Get out of this Room-ba!

I’m going to let you in on a little secret about me: I hate vacuuming.

I know, I know. You were probably thinking to yourself, “That Smidge, he just loves writing books, eating nachos, and vacuuming.”

But alas, only two of those things are accurate. I hate the task of vacuuming, and I also hate the word. I can never spell it right. I always think it should have two C’s and one U. I’m going to write my congressman.

Anyway, since I dislike vacuuming so much, you can imagine how excited I was when I found a reasonably-priced Roomba at Fry’s Electronics. (If you are unfamiliar with Fry’s, it’s a strange, semi-nationwide chain of stores that give you the impression that a Walmart, a Radio Shack, and a 7-Eleven all got together and had a love child. You can buy a 60-inch flat screen TV, a no-kink garden hose, a three-pack of Barbie dolls, a ten-micro-farad capacitor for your circuit board, and a 64-ounce soda all at the same cash register.)

Roombas are made by a company called iRobot, and just like the iPhone, the new ones cost about the same amount as a semester at Yale. But apparently, just like the iPhone, last year’s models are looked down upon by the hipster robotic vacuum in-crowd, so I was able to score one for what a semester at a midwestern junior college might cost. It was on the aisle between the Samsung refrigerators and the pool noodles.

I brought it home, absolutely giddy with how much time and frustration it was about to save me.

And then I watched it work.

I don’t think it’s saving me any time at all, and it’s certainly not reducing my frustration levels. I was under the impression when I purchased it that you just push the button and walk away, letting it clean your house for you, but that’s not how it works. It must be constantly monitored and given verbal directions, because it seems to be a total vacuuming moron.

That’s the table leg. Just go around it. Yes, that’s the same one. You ran into it twice within five seconds. Who programmed you?

Go left! Left!

No!

Left!

OK, now you’re stuck under the easy chair. Why would you go under there? You have sensors on your front. Use them!

Oh, my God, get out from under the chair. Get out! OK, fine, let me lift it up. OK, there you go. Now go left. Left!

Why would you make a 180 after you just got stuck under that chair? Why are you going back?

Here, let me block you with my foot. Yes, I don’t want you to go back under there. That’s it, turn around.

No! Don’t come back to my foot!

Left!

OK, good, now you’re heading the right direction. Get that carpet. Wait. Where are you going? Why are you leaving this room? You made one six-inch-wide pass at the living room carpet and you’re leaving? There’s a lot more carpet!!

Why would you go back to that table leg?

OK, good. Get the hardwood floors. This is why you’re here. Get the dog hair. Looking good. I’m going to leave you now and go do something else.

I need to… what’s that clicking sound? That’s a baseboard, why are you… that’s a wall. Why are you just running into it? Are you stuck on the baseboard? Seriously? How is that possible? Did your designer not plan for baseboards?? Get off! Just go left!!! OK, let me kick you loose, and then I really have to go do other things. I can’t be here with you the whole… get out of the drapes!

Just go left!

Dining room, OK. Great, looking good. No, that’s a chair. Don’t go under… why? Why would you go under the chair? Just spin around and go back out the way you came. What is hard about that?? Why would you go back there? OK, now! Go left!

Let me just lift the chair up for you. OK, get out. Go get the carpet. Don’t… sweet mother Mary and Joseph, why would you go back under the same damn chair!?!?

OK, seriously, I need to go. Just get the carpet over there to the left.

That’s the coffee table. I don’t think you fit under… yes, you’re stuck. Oh, you have a nice female voice with a soothing accent in there to tell me you’re stuck. I can see that, but thanks for the verbal heads-up. Let me just get you out of there. OK, now go get the… No! Go left! WHY WOULD YOU GO BACK TO THE SAME PLACE YOU JUST GOT STUCK!?!?  

OK, go do… another chiming sound? What does that one mean? Now where are you going? Back to the dock? Oh, battery is low… well, OK. Thanks for cleaning under all those chairs. Maybe next time we could get more of the actual floor? Have a great rest.

For those of you who watch too many sci-fi movies and worry that the machines are going to take over the world, I wouldn’t sweat it. I don’t think we’re quite there yet.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2018 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

High Pressure Shopping

Yesterday was Prime Day on Amazon. At this point, I would assume that every person in the entire civilized world is an Amazon Prime member, so you no doubt knew that.

