy veh!)

      If -you- do not respect yourself, -they- certainly will not.

      Much as it was unpleasant, you have a reset-point. Habits are more easily changed in a crisis. Make good use of it.

      I was once advised “Keep doing what you are doing, keep getting what you are getting.” Too true.

      Or the humerous version by Beavis: “This sucks! Change it!”

      .

      Change it.

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  7. It’s been an interesting week. On the one hand, there’s the repression in the UK, a country that we expect better of

    On the other… there’s a reason why people are now cracking jokes about German tanks in Kursk (though none have actually reached it yet, afaik). And there are a number of bloggers explaining why this is even more disastrous for Russia than I had initially realized.

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    1. Russia is -F(HONK!)ed. Unless they can persuade the West to persuade the Ukies to quit, Russia is going to bleed out on the bayonets of the Ukraine Tar Baby.

      At the rate they are throwing away breeder males, and the rate their females birth, there may not be much of a Russia in 20 years.

      I am shocked at just how bad things have gone for Russia. It should have been over in a week. A month max. Two and a half years later, they still haven’t done it.

      Once they blew it, calling it “punitive expedition” and withdrawing to the start point would have preserved their surviving forces, and most of their rep.

      Instead, they lost a big chunk of the Russian -navy- to a country with little more than revenue cutters and a frigate or three. And balls, big brass ones. And brains, sneaky, sneaky, clever brains.

      And now the “nearly beaten” Ukies are running amok in Russia, for a bit of turnabout.

      Boned, stinking.

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      2. One frigate, Hetman Sahaidachny, ex Soviet Krivak III class, under repairs and scuttled at the pier in Mikolaiv on invasion day 1 when the Russians were rolling into Kherson.

        The biggest they reportedly have left is a minelayer, the 2,096 ton displacement ex-Soviet Bereza-class Balta, with the largest actual combatant craft remaining above the surface being the 257-ton displacement Pryluky, an ex-Soviet Malka-class hydrofoil missile boat now apparently sans missiles.

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      3. Some interesting items are coming up in things I’ve read. Some have noted that the Ukrainian now have access to all of the sensors on the Russian rail network, and the only way to remove that capability is by physically removing all of them. So the Ukrainian can now track Russian rail movement in the region (Russia already has this capability against Ukraine).

        I’ve also read that the gas pipeline to Europe runs through that region, and the Ukrainian can now shut it off without damaging it.

        I’ve seen it noted that the current salient gives Ukrainian drones a route past the front line air defenses. And as the Wagner insurrection demonstrated, there isn’t much in the way of defenses in the Russian interior at the moment.

        And finally, it seems pretty clear that Russia has stripped the border defenses from the national border (i.e. areas where there is no fighting) in order to send more men and material to the areas of effort. They did this secure in the knowledge that Ukraine wouldn’t dare to launch a counter-invasion. This is a notice to the Russians that they can no longer afford to do that, and it will hurt their overall war effort.

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        1. And finally, it seems pretty clear that Russia has stripped the border defenses from the national border

          Oh it’s way *WAY* worse than that. Last year they sent the Moscow regime protection force to the front. Anyone who tells you that Russia has tons of reserves they can draw on is at *least* a year behind on their knowledge of the war.

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          1. I would have thought that they’d pulled those reserves back to Moscow after Wagner’s little whatever the heck that was. That should have been a wake-up call…

            On the other hand, barring the complete collapse of the Russian forces, making a serious play for Moscow is out of the question right now. The distance is just too far. And even if the troops in front of the Ukrainians suddenly vanished into thin air, there aren’t enough Ukrainian troops to properly guard the flanks of such a move.

            It does suddenly start making me wonder if any of the outlying Russian provinces are feeling restless, though.

            Much of the argument over “unlimited” Russian reserves comes down to the sheer population size. But that only gets involved when the conscripts do. And conscripts are legally only allowed to fight in defensive wars, something that Putin has seemed inclined to follow so far. Up until now, only the volunteers have been sent to fight against Ukraine. That might change now that Ukraine has crossed into Russia. But there were some conscript units not far from the border when Ukraine invaded, and the commanders of those units did not allow their troops to withdraw. The results – in those cases in which the troops didn’t immediately surrender – were reportedly complete disasters for the Russians, with the Ukrainians apparently coming away with the impression that the hapless conscripts had received no training whatsoever.

