Chrism on my hands: science and faith

Practical theology.
In the library of the Convent of San Marco, Florence.

More than thirty years ago, I moved to the East Coast from California.  We registered in our local parish, where I was surprised to find that women could not be lectors or cantors or Eucharistic Ministers.  "The only time a woman should be on the altar," the pastor told me when I asked, "is to clean it."  Ah.  He had many gifts to share, not the least the ways in which he modeled a deep and abiding life of prayer, but this was a mindset he couldn't shake.

Last week, our associate pastor caught me after Morning Prayer, with a question about cleaning.  The question came, not because he thinks that the only role women have to play in the liturgies of Holy Week is cleaning the altar and vessels (which he most certainly does not!), but because I'm a chemist.  One of the chrismaria, the glass vessels used to store the parish's stock of oils for anointing, hadn't come clean with a first round of soap or with a second round of bleach.  It had held the chrism.  What might I suggest?

I looked at the glass container and noticed it was coated in a fluffy, waxy substance.  I rubbed some of it between my fingers.  (Yes, yes, I know, chemists shouldn't touch their stuff; buried somewhere in here is a reflection about humeral veils and gloves in the lab.)  Bleach is an oxidizing agent.  Fats, like olive oil, which form the base of chrism, when oxidized can give you esters — and alcohols.  The chemical mantra when it comes to dissolving things is "like dissolves like." So....

"Try some rubbing alcohol." I offered.

With this I went off to teach quantum mechanics, to find an email when I was done that the alcohol had done the trick.  Science in the service of the faith.

My hands smelled of chrism all morning, each time I raised my hands to write on the board, this reminder of my own baptismal anointing brushed my senses.  As priest, as prophet.  The catechism of the Catholic Church notes that service is intrinsically linked to the sacramental priesthood [CCC 876], and I see its traces in Ignatius' Suscipe, "Whatsoever I have or hold, You have given me; I give it all back to You and surrender it wholly to be governed by your will."  What do I return?  What do I turn toward God?  Toward service?

I thought, too, of Kathleen Norris' short book, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and 'Women's Work,' in which she writes, "But laundry and worship are repetitive activities with a potential for tedium, and I hate to admit it, but laundry often seems like the more useful of the tasks. But both are the work that God has given us to do."  The laundry and the dishes are inextricably entwined with worship.  We learn to do one by doing the other.

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Chrismaria that look like they belong in the lab!

Minimalist KonMari

My laundry, tied up by load in furoshikis

Marie Kondo's tidying book is all the rage.  It promises not only organization, but painless, persistent organization.  While part of my mind is thinking, what part of the second law of thermodynamics does Ms. Kondo not understand?, the rest is crying, is this the holy grail of tidying, will at last all be wondrously organized?

I suppose I could have spent my sabbatical ruthlessly purging my possessions, asking each one if they were a source of joy.  But I didn't. What I did do is apply a dash of KonMari to my laundry and to my office.  This violates Kondo's principles (do it all, she says, or nothing), but not mine, so off I went.  I found a one page version of her folding methods (easier than flipping through the book) here and tackled my dresser and closet.  Some worked well with the storage I had, some didn't.  Several months later, things are still tidy without a lot of mental work going into keeping them that way.

There is something of the Liturgy of the Hours in this discipline of putting things away just so.  Each day I begin again, each four week cycle ends, only to repeat.  When I cannot find the words to pray, I can open my book, and begin — like my socks, the psalms are tidy and waiting for me.

Carthusian laundry

I have a good sized collection of books devoted to elected silence and the contemplative life, ranging from Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence to Thomas Merton to St. John of the Cross to the desert fathers, and I'm always on the look out for new additions. I recently stumbled across First Initiation into Carthusian Life — an introduction to life in a Charterhouse written for Carthusian postulants and novices.

My first thought was it might be useful background reading for my students for the next time I teach the course on contemplative traditions in the West. Two pages in, I am ready to tuck the book into my bag for my upcoming retreat (a week in solitude in a hermitage here).

The anonymous Carthusian author invites the postulant to read the book slowly, as lectio divina, to reflect deeply on the scripture passages that treat of a contemplative life. It's a rich banquet set out, one I want to do more than taste, one I want to linger over — or to use the novice master's metaphor — to get past the rind and into the interior.

