Yuh yuh

I hate housework. No, I mean, I totally loathe hate despise housework. And it's not just the usual housework -- cooking, laundry, bathroom cleaning -- it's the insidious housework. The stealth housework. The housework I didn't know I had to do until it's staring me in the face, TAUNTING me, and DARING me, to ignore it for yet another day/week/month/year. Stealth housework. You know what I'm talking about. It's the little jobs, the things you didn't know you had to do until you open up the dryer and discover clothes in there that have been tumbled dry god only knows how many days/weeks/months/years ago. Or the dinner napkins that need to be ironed and folded and put away. Or the collection of bags that somehow escapes from behind cabinet doors and blow across the living room until suddenly, it's like I'm a two-legged cactus surrounded by plastic tumbleweed in my own living room.

Stealth housecleaning is evil. It's the moment when you discover that taking out the trash isn't going to be a 30-second job, but rather a 5 minute thing because there is some kind of weird brown goop growing on the side of your trash can. Other stealth tasks that I'm pointedly ignoring at the moment: the pile of receipts by the shredder that need to be shredded. There's the stack of dry cleaning that's just not going to walk itself over to the dry cleaners no matter how much and how hard I will them to. Shoes seem to sneak out of the closet when I'm not looking so when I come home, I trip over them (remember, most days I'm wearing heels of 3" or higher) and then I'm forced -- FORCED -- to put them away before I can do anything else. The ironing board -- the IKEA one that by most rights should come with a Swedish ironing boy -- never quite makes it back into the laundry room except when I have company because for some reason, wrinkles never, ever go away, no matter how high you put the heat. I am, without doubt, an ironing fool, but most days, you can't tell. Thank God dry-cleaning is $1.18 per regular garment.

Most days, I just drop my various bags on the floor, my keys slide across the kitchen counter and I slump in the recliner and reach for the remote control. Bare minimum, I think, bare minimum so I don't get evicted. But sooner, rather than later, something steathily will catch my eye, I'll feel guilty, turn off the television, and take a feather duster to me my faux plant because there's nothing sadder than formerly proud silk wilting under the weight of accumulated dust.