            I’m not surprised, mind you. Training is expensive. And since the “Ukrainian Operation” is not a defensive war by any stretch of the imagination, it never occurred to anyone in the Russian government that the troops might see combat. Ergo, skip the training, and send the resources saved from that to support the active front. Assuming that the commanding general didn’t pocket the training funds, which is also a possibility.

            The complication now for Ukraine is that Putin might decide to declare that Ukrainian troops crossing the border now means that the war is a defensive one, and the conscripts can be ordered to fight. But if they’re all as poorly trained as the ones in the Kursk Oblask were, then they’re not going to do much more than catch bullets. And such a move will likely be very unpopular with the general population.

            Reports are that currently, Putin has declared the counter-invasion a “terrorist action”, and has handed control of the new front over to the FSB. Hoo boy… Letting the secret police run your military operations is rarely a good idea, historically.

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              1. I have known online trolls to go about “don’t poke the bear” and literally not recognize (or feign not to) when someone points out that they are applying a double standard of Russia can’t help responding to things but other countries can.

                And really not like it when someone points out that if Russia is mentally incompetent, it’s the duty of the other, competent countries to conquer it.

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                2. Which reminds me…

                  The Russian government has apparently been loudly complaining that other countries in the international community aren’t coming out against the illegal Ukrainian incursion into Russia.

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                    1. You mean like the school bully crying when their victim actually fight back?

                      No! Really? Tell me Russia isn’t just like a school yard bully?

                      Unfortunately, I am actually surprised that no idiot hasn’t come out and screamed about Ukraine. Just like they have to Israel and Hamas, and the no violence tolerance regarding victims and bullies in schools and anywhere here in the states.

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            2. There are also reports the Russian troops are looting Russian homes. They seem to be taking videos of themselves doing this…and pitching the regular Army got there first.

              This is not how you win friends and influence people . At least, not in your favor.

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              1. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian troops in the newly occupied territory are patronizing the local businesses (the ones that are still open), and posting restaurant reviews on Google.

                “Good food

                Good service

                Parking lot is a bit small. I had trouble fitting my tank.”

                🤣🤣

                That wasn’t the only review like that.

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                1. Oh, that is -brilliant-! That is also the sign of well-disciplined troops, to be courteous to the locals. Well, as courteous as practical when invading their homeland.

                  And if the -Russians- are looting their own homeland, that suggests either 1) a near total breakdown of discipline, 2) the troops see the locals as “dirt”, 3) both.

                  Kinda hard to successfully paint as fascist monsters the folks posting nice reviews on Google while the home team runs amok.

                  This is epic disaster, a slow-motion train wreck for Russia. Even by the Russian “doomed to suffer” tradition, this is winding up a bite-the-pillow engagement.

                  As the bear said in that old joke, as he yet again ravishes the hapless vengeance-seeking hunter: “C’mon. Admit it. You are not here for the hunting.”

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        2. Since Putin is still clinging to various bits of internal legal cover, he legally cannot send conscripts swept up in the annual Soviet-pattern “universal” conscription outside of Russia. They put strong pressure on conscripts to “volunteer” and sign a contract so they can be sent into the Ukrainian areas, and again “legally” (with scare quotes) the “annexations” allow conscripts to be sent there anyway, but the bottom line is the borders are all conscripts doing their required service, so they can use the more battle-experienced troops at the active fronts.

          The other part of this is Russian Federation conscription is indeed more universal than the recruitment for contract recruitment and prisoner formations, which get a lot more troops from the distant provinces and fewer from Moscow (though many escape there due to connections) and St. Petersburg and suchlike “real Russia” areas. Keeping conscripts out of the meat-wave fighting reduces the chance of people local to the Kremlin or other power and money centers being upset due to their having family killed, wounded or captured, and thus reduces the chance of local unrest and expressed dissent for the government elite.