The section on community life is a helpful meditation for anyone living in community - and we all do. (This Carthusian community is male, hence the non-inclusive language.) "We listen carefully to each other and try to understand each others' point of view. We never condemn, or judge a person. We never repeat any evil we have heard. We do not look at the speck in our brother's eye. We avoid all criticism. We try always to adopt a positive attitude, to see the good in our brother's actions and to discover the face of Christ which is gradually being formed in him. At times, one has to accept the fact that one is not understood nor can one understand the other — but all all times we can love." The italics are mine, as that's the piece I need to think about before I start typing into com boxes, or rehearsing arguments in my head, but it all bears contemplating.

What might we have the time and breath to say if we were not criticizing others? If we gave over trying to convince each other to change entrenched positions, particularly on matters principally of style (Communion in the hand, Latin in the liturgy, partisan politics)? How might we "offer each other discrete but very precious mutual help along the steep paths" we follow?

But as my friend Lisa is fond of saying, it all comes down to the laundry. The last two pages of the book deal with the practicalities of getting your laundry done when you are living in solitude and silence within a community of other silent solitaries. There is almost as much as instruction given about laundry as there is about meditation. Which as postulants and novices, might be more what they need. There is almost a scriptural character to the advice given about bloodstains: "If anything is stained with blood, it should be put at once into COLD water and it will be found that after a couple of hours, the stain has been entirely removed." My experience with newborn sheep suggests not, or maybe my faith isn't strong enough?

Faster than light

The faster you travel, the slower the clock ticks. Perhaps that's why I'm having a hard time believing it's not only November, but deeply November. Surely it's just the beginning of October?

I've been running at the edge of the speed of light since before this semester began, packing into three and a half months what would have taken me three and a half years to travel in centuries past. I feel a bit like a particle in a synchrotron, rushed around in circles until I reach a critical velocity and come shooting out a beam port.

I may finally have been spit out of the subatomic particle's equivalent of a hamster wheel. There is at least an even chance that tomorrow I will get my laundry entirely folded and put away for the first time in six weeks. Or I could sleep....

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Photo is from the DOE.

Column: Frenetic Diligence

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 30 June 2011.

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat, nor about your body, what you shall put on. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Lk 12: 22b-23

The smell of steaming starch and suds transports me to my grandmother's laundry room. I was fascinated by the mangle, which could wring water from bed sheets I was sure were not even damp. I loved watching my grandmother's expert hands folding and feeding the laundry through the rollers, marveling at her skill — a skill the operation of the electric dryer in our basement didn't require.

As I ran the iron across yet another linen shirt last weekend, while the boys’ laundry chugged away nearby, I wondered (not for the first time) why I buy summer clothes that need extra maintenance. While my grandmother had no choice but to starch my grandfather’s collars and painstakingly press the wrinkles out of my aunt’s sundresses, I am a child of the permanent press era. Wash, dry, hang and wear. It’s nothing if not efficient.

These days I’m not so sure efficiency should be the overriding goal. The minute or two it takes me to stuff a load of clothes into the washer and toss it wholesale into the dryer, sandwiched in between starting dinner and grading a stack of paper, leaves me feeling simultaneously inattentive to what I have — food for the table, clothes to wear, a job — and anxious over keeping all the tasks in line and efficiently moving along.

Yet here is Jesus in this passage in Luke telling his disciples, “do not be anxious about your life.” The body is more than just what our soul wears, we are created to do more than put the next meal on the table. Reflecting on this Gospel in the 5th century, St. Cyril of Alexandria warned his congregation to foreswear a “frenetic diligence” that drove them to gather more than what they needed. I suspect my efficient ways are an attempt to gather more time than I need. I sense, too, that my frenzied diligence isn’t always producing more time for God or family or rest, but just more time to be frenzied.

It remains hard for me to remember that for all I pour into getting dinner on the table, or the laundry done, or the next lecture written, the success of these ventures does not ultimately depend on my efforts alone — frenzied or otherwise. If the smallest things are outside your control, asks Jesus, why worry about the rest?

As the line of pressed shirts hanging on the rack grew, I realized that the scent of starch brought back more than nostalgia for the summer days of my youth. I learned in that sunny space off my grandmother’s kitchen a certain rhythm of work. I learned that an unforced pace attentive to the present moment, not caught up in what was coming next, could get done what needed to be done. Diligence and care did not demand frenzy or undue anxiety.