The first item that caught my attention was a 9” tall, 5” diameter white metal cylinder with the title “Furbo Dog Camera.”

At first I thought it was like a dog toy, where you could teach your dog to carry it around and take pictures of interesting stuff, like other dogs’ butts and holes in the lawn. But on further investigation, it turns out it’s supposed to just sit on the shelf or counter and act as a canine baby monitor.

All the features and other reasons why I should buy it were very confusing, but there was a handy video to explain everything.

The video featured Cha Cha, a Husky-looking dog, approximately 40-60 pounds, who lives in an apartment with a single woman who leaves him at home to head off to work for the day.

When he’s barking at the door in the middle of the day, she receives a “Cha Cha is barking” alert on her Furbo smartphone app, and she is able to talk to him to calm him down via the two-way microphone and speaker communication system. Her office mates look at her with the appropriate amount of distain.

Later in the day, after an important meeting where she is no doubt ridiculed behind her back by her coworkers for talking to her dog on her phone, she is able to check in on Cha Cha, even though the sun has gone down and the apartment is dark, because Furbo’s camera has night vision.

But my favorite part of the video was when she gives Cha Cha a treat in the middle of the day, via the Furbo’s treat-tossing hole. You heard me. The Furbo has a hole in the middle of it from which it can toss a treat to the dog. Along with a camera and a microphone, this little 9” x 5” cylinder has a bamboo wood cover and is filled with delicious dog treats.

This is how I know this is a fake product. And Cha Cha is obviously a fake dog, because after the first treat launched out, every dog, no matter what size or how well trained, would immediately remove the pint-sized Furbo from the shelf, gnaw the bamboo cover off, and snarf down every single treat contained inside.

Furbo claims to have 1900 reviews with a 4-star average rating, which is obviously a complete fabrication, or else every positive review is about how white it kept their dog’s teeth from chewing all that bamboo.

More Prime Day Deals were coming fast and furious, in what appeared to be a random order, but as we know, Amazon is owned by an astronaut, and astronauts never do things randomly. You don’t just fly your rocket to wherever. There is always some rhyme or reason to the products Amazon presents you with. For instance, I have a dog, so the Furbo ad made sense, even if the product itself is patently ridiculous. I was, however, a little confused by two other deals I saw back to back.

The first was Poo-Pourri Before-You-Go Toilet Spray. If you haven’t heard of this product, it’s something you spray on top of the toilet water before you poop. I am not making that up. It apparently helps trap odors under the water, sort of like a flower-scented layer of Saran wrap. (Note: Saran wrap of any scent does NOT work for this application.)

Again, if you are unfamiliar, I implore you to look up the Poo-Pourri ad campaign with the nice British lady who speaks very frankly about her poop. The ads are solid. (Pun intended)

The original 2-oz bottle was available for only $6.51, dropped from the original price of $9.95, but I had to move on the deal and plop it into my cart in the next 3 hours and 10 minutes before the offer was flushed out of the system. I passed. (Again, all puns intended, however, completely unnecessary and juvenile)

Floating there, right next to the Poo-Pourri, was the next Prime Day Deal. For a limited time, I could score a Generac SpeedWash Model 6882 2900-PSI Gas-Powered Pressure Washer for only $349.00. I don’t know what the original price was, but that sounds like a smokin’ deal to me. I mean, that’s only $0.12 per PSI. Where else are you going to find PSI’s that cheap? Nowhere, man!

Amazon has obviously figured out that I like power tools, probably using the ingenious algorithm of, “He’s a dude. Sell him power tools.” But what I can’t figure out is what a 2900-PSI pressure washer has in common with an anti-stink toilet spray. They have to be connected to each other in one of Amazon’s internal algorithms, because I have never shopped for anything even remotely connected to poo spray on the internet.

I have purchased Saran wrap before, but that can’t be it. The only possible explanation is there must be a strange sector of power tool-loving men out there who have inexplicably rejected toilet paper in favor of pressure washers. A mobile, gas-powered, 2900-PSI bidet, if you will. I will not. These men are probably from Alaska, or Montana, or Detroit, and I have no idea how I became associated with them.

Either that, or the Poo-Pourri and the pressure washer are related to my dog somehow, but she very rarely uses the toilet, and I think she’d bite me if I hit her with 2900 PSI. It’s all very confusing.