          That’s why the mass surrenders are predictable and important: Those kids are mostly conscripts, which is why they decided to give up, and more of them likely have relatives in “real Russia” near the levers of power, so their exchange will be more of a priority for Putin’s government.

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      5. I don’t know if any of you have come across this song… It’s from 2015, and was written by a Ukrainian band that was *very* unhappy about Russia’s invasion of Crimea. Russia badly underestimated Ukraine’s will to fight.

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    2. As Andrew Breitbart said “Politics is downstream from culture.” The modern nation of Ukraine started with the ideas of artists and poets in the middle of the 19th century. Taras Shevchenko is something of a national hero. The Ukrainians see themselves as the true heirs of Kyiv-an Rus, with a much stronger claim than those upstarts from Muscovy who took so long to escape the domination of the mongols. The Russians want to pretend that Ukrainians are natural subjects of Moscow, but no Ukrainian believes that anymore.

      From another point of view Ukraine represents the part of Russia which has in recent centuries favored engagement with the west rather than the isolationism of the Muscovite empire. Wars are messy things. There is no way to tell how this one will come out, but it seems very unlikely that Moscow will ever again have a loyal Ukraine to exploit. Western leaders should bear in mind, however, that Ukraine will not be easy for them to dominate and exploit either.

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      1. The effort by the Russians to help/aid/liberate/protect/whatever Russian-speaking Ukrainians has effectively demolished much of the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, while at most damaging somewhat certain parts of the the Ukrainian-speaking regions. Ask any real estate agent: Conducting years of trench warfare tends to reduce property values in an area.

        Yeah, about that helping…

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        1. The Russian claim to protect local ethnic Russians was never anything more than a very thin fig leaf for raw conquest. I am no longer in contact with any of the Ukrainians I knew, but I am haunted by the knowledge that they have certainly been sucked into this war. Some may well have been killed early on as they mostly lived in Hostomel, Bucha, and Irpin where the initial attempt to take Kyiv was focused and where many executed civilians were left in the streets when the Russians withdrew.

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            1. Correcf. First Austria, then the Sudetenland (followeded by the rest of Czechoslovakia not long after). And finally against Poland.

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              1. And they made films in which the German minority was persecuted in Poland, ripping off their own behavior against Jews in Germany.

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            2. The “You know he won’t stop there, right?” Is my main issue with the “cut off aid to the Ukrainians”singing the tune from the Moscow sheet music. History shows in NEVER cases that the guy stops.

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              1. The response I typically saw from certain individuals basically amounted to, “After Ukraine, he won’t be able to afford to go any further. Besides, they’re all super poor, corrupt countries that we don’t have any real national interest in defending, and thus aren’t worth our blood or treasure. And why did we let the Baltic States into NATO?”

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                1. Arguably his second. IIRC, the Chechnya mess was started by Yeltsin, and (unlike Ukraine and Georgia) didn’t get “released” when the USSR collapsed. When it announced it was breaking away, imo the Russians were perfectly within their rights to say, “No, you’re not.” The Russian people have given Putin credit for *ending* it.

                  So iirc Georgia would be the first.

                  You can say that this is his second land grab in Ukraine, and thus his third attempt. But I see the current war as the same long, extended campaign that he’s conducted against Ukraine ever since Yanukovich (sp?) was chased out by the Orange Revolution.

                  I’ll add that at that time, I was content to let him have Crimea. If he’d kept the status quo after that, I wouldn’t have cared, no matter how much the Ukrainians might complain (though at the time they were largely focused on the “separatists” in the autonomous regions – i.e. the guys that shot down the Malaysian airliner with a Russian SAM emplacement). But he invaded Ukraine proper. And despite what many say about Western provocations, and why Putin “had” to do it, he shouldn’t have done that imo.

                  I do worry about the state that both countries will be in when this war ends. Ukraine has undoubtedly lost large numbers of its men over the course of the war. And while Russia isn’t a particularly nice country, it’s kept a large number of Islamic-majority countries under control (and has occasionally paid a severe price for doing so).

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          2. Absolutely yes, it’s a lie. Always was. Just like in Georgia, the country not the state.