I have tucked the shirts into the closet, but left the lesson out where I could be reminded. Life is more than the sum of my to-do list.

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Be with us, Lord, as we take up our daily tasks: and help us to remember that it is in your world that we live and work. — From the Intercessions for Morning Prayer, Monday Week III

Photo is from the National Archives of the Netherlands

Thirty-four thousand revisited

Last weekend, Math Man was on the road again. It was the start of tech week¹, so I was shuttling people hither and yon, carefully choreographed runs to the high school, to the church. Dropping people at parties, delivering forgotten pieces of costumes, picking them up from shows they were reviewing. And doing the laundry, the shopping, the cooking, the
bills....²

I need to say that Crash and the Boy have done their own laundry since I went on the 30-days (a fruit of the Exercises Ignatius probably never imagined). For the last two years they have alternated who washes and dries and who folds and puts away, generally with no arguments or prompting from parental parties. (Yeah, I know it's a downright miracle - if Ignatius had not already been canonized, I would submit this to the appropriate office in Rome.) However, in the
craziness of tech week, I offered to finish up a load that Crash had put in to dry before he left on Saturday. I pulled it out of the dryer and went to throw a load of whites in. I bent down, only to
notice blue streaks all over the inside of the dryer, and a greasy green splotch by the lint trap.

My heart sank. Had someone left crayons in his pocket? Weren't we past the crayon days? No time to deal, though, I was off on my next pick-up. It wasn't until I had both guys in the car on the way home that evening that I calmly³ mentioned that they should clean their pockets out before doing the wash, lest things melt in the dryer.

There was a brief silence. "Was it green?" wondered the Boy. "Well, yes," I responded. "It was me. My gum." Mystery substance identified. First step in removal. "OK, then, could you research how to get gum out of the dryer?"

He was delighted at the round number of Google hits - 34,000. The procedure wasn't too arduous (involving fabric softener, scrubbies and rags) and very effective (though I ran a load of light colored towels before committing all my white turtlenecks to the presumably now clean
dryer - I've been burned before!)

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1. An essentially sleepless period before a show opens, at least if you are part of the tech crew or like Crash, the production stage manager.
2. Before you direct any sympathy my way, let me point out that as I write this, I'm on the train to Amherst, MA to give a talk at a conference — leaving Math Man to pick up 200 pounds of dry ice from South Philly for opening night. And deal with the laundry, the shopping, the bills and the chauffeuring.
3. I really was calm. I'll take credit for having some perspective on the level of crisis this constituted. The weekend before had involved a run to the emergency room.

Silk strands

On the last day of the only eight day retreat I've made with Patient Spiritual Director, he suggested an exercise to "gather up the crumbs" and see what baskets they might fill. As I hunch here in my window seat, 39,000 feet above the Atlantic, the seat in front of me less than 8 inches away (on occasion perilously closer as the hulking young man in the seat in front of me throws his weight around), it seems like a good time to gather the last few strands from this trip.

Singapore is a city of flats, mostly high-rise flats. I loved the flag poles that bristled from the buildings, festooned with drying laundry. Some flats sported as many as five. I wondered what would happen if (when?) the laundry blew off.

Taxis. They and the MRT train line were my magic carpets to Singapore Island. They could be summoned with a click of the computer at the front desk, or an SMS. I loved the little slips that the desk would give me, with the time to arrival and the taxi number on them. A ticket to my next adventure. The biggest adventure was often coming back, trying to direct the taxi driver to the hotel on the large campus I was staying at, usually in the dark, and at speed (and on the "wrong" side of the road).

Despite the heat and humidity, Singapore is not locked up tight in air conditioned bunkers like Houston. Windows are open in the high-rises, shops open into the air, corridors in buildings on campus likewise often open into the out of doors. My hotel alas did not have windows that opened (a concession to overseas guests less adjusted to the heat?), and the A/C in my room had no off switch, just cold and colder. I finally resorted to sleeping in my hoody.

Bargaining in the shops in Little India. I've not lost my touch since the Oaxaca markets.

Immigration and border control at Changi. A whole bowlful of hard candies on the counter. "Lolly?" offered the official. I decorously took one, only to be encouraged to take a handful. (A traveling mercy later when I had a tickle in my throat and nothing to drink!)

