Living in an Increasingly Cleaner House

This is NOT to malign Luis' keeping - such as it was - of the house when I went into Mo'town over Christmas. It looked like London after the Luftwafa came and laid waste to it. No, this time, although the duration was almost three times as long in the St. Clare's hospital, he really did not let it get as totally out of control as it had gotten the last time. When I'd asked him on the way home how it looked it, he said, "It's terrible - just awful."

No, not his idea of a joke.

Luis sometimes can be a momentarily immature little pain in the ass (it happens to the best of us - I won't grace you with MY failings but that is one bloody long list, let me tell you); but most of the time, like Spock, his logic is not in abeyance when it comes to certain things. He knows the exacting manner in which I prefer - operative word is prefer because I cannot always manage it once it reaches critical mass - to acknowledge the house as being clean. Well and truly clean. We have the cleaning ladies come every two weeks and they do a hell of a job. I do the daily pick up and such. So while the house was not the bombing of London, it was more like a couple of minor skirmishes with some very stupid... well... dishes. Yup. Dishes. One or two piles of socks. I can live with that.

When I came home the day after Christmas, I had stood there in open-mouthed shock at the unbelievable condition of the house! It was wrecked! It took me the better part of four days of very intensive labour to put it to rights, and even then that was in a basic way and not in the satisfying way a house - where the "homing uterus" can work correctly (think about it) - has everything in its rightful place and I bloody well know where those are.

This time, like I said, the kitchen was the worst, which I suspect is the standard room that requires the most work every single day. We live to a certain extent in our kitchens. When the mail comes in, it arrives on the kitchen counter. When groceries come in, they go straight to the kitchen and the foodstuffs go away first - all other room purchases are distributed last. When guests come over, you try to keep 'em in the living room or rec room or whatever, but eventually they all migrate - singly or en mass - to the warm, wondrous, fragrant kitchen!

The living room, in our case, often looks like the dining room should. Not the furniture - that is as it should be; my hanging chair, our wrap-around couch, the longish, low table, the fireplace, a couple of ancillary tables and the entertainment center. A typical living room. What isn't quite as typical as the average family - especially those with kids, which we are not and have no wish to emulate - is that we eat just about every meal in front of the telly. Luis is the driving force behind this far more than I am, but even then, I was raised by parents who did the same thing. For one, an electrician father and a go-go dancer mother do not a standard schedule make! So the eating together often fell by the wayside. The difference was that I ate every single meal with a book - one of MY books, not a school book (no need to ruin dinner, eh?) and read as voraciously as I ate. I still do that for breakfast and lunch. At dinner I join Luis in the living room for eats and telly and we talk through a lot of it, too.

Life with Luis is very rich and satisfying in conversation, even though sometimes, one of us wants more to watch the current viewing choice than the other wants to say something somewhat long winded. But most of the time we have a very good time kibitzing through whatever show we are watching.

But life with Luis also means being a slave to the house and (in the subject of cleaning) to him - not that he isn't physically fastidious, he is. He showers every day just like all us crazy Americans (as far as my foreign friends sometimes say. He wears good cologne, and dresses fairly nicely. His weight is an issue, but he doesn't get stinky fast. But when it comes to his surrounds, forget it. He doesn't "see" it. He comes home, dumps his clothes wherever. He cooks or buys food and leaves it out - dirty dishes and all. I'm not perfect about dirty dishes, but I do put them onto the kitchen counter or sink if I need to empty the dishwasher.

He is clueless. I am just disabled. What a match!