Can't get no satisfaction

Someday I will make enough money as a novelist to be able to pay a cleaning service. But until then, I have to do it myself and I have to confess, I’m no good at it. I can’t clean very well.

I’ve been in other people’s houses, people with children, people with pets as well as people without, and their homes always seem so much more spotless than mine. It’s depressing. So now and then I go on cleaning binges, where I really break out the elbow grease. Sadly, it never seems to make a difference. It’s an uphill battle and I always lose.

I have an extensive collection of cleaning products and a few handy gadgets like a steam cleaner [which I think I wore out – it doesn’t work so well anymore]. I bought that thing on a stick for cleaning windows [it doesn’t work]. I’ve bought dusters and polishers and all those presoaked cleaning pads that you stick on the end of a plastic mop [they smell nice and they pick up a lot of dirt, but they leave a lot of dirt behind too.] The one newfangled cleaning product I swear by is Mr. Clean’s Magic Eraser. By golly, those foamy little rectangular sponges are amazing! I’ve run around my whole house with one of those, cleaning smudges, fingerprints, and crayon marks with it. Love ‘em.

But despite my supply of Magic Erasers and other modern chemical wonderthings, I still look around and think, sheesh, what a mess. It just never looks clean in here. Maybe I’m too hard on myself. Maybe I look too closely at things at home that I don’t look at when I’m at someone else’s house. Maybe they have dog hair in the corners and smudges on the handle of the fridge and dust on the leaves of their houseplants and I just can’t see it. Hopefully when other people come to my house, they can’t see the dirt either.

Just another incentive to put away my dust cloth and write, write, write so one day I can sign my royalty checks over to a team of professionals who actually know how to clean.