Cleaning Day #1

Today is cleaning day, not in the sense that I clean but in the sense that I am one of the great shamefaced multitude of stay-at-home parents who pays other people to clean my house for me.

If you're unfamiliar with this phenomenon, here's how it works - you do a crappy job cleaning your house for some significant period of time, until you come to a decision as a family that it would be best for everyone if someone actually cleaned the damn house every once in a while, and so you hire four members of some marginalized socioeconomic group to clean up after your privileged suburban ass.

Which sounds great until you realize that the reason you never clean anything is that every surface in the house has a two-foot layer of debris settled on top of it, made up of, say, clothes that may or may not be clean, pieces of construction paper with a cat's face drawn in marker the same color as the paper, half a jigsaw puzzle spilling out of a box that can't hold a jigsaw puzzle because some hairy neanderthal stepped on it, not even really by accident but more out of depraved indifference to the fate of the box, that sort of thing.

So obviously when your house is in that kind of condition no one can clean it, not even very dedicated, hardworking poor people.  So before the cleaners get there you have to clean up all the shit that is the whole reason you never clean (the cleaning part is actually rather pleasant once you get down to it, in my experience), and it takes hours and will show you exactly how out of control your entire living situation has gotten when you try to put away the fabric markers and you find that there are four separate bags of markers, each containing some part of three different sets of fabric markers, and also those bags contain things like pencils and hair ties and small bits of plastic that don't seem to do anything at all but are definitely an important part of some thing or other that little Daisy definitely needs in order to realize her potential as an artist or fashion designer or whatever the fuck.

So you get the picture, I would think.  It's a hard day.  A day of reckoning.  A tiring day.  And yet I care about you, Dear Reader.  So I stay up after putting the kids to bed to bring you this blog post.  And also to watch a bit of football.

If you're not a football fan, as I think many of the readers of this fine blog in fact are not, you may not even be aware of Thursday night football, which is only a few years old.  There is a game on Thursday nights that's not on TV and features two teams that just played four days ago, so they're all injured and sloppy and the game sucks.

You can watch the game if you either have NFL Network (which most people don't) or if you go to NFL.com and watch it online.  Except instead of actually showing you the horrible game online they just show you random bits and pieces of the horrible game and the rest of the time it's two guys just talking about the game in a cheap, tiny studio, or ads for stoner food like pizza and taco bell (that may just be my ads.)

So anyhow, I'm going to go watch that now, because I have no taste.  Enjoy your evening.  Your assignment is to not watch this awful football game.  I mean, what are you doing with your life, Dear Reader?