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Show Do you remember Sisyphus Housework never actually gets done it's no surprise they get sucked up, they don't have any arms to hang onto the carpet with. Come to think of it, houseclean-ing houseclean-ing has gotten a lot more difficult since my son arrived. At first it was just the odd toy thrown from a I don't actually clean anything, you understand. I just move the mess from one place to another. I've found that merely changing the way the mess looks has a therapeutic effect. I wish there was some way to Short Cummings KEVIN CUMMINGS Staff Reporter Do you remember Sisyphus? In Greek legends, he was the guy who cheated death. The Greek gods were so ticked off at him that they condemned him to spend eternity rolling a heavy rock up a big hill. When he got to the top, the rock rolled back down. The way I see it, he got off lucky. They could have condemned him to an eternity of housework. At least Sisyphus got the rock to the top of the hill from time to tune. With housework you never actually get anything done. My wife and I have divided up the housework more-or-less equally. equal-ly. (She says it's more equal for me, less equal for her.) Among other things, I get to pick up the house. If there's a stack of Dr. Suess books on the floor, I pick them up and put them in a drawer. Clothing gets stuffed in a hamper. Junk mail gets piled under the telephone. If a pile of papers gets too big, I just box 'em up and put 'em in the basement. base-ment. This is why my basement needs cleaning fairly frequently. marriage, when I didn't have any children, I had to clean the carpet once. In the two years since my son was born, I've cleaned the carpet 15 times. I'm the charter member of the carpet-shampoo-of-the-month club. If I had any sense, I would have gotten a baby food-colored carpet to begin with. I think house cleaning is the one area where scientists have really let us down. Oh sure, they've come up with all kinds of chemicals to polish wood, deodorize carpets, shine kitchen kit-chen and bathroom faucets, and clean glass without streaking. AH of those things are great, but what I really need is something that'll use the chemicals. Something that'll do the cleaning for me. Actually, my mom had something like that. She had me. Just the other day I was telling her how lucky she was to have my brother and me. If it weren't for us, she would never have gotten anything cleaned up. Can anybody explain to me why she found that so amusing? apply this same theory to vacuuming. vacuum-ing. Vacuuming is the one chore that I actually have to do. I haul the vacuum out of the closet, and run it back and forth over the rug. From time to time the vacuum actually picks something up. Usually it's one of the little people my two-year-old plays with. This means that I have to dismantle the vacuum to rescue the little person. Of course blanket. As he got more mobile, he left a trail of toys wherever he crawled. Once he could walk, things got really bad. He escalated from toys to foodstuffs. Once upon a time I had a nice, sky-blue carpet Now it's dotted with little green, yellow, and brown stains. It looks like a aerial photo of the South Sea Islands. During the first three years of my |