I’ll tell you what, though. Speaking of toilets and pressure washers, what the hell have we been doing all these years with that silly little toilet brush? When it comes time to clean the bathroom, the Generac SpeedWash 6882 would put the hurt on that job in a hurry! Why didn’t I think of that before?

Excuse me, I need to get back to Amazon and see if that deal is still available.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2018 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Coast to Coast Dirt

It is time once again for our annual house cleaning. When my beautiful wife went back to work full-time and left me here to type away on this computer and forage the cupboards for midmorning snacks, I promised her I would handle all the cleaning.

Looking back on it, I think she probably figured I would keep the same cleaning schedule she had been maintaining. She obviously figured wrong.

We’ve had lengthy discussions on this topic, and piecing together all the information I’ve received from her over the years, I think her philosophy is that you’re supposed to clean things almost on a daily basis, so as to keep the house clean.

That makes no sense to me. If you clean every day, the house will never be dirty. Where’s the sense of accomplishment in that plan? That’s like being a cop in a town where no one ever breaks the law. Bo-ring! I don’t want to be Sheriff Andy Taylor from the sleepy little town of Mayberry. I want to be Dirty Harry Callahan from the mean streets of San Francisco. I want the house to become filthy, so when I clean it up, people actually notice.

My wife, bless her heart, doesn’t understand the Dirty Harry movies.

Even though she fails to see the brilliance of Clint Eastwood, she tends to emulate some of his scarier character traits when the house gets a little too dusty, or “disgustingly filthy,” as she calls it. Let’s just say this time of year, when the holidays approach and house guests are imminent, I am glad she’s not armed.

So, the time is upon us once again for the annual deep cleaning. It’s time for this Dirty Harry to send the filthy dirt packing, just in time for the family Thanksgiving week.

At least, it was time, until my entire house cleaning philosophy was turned upside down yesterday by an article on an art exhibit in New York City. A plucky young journalist named Kyle Chayka on a blog called The Paris Review wrote a piece about something called The Earth Room.

Foolishly, I had been concentrating all these years on removing the dirt from my house. I am an idiot. What I apparently need to do is bring more dirt in. A lot more. If I can cover the second floor of my home in a twenty-two-inch deep layer of dirt, I’m in business. If I can do that, my wife and I will never have to work again, the kids will be taken care of, and we can even hire someone to look after it for us.

How so, you ask? Simple. Fill up a second-floor home with dirt, never clean it out, and invite the public to come check it out. Duh.

Here’s a few snippets from Kyle’s column:

On SoHo’s cobblestoned Wooster Street, tucked above North Face and Lululemon boutiques stocked with neon athleisure, there is an otherwise empty, white, second-floor thirty-six-hundred-square-foot loft filled with 140 tons of dirt. It’s open to visitors from Wednesday through Sunday, noon to six P.M.

This is The New York Earth Room, an installation by the New York–based artist and musician Walter De Maria

In October 1977, the German art dealer Heiner Friedrich hosted The Earth Room as an exhibition at his gallery, which then occupied the Wooster Street space, where the dealer also lived in a front apartment. The installation was meant to last for three months, but it never left, and in 1980, Friedrich helped found the Dia Foundation, an art organization that has pledged to preserve De Maria’s work in (more or less) perpetuity. This year marks the fortieth anniversary of The Earth Room’s quiet persistence, which Dia is marking with commemorative events and ongoing exhibitions of De Maria’s work.

De Maria might have created The Earth Room, but its public face is Bill Dilworth, a sixty-three-year-old abstract painter who has been caring for the installation as its curator for the past twenty-eight years. Walk into the back office room past the glass-protected aperture that opens out onto the field and most days you’ll find Dilworth behind a high wood desk. Tall, gregarious, and preternaturally youthful (a result of dirt therapy?), he has thought more about this particular piece than just about anyone. “My life and my experience here is immersed in art, earth, quiet, and time,” he told me. “It’s a continual growth of time.”

I’m not sure if I have too much in common with Walter De Maria, but Bill Dilworth and I are like long-lost brothers. My life has been a continual growth of time as well, and both of the places we work are dirty.

De Maria called The Earth Room a “minimal horizontal interior earth sculpture.” I am now referring to my desk as a minimal horizontal interior dust sculpture.