            Putin wanted to secure the more easily blockable mountainous borders that the USSR had held (see Zeihan), position Russian armies to more directly threaten NATOs eastern block, and secure the slightly better Ukrainian demographics to bolster falling native Russian birth rates, all with three fast days of driving down the roads to Kyiv.

            Yep, nope.

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            1. Ah, right . The Ukraine-Romania border is basically a mountain range with a very small number of passes. Advancing Russian-controlled territory up to that point makes it much easier to block out someone coming in from south-eastern Europe.

              Hmm…

              Now that I look at a map of the region, it also appears that Moldova is east of the mountains. Yet another hint that the tiny country would likely be high on Putin’s list if he somehow got Ukraine back.

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                1. In fairness, the hollow nature of the Russian military shocked nearly everyone. I know personally I believed that the Russian military didn’t match up to general European standards. But at the same time, I was also highly wary of that fact that I *wanted* to believe that the Russian military sucked. So I hedged my thoughts on it just to be on the safe side. I guess I didn’t need to.

                  Reading the Zeihan piece, something struck me that Zeihan didn’t mention at all. Zeihan mentioned Russian occupation troops needed post-war to keep 45 million restless Ukrainians in line. Well, if you’ve already got that many troops in Ukraine, and there’s a small neighboring former Soviet Republic that’s also part of what Russia needs anyway to get that geographical barrier, why not grab it? An invasion of Moldova (to “free” Transnistria, of course) would be practically assured. But given the close ties between Moldova and Romania, that would threaten to bring Romania into the war. And Romania is a member of NATO. While NATO is a defensive treaty, and thus shouldn’t be invoked if Romania comes to the defense of a non-member nation, it might be enough to get some of the other Eastern European nations involved, such as Poland or the Czech Republic (Hungary is better positioned, but…).

                  And then, well…

                  Yeah.

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                  1. The Reader notes that there is a reason Poland is up arming as fast as they can. And it isn’t to invade Germany.

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                    1. Polish Cold War anecdote ending “you must ALWAYS attack the American division first, then the Germans. After all, Comrade: business before pleasure.” 😁😁😁

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                  2. Zeihan’s map color coding has Ukraine and the Baltics as phase 2, half of Poland up to Warsaw and the Vistula as phase 3 and Moldova plus the rest of Georgia, the country not the state, as phase 4.

                    I’m not quite clear on what the rest of NATO would be doing during these phases involving invasion and occupation of NATO members, but at the end the only flat tank-friendly stretched the Formerly Red Army would have to guard against treacherous NATO aggressions would be the stretch of Poland from Warsaw south to the Carpathians, the Bessarabia Gap along the Black Sea coast, and the border with Finland.

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                    1. Yeah, the Balts and Poland before Moldova doesn’t make sense from a “NATO exists, and these countries are members of it” standpoint. Further –

                      1.) Unlike Poland, Moldova is a former Soviet Republic, which makes it even more important for Russian prestige to get it back (along with the Balts, but those are members of NATO).

                      2.) Transnistria exists as a ready provocation point against Moldova, much like the ethnic enclaves in Georgia and Ukraine. NO ONE in the Balts likes Russia, afaik, so there’s no enclaves to use as an excuse to invade. And Poland *lost* land when it fell under Soviet domination (the USSR seized a chunk of its eastern territory), so Russia has negative claims to Polish territory. The only excuse I could see to go after Poland early is to create a land link to Kaliningrad. But if Moscow controls the Baltics, then that problem has already been solved.

                      3.) Not only is Moldova not a part of NATO, but attacking it could split the alliance. Moldova isn’t a part of NATO, so invading it wouldn’t trigger the alliance. But Romania would likely feel a need to intervene regardless, and might bring a couple of other Eastern European nations along with it – including the all-important Poland. If Poland goes to war with Russia over Moldova, this could give the Russians a possible way to invade Poland without having to worry about triggering NATO’s defensive clause, and bringing the all-important American military into the war.

                      4.) Moldova’s isolated. It’s on the eastern side of those mountains that we keep talking about. The only way to it that doesn’t involve passing through the mountains is a relatively flat stretch of ground between the southern end of the Carpathians, and the Black Sea (the Romanian capitol of Bucharest is located in this region).

