Folks who’ve had to live with me know that I’m not a particularly neat person. I attribute it to just always juggling too many things – a clean home ranks among the priorities, but it’s handled in amongst all of the other things that vie for my time and attention. It bothers me when I stop and look around my house and see things that need attention, but my times to stop are few, and the times when I actually have a moment to do something about it seem even fewer. I’ve often been tempted to hire professionals to come in and do it for me, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to do it. One, I’d be embarassed to have someone else clean my house. Two, it feels like cheating, like I somehow can’t handle the own mess that I make. But, boy, does it seem like a losing battle, this housework stuff. The best I ever seem to do is to keep a reasonably low level of clutter (reasonably low varying depending on my particular time to pick up vs. clutter tolerance level balance), and then rotate through areas of the house, making each one individually at least cleaner than it was. The whole house never seems to be clean at once, and that’s not even counting tackling the basement. It’s not as if we have a large house, either- in fact, I’m fairly well convinced that I never want a large house, just because then the cleaning problem would expand with the increased square footage.

Tomorrow’s task list looms large, even without the household cleaning chores. The lawn needs mowed, and we need to get a new lawn mower because the old one’s decided it’s time to retire. The nursery needs its paint job to be completed. Milk’s mostly gone, so we need to do a grocery run, and heck, might as well do the weekly shopping if you’ve got to wander in the grocery store for something else. And that’s before the vacuuming, dusting, bathroom cleaning, and floor mopping that ought to happen, too. Even if we didn’t aim to keep the Sabbath on Sunday, there’s really no room for chore spillage there, as we have duties at church, and it’ll be Jason’s birthday, so we’ll have cake/ice cream/fancy lunch. Monday it’s back to work, with an hour or so available in the evening after Cora’s gone to bed.

How did folks ever do this before time-saving devices like dishwashers, washing machines, and vacuums??? When women had six or seven children running around, how’d they then have time to tidy up the place and make the dinner? Granted, they didn’t have indoor plumbing, so no bathrooms to scrub, but I’m not ready to retreat to a little shack in the backyard with a half-moon cut out in the door. (Is that where we get the idea of mooning someone, I wonder?)

Just my rant for the evening, I guess… spent a bit of time attacking the kitchen, but feel like someone else walking in would notice what’s _not_ been done, whereas I’m the only one who notices that, gee, it looks a lot better! Pretty depressing…