I RULE at Sunday!

Up at 9:30, mom called, 7 loaves of banana bread in the oven (two banana chocolate, three banana walnut, two plain), dishwasher going, kitchen cleaned – and it’s not even 11am. WHO’S AWESOME? I’M AWESOME!

Did you know that it’s very difficult to bake when you’ve got a near-obsessive compulsion to have clean hands? It’s true! I absolutely HATE having anything on my hands, and baking is not a tidy job. It’s why I can’t make anything that involves ingredient manipulation, like shaped cookies or pies – I’d have to touch the dough and I just can’t do that. Having sticky or dirty hands is so uncomfortable to me that it makes me panic a little, especially if there’s no easy way to get them clean. Ever see me fish ice out of my drink and rub it all over my hands? Yeah, that’s me with a desperate need to clean myself off. I’ve always had an aversion to being sticky, but I think I can pinpoint the moment it turned into a phobia: we were at Circle in Calgary, celebrating Yule. The candy was flowing fast and furious, and people had brought their children to the party. At one point in the night, we had to form a large circle and hold hands – and to my left was a small sticky child with a cold, who had, mere moments before, sneezed into his hands and wiped them off onto his pants. He was covered in crumbs and germs, and I had to hold his hand for what seemed like forever – it makes me shudder to this day; remembering the horrible sensation of icky sticky snotty child hand tightly clutching mine. It may have been a festive Yule, but a compulsion was born: clean hands, all the time, or a little piece of me dies inside.

My other phobia – and this is an actual phobia; if it happened for longer than 3 seconds every two months I would scream out loud – involves hair dryers.

I am off to shower! It’s time to finish my Giftmas shopping!

ninjamas!