The pastel colored shophouses in Little India. The Deepavali market on Seragoon Road, so packed you could hardly move, and the attempts the young woman at one stall and I made to try to fish down a lantern in the jostling crowd.

The fabric stores on Arab Street. I could have stayed all day, just going from shop to shop. When I got on the MRT to go back to the hotel, I noticed my bright purple bag had strands of silk along the side, undoubtedly caught as I wove my way between the bolts that littered the sidewalk, advertising the wares within. The little perfume shop, tucked into a corner of one of the old shophouses in Kampong Glam.

The shopkeeper who showed me how to wear a sari, and the cheerful Indian woman, a fellow shopper urging me to "do check it out in the mirror, dear, you look very nice!". I bought the sari, yards and yards of midnight blue silk chiffon, edged in gold. What will I do with it???

The beautiful Tamil script. Maybe we could borrow some for quantum mechanical symbols?

The public service announcements on the MRT, "Love your ride!" sung by Singapore's equivalent of the Dixie Chicks. Give up your seat to the old and infirm (someone gave me a seat!), don't block the exits while waiting to board at the station.

Let there be laundry

Three trips down, one to go for the kids. It seems that their clothes have spent the summer traveling not only coast to coast, but between duffel bag and laundry basket. I think a fuller caption to this could read: "God separated the light from the dark...thus two piles were created -- the first load."

And seriously, I still think that a washer and a dryer are graces!

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H/T to Gone Walkabout.

Towards a Philosophy of Odd Numbers

I'm sitting in the garden, in the heat of the late afternoon drinking iced tea and waxing philosophical about the laundry that I'm not doing at the moment.

There are some problems too knotty for even philosophers to touch. Take the problem of dualism and socks, for example. If philosophy can take a crack at what it means to be human, why can't it tell me why I never have an even number of socks return from the wash? Why doesn't dualism work for me here?

Dualism is a pervasive philosophical concept and one that I find only marginally appealing even when applied to things other than socks, I'm going to admit.

There is light and darkness, good and evil, male and female, left and right. Dualism has an appealing kind of tidiness to it: thing either are or are not. Yet, I wonder how often we impose dualism on the universe rather than find it there.

We match socks, reflecting the underlying dualism of feet: right and left. But socks generally speaking, don't have a right or left, still we insist on pairing them and fret when they don't. (I do have two very fancy pairs of running socks that claim to be chiral - right/left specific.)

Once you admit of an intermediate state, things can quickly get more complicated. Consider the quantum mechanical case where you have two degenerate states (think "equal in dignity") where any intermediate state in the spanned space is an equally valid solution to the problem at hand. Or the biological tags male and female. XX and XY genotypes are only two of a larger set of expressed and viable possibilities, and the resulting phenotypes are more complex yet.

Are my unmatched socks trying to tell me something?

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Photo is from looseends via flickr.

Laundry Magic

"Where did the pile of socks on the floor go?" wonders Math Man - trying to organize the laundry on a Sunday night.

"Maybe they crawled away under their own power," I suggested from the kitchen. "Crash put them in the hamper," offers Barnacle Boy. Math Man decides this is a better spot for them than the middle of the sunroom floor and calls it a night.

Fifteen minutes later, the Boy is back. "I don't have any underwear," comes the plea. I suggest where he might check. No dice, he's all out.

"Get me some dirty ones and I'll create you some clean ones by morning," I offer. He giggles at the thought of his mom waving her wand and clean boxers wafting their way into his drawer. Which reminds me -- time to put them in the dryer!

Column: Lather, Rinse, Repeat

The photo is of the basement laundry room at Eastern Point. I took it to try to capture for my spiritual director the sense of warm prayerfulness I encountered in that space. For, as a good friend wisely remarks, "It's all about the laundry!" This is the first of four columns for the Standard on the principle graces of the Exercises.

This column appeared in the Philadelphia Archdiocese's Catholic Standard & Times 26 March 2009.

For this reason I kneel before the Father, that He may grant you in accord with the riches of His glory to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner self, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. — Eph. 3:14a, 15-19

Lather, rinse, repeat. The standard instructions on the back of shampoo bottles are an apt description of my experience of Lent this year — I feel as if I have just been through Lent’s wash cycle and have been inadvertently returned to the laundry bin.

As the calendar year began, I was sequestered in silence, making the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius. The exercises are structured around four “weeks” or graces, as my director said. The first grace sought was to know how profoundly we are loved by God and how often we have failed to respond to that love.

