A Little Gift

I bought myself a little gift today, the gift of Time; aka a house cleaner. I've never claimed to be the best housekeeper in the world or very good with money. When I was growing up, I used to do the dishes wrong so that my mom wouldn't ask me to do them anymore.

And even as an adult, I used to hide dirty dishes in the oven. You know, to let something "soak". One time, I turned the oven on to preheat it and forgot I had some plasticware inside. I had a seriously toxic fire of molten hot Tupperware blazing in my oven. The fire department came with sirens on because a neighbor had called about all of the billowing black smoke.

My mom helps out around my house a lot otherwise it would be even worse if she didn't help with the dishes and laundry. She helps out by doing my three day old dishes and washing weeks of dirty clothes.

I now have a sign in my living room that warns: My House Was Clean Last Week, You Should Have Seen It.

The other night I did a load of wash, and sure, it had been a while. I didn't think I put that much soap in the washer but evidently it had a different idea. The entire laundry room flooded. I never knew you could flood something just by putting too much soap in. I thought that was just in the movies. Well, I'm hear to tell you it's not. A repairman came out and told us there was nothing wrong with the washing machine...it was operator error. I tried to blame it on the Doodle since he doesn't talk but that seemed very suspicious.

So first thing this morning, I was up cleaning the house before the house cleaners came. I'm not sure what drives me to do that. I guess I want to trick them into thinking I could do it myself if I wanted or to show them that I really don't need them. But after they took one look at Jimmy's upstairs bathroom, I think the jig was up.

We had a house cleaner before but, like me, she wasn't so good at cleaning either. When I found myself, the worst housekeeper in history, giving her cleaning tips I knew it was time for a change. Our old house keeper couldn't really tell time either. She would always tell us what time she was coming and then show up 3 hours later. Maybe she was still on a different time zone. Then she would leave half way through the cleaning part for a few hours and come back to finish. Pretty soon it would be 8:00 pm and Jim would be getting irritated that she was still here vacuuming.

So the new cleaners seemed pretty good. There were 3 and they were in and out like clockwork and never disappeard once. I saw them clean things that I don't think have ever been cleaned before. They even moved the furniture. And my house smelled so nice and clean when they left--until "someone" caught the steaks on fire and now my house smells like charcoal but, that's another blog entry.

My house was so bad and hard to clean that what started out to be a prenegotiated price of $80 every two weeks, quickly went up to $120. But that's OK because there's nothing nicer than a clean house that I didn't have to clean before Jim gets home.