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                2. My favorite comment regarding Zeihan, who I regard highly (excluding anything remotely relating to US politics), is that he has predicted 13 of the last 2 major crises.

                  While snarky and unfair, it is not exactly wrong.

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  8. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. How do we write books, or tell stories, or knit sweaters? One word or stitch at a time. And slowly, slowly order and a pattern emerge.

    It’s just hard to remember when the cat gets into the yarn, and a system upgrade breaks the filing system in your computer and all the files are now floating around in Purgatory or Limbo on the hard drive, so to speak.

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  10. *sigh* I can’t remember which book that I was working on, after Wee Jamie was born – and a few months after that, we all caught Covid. My daughter and I both had the pneumonia version, and only got better after that was knocked out. Wee Jamie had the sniffles and a slight temperature for about a day and a half.

    But I was so drained that I could only apply myself for a couple of hundred words a day on the then-current W-I-P. Still. Couple of hundred words. And another couple of hundred words. And another couple of hundred words.

    And then you have (to quote Baldrick) Many Hundreds of Words!

    Persistence pays. Even only a little at a time.

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    1. Read how Gabaldon writes about how she writes. She writes snippets or scenes down, as they come to her, and keeps them. Then she slots these bits into where they fit in her books. Strongly probable that whatever scene she writes and stores isn’t even for the current book, at best might be for the current book but she isn’t that far, yet. Give her a way to write what comes to her even if she can’t use it yet, before it slips away forever, and it quits bugging her. Doesn’t make her books come put any faster but it is one step taken.

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      3. I do the same thing. Sometimes I write whole chapters out of order. On one story, I wrote chapters 9, 11 and 12 before I finished chapter 5. They all needed a little revision before they could go in the story, but minor. I’m working on chapter 20 of another story, and have most of what I think will be chapter 24 written. Depends on how many words it takes to get there. :-)

        A chapter written ahead gives me an anchor. A bridge pier, showing where the story has to go.

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      4. I take notes on bits, not write full fledged scenes. But there has always been some work putting them together.

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    2. Covid sucketh.

      I’ve currently been battling serious allergy flare-ups that make all writing take at least twice as long as it should – doctor’s visits eat time, trying to work enough to pay for the visits and still keep rent paid takes more time, augh.

      And the allergy flare-ups lead to ear infections, I’m trying to head this one off ATM… hoping not to need antibiotics again.

      I’ve always had allergies, but they got worse after Covid, and this year they have been Very Bad Indeed. So. Tired.

      But I’ve gotten 2/3 of the way through filling in draft holes in Colors. Progress!

      (Then there will be editing, more editing, formatting, writing cover blurb – eep! – and hopefully getting the last specs needed so I can put in an ask on the right cover our hostess drafted for me… thank you, Oh Beautiful and Evil Space Princess!)

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  11. OK, but if you’re in the kitchen and still looking for a partner, the female cleaner could pick a suitable suitor and ask them to help with something heavy or too high for you to reach. Make sure to do this after the big mess is gone so the kitchen doesn’t look too challenging. If he then offers to help you finish, you might have a keeper.

    Now as a guy kitchen cleaner avoiding the party kinda guy, I’m already partnered so I shoo anyone out who might be tempted to flirt or disrupt my methodology very similar to yours. This includes my spouse, who is prone to dropping things, and I don’t let her back in until all the glass is put away.

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  12. I always thought that I HATED cleaning the kitchen after dinner. I longed to sit with the guys as they talked about really interesting things. But I was also a girl and knew very well how it would go over with the other women if I shirked.

    Turns out what I actually hated was gossiping about people. The actual cleaning itself, when I’m by myself, I like. I never let anyone help me clean up after a dinner. I like to putter around alone. Unless there is someone in the crowd who has something to talk about besides other people.

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  13. Kitchen that you describe? My mom and grandmothers to the infinite detail. Drives me nuts. By the time dinner is ready, everything already done being used is rinsed and in the dishwasher (if no dishwasher, cleaned, dried, and put away). Mom won’t let me help in the kitchen to this day because of this. Start cleaning and mom “I might not be done with that!” Me, “then it can be washed again!” Might have overheard some mumbling along the lines of “Are they sure she is my daughter?” Oh well, the middle daughter is just like her. The youngest of us 3 however, is just like me, and her husband is even worse.

