Not Miss Chatelaine...sorry kd lang

I am a tidy person.  I am houseproud, in a calm sort of way.  Yes, my children, I think I can work my way cautiously, and shamefacedly, to calm houseproud.  For one thing, in spite of our innate friendliness, we seldom have anyone in the house that doesn't already love us.

Sometimes, however,and let's pretend it was today, I bang smack up against the fact that I'm not really a good cleaner.  Dave is the cleaner, the meticulous details-oriented guy who doesn't just line things up under the sink, but pulls everything out, cleans the shelf, and puts things back neatly.  I would so admire that if he wasn't tempted to do it alphabetically, or by size and colour.

Where I'm sitting now, I can see shiny baseboards in the kitchen and I am content, nay ecstatic, that both the inside and the outside of my dishwasher are pristine white.  Usually, I'm a maintainer, not a full-out conscience-ridden scrubber, but the other day when Robyn was here, I thought it might be fun to have a picnic in the kitchen.  When I got down to that level, and came face-first with the baseboards, it was all I could do not to scoop Robyn up in her red bib and run screaming to the door.  And had I made it to the door, I would have had to turn myself in to the Children's Aid.

We had our dinner on my clean, eye-levelish, kitchen counter, which I keep shiny because it's so visible, and I vowed that I'd make a major change in my housekeeping habits.

That was two days ago, and in the interim, I had to see a movie, visit my fave bar, touch all the cosmetics at Shoppers Drugmart and do a whole lot of reading.

This morning, I got busy with many of the tools I have around here for Dave to use, put on some of my favourite tunes, donned my only housecleaning clothes and waded in.  It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but it was humbling.  And it played hell with my nailpolish.