Just as we hear the call of the prophet Joel in Lent to “Rend your hearts,” so in that first period of the exercises Ignatius invites us to open our hearts to God, to see what sin has done to the world, to us and our own role in it. In a word, Lent, collapsed into a week.

Spending a week asking God for the grace to see evil at work in the world and in your own life sounds miserable, but Ignatius builds his exercises on the same foundation that Paul offers the Ephesians: rooted and grounded in God’s love. It is only from this stance that we can risk looking so deeply at how we, together and individually, in this time and in our history, have violated our covenant with God.

It is from these depths that we can begin to grasp the enormity of the love and mercy that was and is ours. The ultimate point of this exercise, as it was in Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians, is not to wallow in sin, but to enable us to “be filled with all the fullness of God.”

No matter how much time we spend looking into this mirror, we are ultimately myopic. We can never know quite how tightly sin has bound us, how deeply its strands are embedded in our lives. Still the merciful grace of God flows over it all, whether we see our failings clearly, dimly or not at all. Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner puts it bluntly in a Good Friday homily, “the world could not escape His mercy.”

Late in the afternoon of the very last day of that first week, God’s mercy found me in the basement of the old retreat house. Standing amid almost 50 years worth of cast-off furniture and dishes, waiting for the dryer to finish, it seemed just the place to examine my conscience one last time. After dinner I would gather my almost 50 years worth of cast off sins and make a general confession — and return to my room with clean clothes and heart.

I’ve lathered and rinsed — is there any point in repeating, in taking another look at my sins? Buoyed by St. Catherine of Siena’s advice, “The more you see, the more you will love. Once you love, you will follow and you will clothe yourself in His will.” I’m ready to look again, to see more, that I may love more. I can do a bit more Lenten laundry — and be clothed again in God’s will.

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God of power, God of mercy, You bring forth springs in the wasteland and turn despair into hope. Look not upon the sins of our past, but lift from our hearts the failures that weigh us down, that we may find refreshment and life in Christ, our deliverance and our hope, who lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit, holy and mighty God for ever and ever. Amen. — Opening prayer for the 5th Sunday of Lent Year C

Oil and water

Water is perhaps more precious than oil where my dad lives. The water table is hundreds of feet down, rainfall non-existent in this season. Dry wells are no joke.

We arrived here last week, with a duffel full of dirty clothes from our sojourn in Maine (just like a college student - I come home to do laundry). We had barely made our way out back to find my dad when my sister-in-law (the Reverend Brother's wife) appears at the gate. She has bad news. There is no water in the big tank, and the pumps have shut off. (They share a well with my dad.) No laundry...no flushing. Will they need to drill deeper?

As it turned out it was an interlock that had gone back at the level of their first well and by dinner time, there was enough water to do the dishes and flush. By bedtime, I had a load of laundry in.

Consumer Reports

Last summer, as part of the fifty fewer project, I decided to opt out of tissues and into handkerchiefs. I bought a dozen or so, mostly hemstitched linen, hankies. Each hanky cost about twice as much as a box of tissues, so I figured return on investment might be slow in coming -- but these things last forever. With the awful cold I caught from Math Man via Crash, came the acid test of my un-consumer option.

If you need to blow your nose a hundred times in a day (don't ask) the following rating scale might help - from worst to best.

• KimWipes (scientists will know this one)
• generic tissues
• Kleenex cold (the citrate in it kills viruses, but is NOT kind to tender skin, there is only so much I'll sacrifice for public health)
• linen handkerchiefs
• Kleenex regular
• cotton lawn handkerchiefs
• Puffs with lotion

Overall, I'm glad to be feeling better tonight. I apologized to Math Man if I'd been a cranky convalescent. "Not cranky," he allowed, as I breathed a sigh of relief, "more whiny, I think!"

The Zone of Proximal Development

Tonight Barnacle Boy briefly left the table, I presumed to get the other half of his pannini (he'd left it in the warm pan to keep the cheese nicely melted). "I just switched the laundry," he announced matter of factly upon his return. The laundry? What laundry? "Are you doing the laundry?" I wondered. "Of course, I needed my gym shirt washed. I did a load of colors." I'm stunned. (I'm still stunned, to be honest.) "I'm very proud of you," I offered, perhaps a beat too late. "Are you really? I know how to do laundry!" I assured him that I trusted his ability to wash clothes, and was duly impressed by his self-sufficiency. "Your dad, now..." I started off teasingly.

