2000-02-06
It's 5:45 PM and I'm sitting on the living room couch, laptop perched on a breakfast-in-bed type tray with folding legs. B's on the phone in the other room and the tea kettle that he put on the stove a while ago is boiling away.
The living room, along with the rest of the house, is notably tidy, owing to the fact that we cleaned yesterday. Which is also sort of notable. You see, I'm a messy sort, not inclined to clean. I'm like the men you sometimes read about in self-help books: I really don't see the dirt. If you point it out to me, I see it, but otherwise I remain pretty oblivious.
B is not this way. He likes things tidier. I like them tidier, too, I'm just not very inclined to do anything about it. So I guess I lied when I said I don't see the dirt. I sort of see it, but I guess I've always had this hopelessness in the face of it. Kind of like why bother to clean when it'll just get dirty again?
At our wedding rehearsal, B suggested the vows be amended to include "in cleanliness and in sloth." Many times since, I've wished we'd gone ahead and done it; would've been good for a laugh and it wouldn't hurt to have it on the record.
Anyway, as you'd supposed, B tends to do most of the cleaning. There are things for which I take primary responsibility -- walking the dogs being one of them -- but he definitely takes the great part of the burden of cleaning. And he grumbles about it occasionally, and who can blame him? I have suggested in the past that we come up with some kind of list of chores; if I have to take the initiative to do something, I probably won't, but if I'm assigned a task, I'll usually do it. This list never materialized, but on Friday night I reiterated the suggestion and he made a list.
Saturday morning he pointed out that when he was a child, his family did their chores first thing Saturday morning, to get them out of the way. I could see the merit in that. So I ate breakfast and then, instead of heading over the Nearly New (for the first time in two weeks, due to the snow), I vacuumed the whole place. And then I cleaned the sink and toilet in one of the bathrooms. It felt good, you know.
And I'm suddenly a little embarrassed to be mentioning all this. I mean, in my last entry I revealed my poor driving. What's next?
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