Random Thought #4: I Hate to Clean

I hate to clean. I could be wrong, but I hate it with a vengence that I think may be unparalleled. It isn't that I enjoy living like a slob, so I do feel compelled to clean at least every once in awhile. But the problem with cleaning is that you're never really done. I will think that everything is looking really nice, and then I will notice that the top of the microwave is all dusty. Well, I won't feel like the place is really clean when the top of the microwave looks like crap, so I have to dust that. And then I notice that the computer screen is a little dusty, and that the crumbs around the toaster seem to have multiplied even though I just cleaned that area. It's never good enough.

Somehow I manage to stop myself before I go too crazy and decide to just move.

A friend of mine says that she just acknowledges that the dust won. I think it's good advice.

Cat hair is the worst. If I don't cover up my desk chair with a towel, within five minutes it will be completely covered in cat hair, because the cats love to lie down on it. The only good news is that when I sit in it in its cat-hair-covered state, I do not become covered in cat hair, because it still sticks to the chair.

Yes, I even have books about cleaning! Once one of my cats had a UTI and peed on my rather expensive bed, and I tried every cleaning trick known to humanity, enzyme products, using a black light to see if the stain still showed up (which means the cats can still smell it), club soda, borax, baking soda, you name it. Finally it seemed to be clean, and I flipped it over and put a bowl of food on the bed. This is kind of a neat trick. Cats don't like to pee where they eat, so putting a bowl of food somewhere helps them remember that that place is not a bathroom.

I seem to have gotten away from my original premise of reviewing mostly fiction books. Apparently I have been thinking more random thoughts than reading in the past few days, but I will do another fiction book review soon.

Anyway, these books have some really good cleaning suggestions, and helped me weather my cat's health problems.

How the Queen Cleans Everything: Handy Advice for a Clean House, Cleaner Laundry, and a Year of Timely Tips, by Linda Cobb (New York: Atria Books, 2002). Extremely thorough. This is a compendium of three of Cobb's bestselling books. In the introduction, the author says although she loves talking about housework, she hates doing it. I find this extremely hard to believe. The level of detail in this book suggests a degree of obsession with cleaning that I find highly disturbing. But, I challenge anyone to have a cleaning question that this book does not cover, so it's really useful.

Haley's Cleaning Hints, by Graham and Rosemary Haley (New York: New American Library, 2000). This book also has many useful hints. The focus is on saving money by using common household items (i.e., baking soda, ammonia, even toothpaste) instead of buying a lot of expensive cleaning products.