Let’s get something out in the open. I’ve never claimed to
be the world’s best housekeeper. Dusting, vacuuming, washing dishes - they’re
all necessary evils that I avoid like – well, like laundry. There is, however,
one chore I definitely detest more than others. Mopping.
In this house it is a constant battle to keep the kitchen
floor even semi-clean. I wish I could say it’s just because of the animal fur
and mud being tracked in, the normal pet-owning, spouse-tolerating reasons you
would expect. But you know that’s not the end of it.
My kitchen floor is a magnet for disaster.
Case in point: I finally got around to washing the floor
last weekend. Please note, I will not be responding to any inquiries regarding
how long it had been. The act of washing the kitchen floor requires moving
furniture, shaking out the mat everyone is supposed to wipe their feet on that is never really
free of grit even after vacuuming and slamming it against the vinyl siding(which now has a big gray blotch on it),
sweeping, and washing the blasted dishes in the kitchen sink so I can soak the
mop in it. Really, I just wanted to nap by that point.
After blocking all doorways and forbidding any living thing
to enter for the next 20 minutes, my kitchen floor was clean. Practically
spotless. You could eat off a 2-square-inch spot of that floor… for about 30
seconds. Then the Golden Retriever walked through and little fur puppies once
again wound their way around the table and chair legs. The cat appeared for her
evening snack and left morselettes in the corner under the cabinets. Spouse
wandered through leaving tiny droppings of dirt and other unidentified matter
from the bottom of his fake Crocs.
As if that wasn’t exhausting and traumatic enough, the next
morning I reached into the refrigerator to take out eggs for breakfast. I
hadn’t noticed that the carton was ripped. The carton went one way, the eggs another, and the next thing
you know...
“I’ll have a half dozen raw eggs spread across my clean
kitchen floor and under the fridge, please.”
Not to be outdone, the following evening the kitchen
cabinets decided to stage a coup, and chose the canola oil to be their
representative. As I was about to pour a small amount into a pan, the oil
pushed itself out of my hands and flowed as quickly as it could onto the gas
stove before lunging for the floor. I caught it in the nick of “What’s going on
here??” It took twice as long to clean up the oil as it did the eggs from the
day before, and I swear I could’ve just lit the dang floor on fire and cooked
the already scrambled eggs quicker.
If I happened to love housekeeping, these little mishaps
wouldn’t rattle me in the least. I would have a comprehensive collection of
cleaning products in place of the rags that I currently neglect to shake out
until I have to declare the dust as a resident. I would toss the used vacuum
bag more often rather than wait until something claws at me through the nozzle.
Visitors would no longer be able to write their name in the particles on the
television stand.
Best of all, the mop head would never look used because, naturally,
I would wash the floor so often there would be no dirt to dredge up.
But I’m never going to love housekeeping. I am more of the
mindset of my hero, Erma Bombeck, who said, “Housework, if you do it right,
will kill you.”
What’s my solution to avoid this fate? I’m just going to
collect the dog dust bunnies, spread them around the floor and claim that we
installed a shag rug in the kitchen.
(Journal Tribune 10/5/14 edited)
Too funny! This sounds very familiar. I carried on with this exact same saga....until I finally hired a cleaning lady.
ReplyDelete