A Clean House is the Impossible Dream.

It should be obvious to everyone by now, that I am not exactly a domestic goddess. Unless by that you mean a collector of domestic animals. And, since I’m being honest, I can’t control most of them.

The really odd thing for someone who lives with a bunch of dogs, a cat and at least two horses in the back yard, I really love a clean house. In fact, when I had a real job that paid me on the regular, I hired an amazing lady who came every other week and made me place sparkle. It helped that she and my dogs had a deeply felt mutual admiration.

 It was awesome. I’d leave a dump in the morning and return to happy dogs and a fresh smelling shiny house. Ah, memories.

I not only hate to clean, but I don’t cook. It’s not that I can’t – every two weeks I whip of two trays of turkey loaf for the dogs. I just find cooking pointless. I mean obviously I do eat and thoroughly enjoy it, especially if it’s bad and fattening. But to sit down, pick a recipe, go out and buy ingredients and take bunch of time just for me to eat in five minutes seems well, dumb.

I completely appreciate people who love to cook. They find it soothing and cathartic.

Not so much for me.

I tried it once. I did a trial run of one of those meal services. Every week I’d get a box with all of the ingredients for three meals and simple to follow recipes. Each meal was enormous, so I would divide all of them and be good for at least a week. My freezer was never so full. In theory, it was cheaper than shopping.

There were two problems. First, I’m a pescatarian, so I don’t eat meat (fish and dairy are okay). This wasn’t an option, so I chose vegetarian, because most of the time I am. The food lived up to every cliché about vegetarian eating. It was dull, boring and tasteless.

I am not a foodie, but yick.

Also, and I don’t know if it was just these specific recipes, or all recipes, because as I said, I don’t cook, but it took a huge number of bowls and prep containers. Literally every bowl and knife in my kitchen was in play. Which meant a ton of clean-up.

After a few weeks I cancelled and went back to my normal life.

One of my conundrums is that while I dislike housecleaning, I really enjoy having a clean house.

I’m not a pig. Mostly I’m pretty tidy. I never leave dirty dishes in my sink. Living in an apartment with a roach issue cured me of that. I learned really quickly to wash up immediately. Even so, every night my cat would go into the kitchen and bat around the bugs for fun.

Gross.

I also do laundry regularly. That includes changing and washing my sheets weekly. I love clean sheets. If I wasn’t so lazy I’d be like Oprah, and change them every three days. I suspect she has someone who does it for her. Sigh.

Sadly for me, tidy is not the same as super clean. I vacuum several times a week (remember all those paws that run in and out a will?) and throw out papers. What I don’t do often enough, is wash floors and dust my tchotchkes.

I can almost get away with it during the winter when the windows and doors are closed. But this year we barely had winter. It was 90 degrees for a few days in January. I left doors, windows and the catio open a lot. So a ton of dust and dirt from the paddock and yard migrate into my house. (A hummingbird flew in too, but that was kind of cool since I got it out unhurt.)

All of this is yet another reason to worry about climate change.

I went into a cleaning frenzy this week. I really did it up. Washed the floors. Scrubbed the bathrooms. All the dog stuffies went into the toy box.  I even washed the shelves in the fridge and took out the produce drawers and washed them. Who knew that it was possible to take them out?

Seriously, I might have had a weird new variation of COVID. (COVID-Cleaning?)

I even emptied the cabinet where I keep staples. That was eye-opening. I discovered I had two cylinders of salt. I don’t use much salt. In fact, I use so little that I realized one of the containers was a store brand from where I went to college.

Does salt go bad? I didn’t know, so I put it back on the shelf.

There was also an unopened package of food coloring, and three boxes of brownie mix. I like to bake occasionally, so I kept those too. Ditto for the vanilla, the cupcake tins and birthday candles.

As I looked around my clean house I was so pleased with myself that I took the dogs for a walk.

We were only gone for about an hour, but when we returned the place was covered with dust and ripped dog toys.

I blame Tilly the cat.