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  14. Plastics and wood first, in the fresh and hot sink (we have some that will “grab” onto any grease in the water). A lot of those air dry, too, as they are full of crevices.

    Next are ceramics, glass, and metal wares. Dry those, then pots and pans, dry those.

    Oh, in between, clean the stove and countertop next to it. Countertop that accumulates the dirty dishes cleaned last.

    Took me quite a few years to develop the system (actually, not until we had kids). Used to be one of those “wherever, and I’ll get to them later” people.

    Now, I do most of this the next day, actually. My schedule has me getting up very early most mornings, so I’m in bed before the rest have eaten.

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  15. Everything is Project Management. And “Work Breakdown Structure” is a natural thing, though folks need to be reminded so they don’t panic.

    Thanks Sarah!.

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  18. After my second or third “mess cooked” souffle, I got religion, and started doing a combination of mis en place and clean-as-you-go cooking (OK, “clean” as in “put it in the dishwasher”). By doing one ingredient or “prep” at a time, I get more interesting and elaborate dishes in the same time it took to do slap-dash stuff in the past. Whether it’s in the kitchen, gardening, home maintenance, or local politics, taking things step by step might seem slow, but it gets the job done. And nobody said you had to eat the elephant in one sitting.

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  19. The tradition I studied in has ‘first step, define the problem’, written down in big huge letters. It is profoundly important to not skip that step as ‘unnecessary’, just because you are ‘very skilled’, and ‘know what you are doing’. We have a lot of mistakes where the root cause is that we tried to solve a problem that we defined incorrectly.

    But, there are two things that have to happen before then.

    One, you have to realize that you actually do have a problem.

    Secondly, you have to realize that it is a problem that you can fix.

    Circling back to somewhere else, despair is not a plan.

    “I’m upset about X, but cannot possibly solve it except by Y extreme measure”, is often enough depression and despair talking. It can also be weak or crippled analysis skills, or something.

    A lot of people in American culture are mental cripples, because the schools have deliberately taught them that they need aggregate goals, and also that behavioral ‘systems’ are anything other than not being able to think about the strategy and tactics of human behavior. Seriously, the young lady feminists going around trying to bully folks, for not saying the feminist things? Are directly raising questions about whether similar young women back then might have bullied victims into withdrawing rape accusations against William Jefferson Clinton.

    The forecast of future possibility is based on data collected, well or poorly, from the past. The description of why many of the assumptions in engineering theory might be valid is that widgets have a small state space, and often no memory, so we can pretty consistently treat a future widget as being in the same statistical idea as a very similar past widget.

    We can be suspicious a lot of the time that this assumption can often be untrue for human behavior, and many academic fields are behaving inappropriately as a result.

    The key promise of socialism or communism is that life is inevitability awful, and that it is only through socialism or communism that you can possibly have any influence over the result. So the theoretical stupidity, and the quest for leadership magic, is very despairing. It requires ignoring what a child can realize about the tactics or strategy of behavioral vulnerability.

    For these reasons, an early step of any fight against Communism is what a Christian might possibly describe as spiritual warfare. This involves having a careful and full understanding that the idols of the left are simply idols, and have no utility or reality.

    Anyway, ‘a problem I can fix’, is a little bit coupled to ‘a problem that I should fix’, and ‘a problem that I can be expected to fix’.

    Communists think they are obligated to ‘fix’ problems that are either not really problems, or which are not really fixable.

    So, what problems must we fix in fighting the communists?

    I have been treating ‘can fix’, and ‘should fix’, as being something that I have solved for an ensemble of forecasts. Basically, I make up my mind slowly about other specific people, and try to remain open about learning new things about them, things that may convince me of an entirely different most persuasive model than my previous most persuasive model. Where the behavior of other people is concerned, there all the individual possible state spaces can be ‘added’ together. From the information I have, there definitely will be situations where I cannot tell the difference between a situation I should fix, because I can, and one that I cannot fix, and should not waste time fussing over something I cannot change. I make some sort of decision on some basis, stick with it, and accept the cost of the possible misestimate.

