This is why I'm no good at housework

We’ve got a lot of visitors passing through over the next few weeks, so the plan was to spend today cleaning the house. Ok, so I blew that for a start by also arranging to spend the morning chatting with the Washington DC bookcrossers as a test run for the chat we’re doing during the convention. But eventually I tore myself away from the fun and decided to get some housework done.

Actually, there wasn’t all that much to do. MrPloppy had done his normal housework yesterday so the key stuff like cleaning the toilet and bathroom, and dusting and hoovering the rest of the house were done, so really all that needed doing was a bit of tidying up, and a few little jobs here and there. So here’s the FutureCat approach:

1. Decide the most important job is to move the boxes of books still sitting in the hallway from when Dad dropped them off last week.
2. Start to move boxes, but then notice the mirror he gave us is still there too
3. Decide to hang the mirror first so it’s not in the way
4. Spend quarter of an hour searching through the garage for a picture hook and hammer
5. Spend another quarter of an hour trying to find a stud in the wall (Among the many other weird features of our house is impossible-to-find studs. The tapping with your knuckles trick doesn’t work, electronic stud-finders don’t work – even measuring along from the doorways doesn’t work. Nobody has ever managed to find a stud in this house other than by sheer luck.)
6. Give up and just bung the picture-hook up in a random spot and hope the wall-board is strong enough to hold it.
7. Hang the mirror, then notice it’s very dusty
8. Get some window cleaner and polish the mirror
9. Decide to give the glass of the pictures hanging beside it a quick wipe down while I’m there
10. Remember that one of the pictures needs a minor repair, so go and get the superglue
11. While I’ve got the superglue out, decide to glue up the couple of cable-ties that have come loose from the ceiling (Another feature of this house is that it wasn’t designed with the internet in mind, so there’s only one phone outlet, in a really stupid place. So we had to lead a phone line extension along the ceiling to the study to connect up the modem.)
12. While I’m up at ceiling height, notice there’s some fly-specks on the wallpaper
13. Get a damp cloth to wipe them off
14. Remember the wonderful thing about walls is that they’re large continuous surfaces, so you can’t clean one part without cleaning the whole thing
15. Spend the next hour or so wiping down all of the walls
16. While wiping the walls, accidentally knock the linen cupboard open, and notice how untidy it is
17. Pull out all the towels and re-fold them, and rearrange the whole cupboard…

So have you spotted it yet? Yep, the boxes of books are still in the hallway!

Oh well, at least I got lots of other things done!