Adventures in Cleaning

by tess

Sadly, I am to cleaning what Carrot Top is to comedy: the living, breathing antithesis of the art.

For years we've had a lady come and clean our house every two weeks. She's a nice woman and has done a perfectly adequate job. The thing is: she doesn't speak any English. And, not surprisingly, I speak no Brazilian Portuguese. I had assumed she spoke Spanish and occasionally printed out different instructions to her from a free online translator. Since they were in the wrong language, she couldn’t read them. How was I to know? But even had they been translated to the proper language, free translations aren’t always accurate. I asked a Spanish-speaking friend to review one of these housekeeper notes; she spent two solid weeks laughing at me. So just a word of warning about that: you could get in lots of trouble inviting your new Chinese neighbor to a dinner of “benumbed hot vegetables fries f*ck silk” (NO, I didn’t make that up!! I’m just not that clever!) when you’re actually preparing hot and spicy garlic greens stir-fried with shredded dried tofu.

So our wonderful new non-economy of the new millennium has drastically cut into our disposable income which means, of course, that the housekeeper had to go. It was sad telling her (via hand gestures) because I knew I wasn't the first struggling to make her understand that I just couldn't afford her even though I know she needs the money. Not an awesome day for either one of us.

And even less awesome is The Hubs and I cleaning for ourselves. You’d think that two college-educated, middle-aged homeowners would be capable of this feat. You’d be wrong. Although we don’t live in squalor, we are admittedly less impressed by cleanliness than others seem to be. Our neighbors, the Obsessive Osbornes, have thrown out a mop every single month for the past five years. How can two people create so much filth that a mop must be discarded every four weeks? I lived alone for ten years without ever feeling required to buy one, and The Hubs and I have owned exactly two in fifteen years. I’m betting that eating off their driveway would be cleaner than eating in our kitchen. But, really, who’d want to?

When The Hubs and I first met, I observed him “cleaning” his furniture for one of our dates. This “cleaning” consisted primarily of The Patented Spit and Rub Technique wherein he licked his fingers and rubbed the cat fur into a little ball, then dropped the fur-ball to the floor. Repeatedly. Picture it: this means that you're re-licking your now cat fur-encrusted hand. I believe my reaction might have been, “That’s disgusting! Do you have any more beer?”

Today during my very first vacuum-the-white-fur-off-the-black-dining-room-chairs event, I worked for at least 15 seconds before wondering how the housekeeper ever managed to remove the fur. I'm assuming that she spent more than 15 seconds, but even at 20 seconds … very little progress. Spit-and-Rub to the rescue. It worked a zillion times better than our top-of-the-line vacuum which requires a PhD in Physics to operate. The only problem being that gruesome fur-ball lodged in my throat. Fortunately I have a beer to wash it down.