About Me

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I live on the ocean, write women's fiction, love to read so much that it's an addiction rather than a hobby (I read an average of a book a day). I live on the wet west coast so it's a good thing that I like to walk in the rain.

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

House cleaning - bah, humbug?


So what it is you hate most about cleaning your house? The toilet? The floor? The windows? The stairs or the corners you have to move everything in the room to get to? Under the bed? Over the stove?

I HATE vacuuming. I hate the noise of it, I hate having to drag around the stupid vacuum, I hate having to move things to get under them, I hate (in my tiny apartment) being unable to vacuum behind or under certain things. Everything else that has to be done I can live with, in fact, some days I even enjoy it. Though maybe that's because, no matter how poor I am, I always find the money to pay for a cleaning lady to show up every couple of weeks.

Why?

Because cleaning the house is a perfect excuse not to write. It's so easy to say, when things aren't going well, I have to wash the floor or clean the tub or scrub the tiles. I can spend hours cleaning the refrigerator or dusting the dozens of bookshelves or windexing the windows or the glass table or moving all the knick-knacks and dusting underneath them. As it is, there's enough to be done without doing all the basic stuff. My new cleaning lady doesn't do anything fancy. She vacuums, washes the floors (all 4 or 5 square feet of them), cleans the bathroom and the kitchen. She doesn't dust anything except what's obvious, doesn't move anything, but she's done things that I can't then pretend I have to do.

Oh, I still find myself cleaning the windows or occasionally dusting something that's caught the light the wrong way, but other than that? I work very hard at convincing myself not to clean.

One less excuse to avoid writing...

Kate

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