Cleaning Furiously

I'm not a great housekeeper.

I admit it freely because I don't care that much. The house might be cluttered (mostly with books and magazines), but it's not DIRTY. There IS a subtle difference. And I don't cook, so that means there are no dirty pots and pans lying around, and that means there are no roaches (THANK GOD!) Because then I would have to move, and that is just too much trouble.

The one thing that I am absolutely HORRIBLE about is putting clothes away. I love to do laundry, to put it in the washer and dryer, and then to pull it out all clean and fresh and warm and smelling sooooo good ... mmmmm. Sometimes I even fold stuff right when it comes out of the dryer. Most of the time, though, I just throw it in the basket and take it upstairs, and every morning I will dig around until I find a clean towel or pair of jeans or whatever. On any given day, my bedroom could be confused with the back room at the Gap, and understandably so.

Yesterday when I got home from work, I had a note from my landlord: she would be coming in today to do some maintenance work on the air conditioner, and she needed to get into my attic to do so. This is not a problem ... except that the door to the attic is right next to my bedroom, where every article of clothing that I own was strewn about on the floor because of my morning ritual.

So obviously the first thing I did was procrastinate. For several hours, in fact (because I am just that awesome).

I am a good multi-tasker, so I hung up clothes during the commercials of The Amazing Race. I also folded my t-shirts using the method that I learned from Martha Stewart. [Y'all, that woman is a GENIUS. I can fit, like, fifteen t-shirts in one drawer now, because the shirts are folded so compactly].

Then, since I was so proud of my good work, I gave myself another two hour break.

Just when I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open, I decided to finish the task. It really only took about 15 minutes, but the whole time, I was just muttering to myself angrily, because I could have done all that work in about five minutes right after the clothes came out of the dryer, if I hadn't been so lazy.

That is what I hate about cleaning--that I put it off and put it off until finally I have no choice BUT to clean, and then a job that could have been finished in a few minutes takes me ... well, it takes me the whole night, since I don't finish everything in one sitting.

However, looking around right now, at my cleaned up floor, which I haven't seen in about a week, I just think, "I love this clean house! I should do this more often!"

But ... I probably won't.