I'd been down in the laundry this morning and noticed that Math Man had carefully hung up a huge collection of our outdoor gear to dry. What really caught my eye, however, was the large light pink athletic sock on the rack by the dehumidifier...and the pink gaiter and... A red fleece item had been washed with whites, and the results were predictable. It ran.

Math Man blushed (though he hadn't noticed the pink sock, just the now-pink gaiter). "Remember the year of the blue turtlenecks?" When we were first married, Math Man had washed jeans with his socks and underwear and all my white cotton turtlenecks (still a staple in my winter wardrobe). His theory was that he didn't want to do an extra load of wash, and didn't care what color his underwear was. Alas, I did care what color my turtlenecks were, so the theory should not have been extended to cover them. They were all now a pale shade of something I could only describe as Virgin Mary Blue. I lived a year with them, the budget wouldn't stretch to replacements. He proudly noted that this time my turtlenecks were not in the load. "You're learning!" "I'm in the zone of proximal development," he shot back.

The Boy now thinks his parents have lost it entirely (he may think that all the time, but I'm afraid to ask). "What's the zone of proximal development?" Math Man, having spent 5 years as a PI of a huge grant for math-science teaching, told him it's when you know enough not to be frustrated and not enough to be bored. Or when you know enough to separate the colors from your wife's whites.

Stratigraphy

I've been on the road much of August, living out of my red rolling suitcase, dropping in just long enough to run a load or two of laundry and head out again. The rest of the team has been road-tripping too, though with a bit less intensity. It felt good on Saturday to be doing the laundry with the intention of putting it away in drawers, of having a choice of shirt color (pink or white?) instead of the monochrome pallete I wear to travel.

After a week at the beach, I decided to stage laundry in the living room. Suitcases were emptied onto the floor, and I dragged the kids' surprisingly full hamper down the hall to join the party. "Hey, Mom," wonders the Boy, "could you order us some more shorts? We only have 3 pairs." Three pairs? They had a dozen between them at summer's start. Have they been that hard on their clothes? "Sure," I shoot back, "just let me see what you've got and we'll order enough to get you through the fall." As I chat, I'm emptying the laundry hamper. And emptying, and emptying, and...

a foot from the bottom , there is a flash of pink. Pink? Pink! Pink panties to be precise. The boys are in trouble, but it's not what you think. Panties belong to their cousin, who last graced these walls on July 27. This layer is a foot from the bottom of their three foot deep laundry hamper.

When was the last time someone did their laundry? No one knows. But the stratigraphy is clear, even without consulting our back door neighbor (a geologist). It's been way more than a month.

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This got me wondering if they'd just been hamper diving while I was away. My current theory, which Math Man isn't debating (he's taking the fifth on this) is that every time they came back from a trip, Math Man washed the three or four pairs of communal shorts that they packed. So I think they've mostly been wearing clean clothes, just not much variety!

RGBP Friday Five: Hard Habit to Break

1. Have you ever successfully quit a bad habit, or gotten a good habit established? Tell us about how you did it.

I started walking, 30 minutes a day, every day. It helped to ask a friend to help me monitor, "Are you still walking?", on a regular, but not too frequent, basis. It helped to ask for Math Man's, Crash's and the Boy's support (necessary if I'm going to get out the door while kids are awake).

2. "If only there were a 12-step program for _________________!"

Putting laundry away. During the semester, the baskets are always with me. Even though I know the time I spend digging through them in one day for socks is equal to the time to put it all away, I procrastinate this task beyond belief! And worse yet, I've enabled it by buying more laundry baskets!!

3. Share one of your healthy "obsessions" with us.

Singing! The extra oxygen is good for the brain or something...but I know it makes the people I live with nuts (but we're even on that see #4)

4. Share the habit of a spouse, friend or loved one that drives you C-R-A-Z-Y.

Leaving the drawers open - it looks like the bedroom has been ransacked. All three of my guys do this and it drives me NUTS.

5. "I'd love to get into the habit of ___________________."

Putting the laundry away the day it's folded.

Bonus: What is one small action you might take immediately to make #5 a reality

Giving away those extra laundry baskets (and then I could claim another fifty fewer category!)