Tag Archives: cleaning

A Treatise on Filth

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Indeed there are the days when a laid-off dad has too much time on his hands even after the hours of cover-letter editing, resume-tweaking, opportunity-poring, and reading of cautionary tales on how everything you’re doing to look for a job is wrong and what today’s now and with-it hiring managers are looking for are these other things over here which will be the wrong things by this time next week. And so he cleans.

This isn’t one of those days. Or one of those weeks.

That’s because this week Noodle, Beast and She all have a week off from school – and then some because of this past winter’s complete lack of snow days. So because the kids and their friends and the three cats have been in and out of the house tracking March Mudness all over the place, I’ve come down with a thorough case of the Ah-Screw-Its, and I’ve passed it on to She, who might have some space there under that blanket on the couch where she’s watching one of the Hunger Games movies.

Or so I thought, because She read this over my shoulder and now it’s time to reacquaint myself with my old pal Mr. Hoover and his friends Sponge and Swiffer.

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And then I vacuumed the garage ceiling

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Once you’ve done all the job-applyin’ you can usefully do for one day, what’s an unwillingly-housetethered housedad to do in an empty house on a rainy day…but clean?

First, the laundry – because I’ll be doggoned if anybody pigeonholes me as Another Dad Who’s Useless At Housework. Three loads: properly separated, washed, dried, folded the way She folds them, and put away.

Then, the dishes – all clean, right down to the hand-washing of the mugs with fade-prone graphics. Then, the floors – vacuum/scrub the major crud and swiffer the rest.

Scrub the countertops, polish the stovetop, change the range hood air filter, pull out the oven and vacuum up the crud that found its way down there, wipe down the fridge shelves, the BATHROOM. Release the kraken of cleanliness! Inside the toilet, outside it, behind it…heck, pop the lid off and scrub away the accumulated nasties there as well. And on to the tub and the sink and the fixtures therein. See Brian scrub. Scrub, scrub, scrub. Over under sideways down, backwards forwards square and round.

Cat has emerged from her vantage point atop the kitchen cabinets, and she has dust bunnies clinging to her, and therefore…where’s that step-stool?…and would you look at all this crud up here on top of the cabinets? Gotta clean that. And in the spring they’ll need staining.

Feel free to stop me if this is starting to sound cabin feverish, because this is the part where I figured that as long as I had the step-stool out, it was time to have a go at some of the rarely-scrutinized and even-more-rarely cleaned parts of the house.

Which is what led me out to the garage, the ceiling mentioned in the title, and the question I meant to ask  you at the start of all this…

Is this customary behavior for a recently-unemployed parent? Is it welcome behavior? useful? Or did I do too much work in the bathroom without proper ventilation?

Your comments are most welcome.