    The things I must try to fix, no matter the scenario, are the mistakes in my own thinking. The mistakes of idolatry, and so forth. Sin is a reasonably complete summary. This is part of how I understand that the ensemble forecast has a solved answer.

    There are cases where it is a no win, but I do not have the information to know that. I am supposed to live in this world, and I am supposed to use my gifts, so I infer that I am suppose to try. Solved answer to ensemble forecast.

    Can win, will happen without me? Solved.

    Can win, if I put in some effort? Solved.

    Now, I do worry that I am not trying hard enough, and also that just a smidge more would do it. But, this is probably, arrogance, anxiety, and getting lost in my own blidnness.

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    1. They do not care what they say, they require neither consistency nor logic, as long as it punishes the people they hate.

      -Any- action, -any- evil is justified, provided it punishes those they hate.

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  20. The European Union just issued a letter to Elon Musk demanding that he censor Donald Trump in their upcoming interview. Threatening him with “legal obligations” if he fails to stop the “disinformation”. How the fuck can they tell if its disinformation if the interview hasnt happened yet?

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    1. Anything that contradicts them, inconveniences them, or simply displeases them, is “disinformation”.

      “We are not amused” is sufficient.

      (Dual Tallman Salute)

      Liked by 1 person

    3. They obviously have an interest in the American election, but what they don’t have is any legal or moral right to an opinion.

      We may know of state actors behind the DDoS.

      I’m not sure why them foreign devils are so worried about Trump, nor why they have calculated that this is acceptable for them to do.

      I would note, Norwegian government had something to do with that Nobel Peace prize for Obama. Okay, legislature sub committee apointing a bunch of ‘expert’ morons.

      It is possible that there has been some back channel communication recently.

      It is possible that the European leaders are merely pedophiles, or something.

      I know that recent times are as unnerving as all, but they would have to be spectacularly incompetent for American foreign policy to matter so much to them.

      Anyway, Merkel is SED, and the SED’s HQ was a Nazi building in Berlin. Therefore, the joke that thus the EU is a nazi regime, and the further joke that Putin would not be incorrect to think that Western Europe merits denazification. (Of course, Putin is an evil lunatic in my view.)

      The crowned heads of Europe can go frustrate themselves. Their opinion on freedom of speech in the US is casus belli.

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  21. With our large family, the clean up crew is usually six or seven of us, both genders. This is my favorite part of a holiday meal. Everything gets washed, dried, and put away, and then someone puts on a pot of coffee and we bring out the desserts and set them on the clean counter. Pies and cookies and cheesecakes, oh my!

    Dessert in our country’s case is going to be an explosion of creativity, industry, invention, and babies. We’re going to come out of this so strong that the luciferian left is going to hide in the shadows for a long time to come. God willing. Please.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Queue up “Battle of New Orleans”

      (grin)

      (Singing, loudly) “…They ran through the bushes and they ran through the brambles. They ran through the thicket where a rabbit couldn’ go. They ran so fast the hounds couldn’ catch ’em. Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico….”

      Liked by 2 people

      3. Fun fact: the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans (January 8) was a federal holiday in the U.S. from 1828 to 1861. It was considered equal or nearly equal in importance to July 4 (and often referred to as simply “The Eighth”, similar to “The Fourth”) because it marked the final defeat of the British on American soil.

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  24. As I was leaving work tonight, a young man approached me and urged me to vote for Don Samuels over Ilhan Omar in today’s primary election. I was tempted for a moment, until I realized that either way I’d be voting for a communist. Like asking me to choose between Arsenic and Strychnine . . .

    Liked by 1 person

    2. The Reader urges you to remember what Heinlein said about ‘voting against’ if you live in a society that votes. Assuming the communist isn’t a pedophile, voting against Omar is a pretty easy choice. Deal with the communist later.

      Liked by 1 person

    3. Well, it seems Omar ‘won’ the primary. Like Biden ‘won’ the 2020 election, with mystery votes in the dark of night. The fuckery is blatant, but will it ever be investigated?

      Liked by 1 person

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