I’m not sure how much my dust is currently worth on the open art market, but the Earth Room installation is estimated to be worth about a million dollars. A million bucks! And that’s just the dirt, not the apartment it’s in, which is undoubtedly worth more than that.

Hey, no sweat, aspiring New York artists. You want to build your own dirt room, but can’t afford the hefty price tag? I can hook you up. I have twice that much dirt in my backyard, and I’ll sell it all to you for half that price. While you’re here, I’ll even let you come inside and view the dust in my office. The admission is twenty-five dollars for adults. Seniors get a five-dollar discount, and kids ages twelve and under are half-price on Wednesdays.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go look up the words “athleisure” and “preternaturally,” and then I need to start hauling dirt upstairs.

I’ll be holding curator interviews soon, so send in your resumes now.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

I'm Not Thankful for Fake Trees

I am thankful for many things. My health, my family, HDTV, microbreweries, and the list goes on and on. One thing I am not thankful for, however, is fake trees, especially around the holidays.

I’m not talking about my well-documented struggles with our Fine Corinthian Christmas Tree, although the epic battle between man and eight-foot, pre-lit, faux pine tree will commence all too soon. No, I’m talking about the fake trees that “live” in our house year-round. We have three of them; two in our living room and one in our bedroom. They are about six or seven feet tall, with about six thousand little green leaves each, made out of some sort of space-age nylon fabric that looks surprisingly like actual leaves. I have no idea why military camouflage isn’t made out of the same material.

As Mr. Mom, one of my duties besides keeping the children alive all day is cleaning the house. My wife stays involved by constantly occasionally offering helpful suggestions on what needs to be cleaned. I take her suggestions into consideration, but usually we’re not on the same page regarding the urgency of the matter.

She becomes more and more inflexible on the subject of cleanliness as the holidays approach, and she shifts to downright immobile a few weeks before Thanksgiving. We host the family for turkey week, and somehow in my wife’s mind, that translates to “we shouldn’t have any dust on anything, and the toilets shouldn’t have pee on them.” Go figure.

Last year she wanted me to start cleaning the house two weeks early. Can you imagine!? A wise person once wrote - on one of those Facebook e-postcard things - “Trying to clean a house with kids in it is like trying to brush your teeth while eating Oreos.” When I bring up those sage words of advice to my wife, she just scowls at me and hands me a rag and a bottle of some type of cleaning solution. Some people just don’t appreciate solid internet wisdom.

So I dust. And scrub. And mop. And dust some more. Which brings me to my dislike of our fake trees. Everything else that I have to dust has some kind of purpose. The TV brings me life-sustaining sports programing, the refrigerator keeps the microbrews cold, and the bookshelves hold all the books that make it appear to guests as if we read a lot. Even the family pictures on the walls serve a purpose. They remind us of a simpler time when the boys were younger and weren’t as annoying. A time when they didn’t bring home so much homework, or so many school projects that I have to complete.

But the fake trees do nothing except collect dust as if they were in charge of attracting it from not only our house, but the entire neighborhood.

Every fiber of my male being wants to simply take them outside and hose them off. My wife has conveniently eliminated that option by rigidly fixing them inside giant decorative, painted clay flower pots that weigh roughly eight tons each. I think she got tired of having the trees fall over onto the kids. You only have to ruin a few of those clay pots by trying to roll them across the patio before you get the message loud and clear to stop doing that. Even if I could find a way to get them outside without severely retexturing their surface, the base inside the pot is covered with about five cubic yards of moss. I can’t tell if it’s fake moss or real moss, but either way, trying to get it out of the way would create a larger mess than the one I’m trying to clean in the first place.

So, I am simply stuck trying to clean the trees in place.

If our house looked like I always wanted it to, this would not be a problem. I would simply hose the trees down in place, because the walls and floors of our home would be stainless steel, and there would be a drain in the middle of every room. My wife insisted on plastered, painted walls and carpet, however, “just like all the other normal people have,” so here we are. Dust rag in hand, cleaning each and every individual leaf, one at a time.

