Where are those damn house elves?

It's only fair that messy people should marry neat people. Do you know the chaos that results when two messy people marry?

Robert and I have lots better things to do than housework. (Anyone who says they don't is lying.) We'd rather tiptoe through the debris than spend a few hours clearing it. Oh, I go on a tear once in a while and clean/scrub/reorganize until I collapse, but right away, it gets dirty again! What's the freakin' point?

To add to our, ah, untidiness (slovenliness is such an ugly word), we live on a dirt road with a whole passel of indoor quadripeds. Between the dust and the dander, I can get a surface absolutely spotless -- shiny enough to see my own grouchy face in -- and while I'm standing there admiring it, the dust and dander start to settle again. Within an hour or so, depending on the amount of traffic on the road and the level of activity inside the house, I can write obscenities on the surface. Again, what's the freakin' point?

I wash dishes, get a drink to soothe my parched throat after all that work, and voila, there's another dirty dish. Spend the day doing laundry, undress to sink into fresh clean sheets, and leave a pile of dirty clothes behind. If I vacuum, one dash through by the dogs is all it takes to litter the floor again. I can't get ahead. I can work my fingers to the bone, and I get to enjoy the results for, oh, thirty or forty minutes. (Remember that Hoyt Axton song: "Work your fingers to the bone, and what do you get? Bony fingers.")

Granted, I've never been fond of housework. It used to involve a lot of threats from my mother when I lived at home. She told me once that she worried about me when we lived in California, because when she came to visit, I was cleaning house twice a day. (I was amazingly bored -- a depth of boredom no longer possible for me to reach. I wrote and sold my first book not long after that. I quit cleaning, too. And gave up cooking. We ate out at least twice a day for years.)

Also when we lived in California, I tried combatting the boredom by returning to school (with a major in Film and Television Production and Accounting). At the end of the semester, we were coming back to Oklahoma for Christmas as soon as my finals were over -- and I had five finals in two days. Somebody had it in for me, I was sure -- though I was offered the chance to reschedule a couple of them. I turned it down so we wouldn't have to delay our trip. If we had delayed, we would have missed the ice storm that stuck us in Texas for a couple of days. Funny how things work out, isn't it?

Anyway, so I took the finals, we packed up and headed out the next day, spent two of the coldest weeks I could remember in Oklahoma, then drove back to California. (Many years have passed, but I do still remember that it was seventy-some degrees the night we got there. For the first time in two weeks, I got warm.)

We grabbed the vital stuff -- mostly the kiddo's presents -- and hauled our tired, thawing bodies to the door. Robert unlocked the door, then let the kiddo enter first. He skidded to a stop, looked around, and said, "Oh my God, we've been robbed!"

Not robbed. While studying for and taking finals and shopping for and wrapping Christmas gifts and packing for the Christmas trip, I hadn't done any cleaning. The house only looked ransacked.

Some things never change. Rachel9:58 AM