Who wants a clean house

Sometimes when I'm actually home during the daytime and don't have to do anything, and can spend an hour or so turning my brain to mush in front of the Tay-Vay, I'll watch "Clean House", with Niecy. Of course, I should be cleaning my OWN house... but the fact of the matter is that I am a shit-ass housekeeper and it's all I can do to keep our little house looking even moderately presentable. Luckily, most of our friends are also shit-ass housekeepers so the embarrassment factor isn't too high. And it never fails that immediately after vacuuming, one of the cats will pop out a big ol' hairball in the middle of the floor. So sometimes I wonder what the fucking point is anyway. Who's great idea was it to put carpet in houses in the first place?

But I like "Clean House". I like it because, hey, it makes me feel better about my own lack of cleaning skills. One does not have to bushwack their way from my front door to my kitchen, or step over piles of stuff, or follow trails through the junk. There is no coating of unidentifiable funk on our stuff. Weird smells are passing, not permanent. We own a Kirby G5 and we use it. Ok, well, *I* use it. The carpet is a sort of uniform dinginess, but part of that is that we live next to a freeway and the particulates and dust gets tracked into the house- no matter how often I sweep the porch and walkway. It's just a fact of life.

I try not to bring more stuff into the house. For the most part, I have succeeded in reducing this to almost nothing... a mere trickle. And I am one who used to grab stuff off the side of the road with the idea that "I can do something with it". I even go through the crap once a month and give it away. I'm always giving shit away. Man, I haven't even seriously started in the garage yet, either, but there is always a box by the door filling up with stuff to contribute to someone else's junk habit. I don't want to deal with a garage sale, either. What I see with garage sales is that the shit floats from sale to sale, anyway. The people who used to live in this house had a garage sale every weekend, I guess. For the first six months we lived here, there were people banging on our door at weird hours on the weekend wondering where the damn garage sale was. I don't know! It isn't here! Shove off! And some of the passive-aggressive neighbors (how I hate people like that) with "It would be nice if those people still lived here and had their garage sale". Get the fuck out of my yard. Right now. (of note- I rarely respond to passive-aggressive behavior. I busted the smart half on it the other day. He didn't realize it was what he was doing. With me, you had better tell me straight up what you want, or I ignore you.)

So, thank you Niecy for the constant reminder that it isn't so terrible in my house. It isn't so great, but it isn't bad.