Believe me; I tried to figure out a way to avoid a leaf-by-leaf cleaning. The air compressor and the vacuum were problematic to say the least. And I thought the “shaking the tree while running the whole-house fan” method would be much more effective than it was. I did manage to shake out two Lego guys and a sock, but no dust was removed. I even tried attaching the dust rag to my grout mixer bar and running it with my cordless power drill, but that just ended up twisting the little plastic tree branches up in a ball and ripping them out of the fake wood trunk. As a result, much like a real Christmas tree, one of our fake trees has a bald spot that needs to face the wall. Don’t tell my wife!

At least I learned that lesson with only one of the three trees. Actually, wait… come to think of it, we have four of them. Dammit! There’s one up in the game room that I missed. Sorry, I have to go now. I need to spend the next five hours of my life dusting individual leaves.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

I really don’t understand why we can’t have drains in the floors.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2014 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Fifty Shades of Shark

This past week the internet was all abuzz with the trailer for Fifty Shades of Grey, the movie version of the number one best-selling “adult erotica” book ever, written by a previously unknown British woman. It’s basically the Harry Potter of sex books. Never have so many housewives been so openly and publicly (I hope I spelled that correctly) excited about a porn movie coming out. Anne Rice could be heard saying, “Aw, come on, man!”

My guess is that married men accounted for at least half the book sales, although not a single man was actually reading the book. Men were buying the shelves clean of Fifty Shades on the advice of buddies, who were reporting major upticks in bedroom activity while their wives were reading the book. No one knew what the book was about, and frankly, no one cared. The results seemed fairly universal, and no one was going to question it.

To date, I believe Dave Barry is the only man to have actually read it, and that was purely for research, since his wife had not read it (yet). My wife hasn’t read it (yet) either, and I am just not willing to duplicate research, so I just read Dave’s take on it to get the gist. Apparently, women like poorly-written stories about hot single billionaires who like kinky sex. As average-looking, married, non-billionaire men who are just fine with regular sex, we all had no idea this was the case. If we had known, we all would have sat down and penned our own poorly-written stories like that to give to our wives.

You see, a man’s interest in sex stays at the exact same level his entire adult life, and that level can generally be described as, “high” and “ever-present.”

Whereas, women’s interest in sex seems to take a rather dramatic downturn when children are introduced into the picture. This may be - at first, anyway - because children are usually introduced through one of the fun parts and then claim immediate ownership of the others. After that initial phase is over, but still not helping the situation at all, the kids tend to hang around. This leaves all of us married men wondering what the hell just happened and how to get things back to the way they were. None of us have come up with any good long-term answers yet, mainly because asking the kids to leave the house and not come back is frowned upon for the first eighteen or so years. So we swarm to any temporary solutions we hear of, and the aforementioned best-selling socially-acceptable book full of smut seemed to be one of those temporary solutions.

While my wife is well aware of our differences in what is an assumed good time for “it” - meaning she understands the difference between anytime and not tonight - I was recently able to really highlight the difference through a deft and rather humorous analogy with a household appliance.

We have a Shark steam mop for our hardwood floors. Operation of said steam mop over the last year has fallen to me in my capacity as Mr. Mom. It had been almost a year since she had used it when she fired it up to mop the floors last month. She was halfway through when she started to get frustrated.

“This thing keeps stopping!”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It stops steaming every once in a while and you have to wait for it to start again.”

“I know,” I said, “it always does that.”

“No it doesn’t! It never did that before.”

“It’s done that ever since I started using it,” I said.

“It’s broken. How can you stand it?”

Hahahahaha, snort! (sound of me laughing hysterically)

“What’s so funny?”

“Well,” I laughed, “I guess I’m just used to having to wait for things to get steamy, whereas you are used to dealing with things that are always ready to go.”

I’m pretty sure she enjoyed the humorous and incredibly insightful analogy as much as I did. Or was it a metaphor? Who cares, it was funny. And I’m fairly sure she took it to heart, too, because for our wedding anniversary a few weeks ago, she got me a brand new Shark steam mop.

Oh, yeah! You know what that means! My wife is very, very interested… in clean floors.

Oh, well. At least she has a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey. She hasn’t read it yet, despite the many, many times I have moved it to the top of her stack, but it’s only a matter of time.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2014 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Glory Chores

I’m discovering something about myself as I get deeper into my Mr. Mom role here at home. I’m tidy, but I’m not very clean. Not me personally, mind you, I mean the house. I myself shower every day and I smell terrific. Ask anyone near me.

