#147 In which our hero talks about housekeeping.

Both The Scientist and I like the house to be clean. Sadly, we are both terrible housekeepers. We wish we were better about it, but it’s wishing like I wish the hole in the ozone layer would close up, or I wish Ohioans would stop voting Republican. That is to say, things that we can’t change nor expect to change any time soon.

We each have our own issues. Personally, I am a piler. I tend to arrange my crap in stacks, and if there’s a pile of stuff, I’m more likely to just dump more stuff on top of it, not sort it and throw out what I don’t need. I think I’ve become better about it, and the only areas of the new house that really suffer are the office and one corner of the kitchen, where the new mail tends to go. And if the old mail is still there when the new mail arrives, well, I pile it up. The general lack of counter space in the kitchen only makes this more of a pain in the ass.

Now, The Scientist has an altogether different problem. My wife is a proclaimer. Every so often she’ll make a pronouncement like, “From now on, every Friday I am going to vacuum all the carpeting!” or “Starting tomorrow, I’m going to clean one bathroom every Wednesday, so they all get cleaned once a month!” What usually happens is that she follows through with the pronouncement once, maybe, then it falls by the wayside. Right now she’s reading this and saying, “Look, I try to do it, but sometimes I’m busy and it doesn’t get done as quickly or as often as I’d like.” To which I say, honey, that’s fine. But since it always goes this way, so why not skip the in-between stuff and just admit that you don’t want to clean?

So The Scientist sees my piles of crap and thinks, “Christ, why won’t he just throw some of this stuff away?” and I look at the rest of the house and think, “Jesus, didn’t she say she was going to vacuum every week?” The end result is that we just don’t clean very much.

But, there is one big motivation that gets us off our butts and makes us break out the buckets and mops: guests. Since we like a clean house we want to at least give the illusion that we keep a neat house… so there’s always a couple days of mad cleaning before people come over. And right now, since we’re having friends over for dinner tomorrow, the house looks great! And once I mop the floors tonight, the illusion will be complete.

This really is the answer to our problems. We don’t need to clean more often, we just need to have more parties.