The house, on the other hand, does not get cleaned nearly as often as I do. Neither do the kids come to think of it. The boys are lucky to get a bath twice a week, but that is really a conscious parenting decision, and not at all an obvious sign of laziness or neglect. We do not want our boys staying too clean. If we constantly remove all the bacteria from their little bodies they may be so clean they never get sick. That might be a convenient short-term parenting plan, but it will no doubt lead to adulthoods fraught with illness, possibly one day culminating in losing that coveted Taco Bell front counter cashier position to Timmy, who hasn’t had a sick day in five years because his genius parents hardly ever bathed him. No, we respect our children’s career ambitions too much to risk their future for our convenience. We’re good like that. Plus, cleaning up after a sick kid every so often, while disgusting at the time, is actually less work that bathing three squirmy boys every night, so it’s really a win-win.

Anyway, back to the house. Ever since I took over the housework duties, my wife has been nearly constantly reminding me of parts of the house that require cleaning, like countertops, and floors, and carpet, and bathroom mirrors. At first, I kept asking her, “Why? Did one of the boys throw up or pee on something?”, but as time went on and her answer to that question remained, “Of course not, you idiot,” I began to realize that she expected me to clean those things with startling regularity, just because.

I was quite taken aback by this. After further questioning, it came out that she expected me to be mopping our hardwood floors once a week. Once a week, people! What is this, Michael Jackson’s crazy hypoallergenic cleanroom?

As it turns out, when she was in charge of the cooking and cleaning, she would wipe things down and sweep things up every day. EVERY DAY. That’s crazy talk. This unnerving revelation has caused me to examine some things about myself.

I thought back to my days as a bachelor, and tried to remember what my cleaning habits - if any - were. I remember my little apartments always being tidy. I don’t like piles or clutter, except on my desk. My desk piles may look disorganized and random to the casual observer, but they are actually purposeful and well thought out. My desk piles are a sophisticated filing system consisting of nine specific categories:

Things I am meaning to read, but haven’t

Things I did read, but didn’t want to file or throw away for some reason

Things that will jog my memory about stuff I need to do

Things I need to do, but haven’t

Things I am blatantly ignoring until an unspecified time in the future

Things that need to be filed, but haven’t been

Things that don’t have a file yet, but need one

Things I need in the next month, so no sense putting them away in a file

Miscellaneous things I don’t know where to file

Besides my desk, I have always kept the rest of my square footage clutter-free. For instance, as a bachelor, I always kept the empty beer bottles nice and neat, back in their original carrying cases for easy disposal. I kept my kitchen mess-less by only eating food out of cardboard boxes or Styrofoam containers, and because I always made it a point to eat on the couch in front of the TV, the dining room table never had a spec of food on it. Dust, yes. Food, no.

I just don’t think it’s in my DNA to want a dust-free house, but apparently it’s important to my wife. This leads us to the thing I realized about myself the other day. There I was, standing in the kitchen looking for something to clean, and it hit me. I don’t look at the stovetop and think, “That really needs a wipe down.”  I look at it and think, “Would my wife think that needs a wipe down?” If my answer is yes, only then do I consider cleaning it.

I’m cleaning for the glory, not the actual cleaning itself. I am only wiping and sweeping and mopping to prove that I'm doing my job. More to the point, to prove that I'm not slacking off completely. I’m in it for the recognition. I have no real tangible personal need to keep things clean. I vacuum, but only when my wife is home to hear it. I sweep and wipe, but only when it can be readily seen that I, in fact, did it. Wiping down the counter every day without my wife noticing seems like a total waste of time to me.

Am I deeply flawed or just male? No telling.

One thing working to my advantage(?) in this situation is my apparent dust-blindness. I either don’t see dust, or it doesn’t register to me that it’s a problem, until after my wife has called me over, put her hands on her hips, and pointed out how dusty the top of the (insert any household surface here) is. Here’s where I’m in kind of a strange situation. When I do finally clean that surface, and she uses her magical dust vision to see that it is finally dust-free, I feel good about it because she can see that I actually cleaned something, and she feels like I am moderately competent for the time being. However, there is the problem of her feeling like I am totally useless on all those days leading up to the day I cleaned, when the invisible-to-everyone-else-but-her dust layer is building up.

It’s that time between cleanings that’s the problem.

I guess that could be solved by cleaning every day, but where’s the glory in that?

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2014 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!