Apartment Woes

The sheer number of tasks I want to accomplish in my apartment stagers the mind almost as much as my complete inability to make progress in accomplishing these tasks while my small people are alive.

A childless person may ask, "Why not work when they sleep?" and the sad, sad answer to this question is that there are only perhaps 20 minutes in the average day when both boys are asleep and I am awake, and I usually reserve those precious quiet moments for drinking coffee and building a little white-picket fence around my sanity.

At the top of the list of chores, washing the dishes and picking up everything off of the floor are tied. Both of these things I have independently accomplished in the past week, but neither stayed done. The best I can do with those two never-ending tasks is to try and think that at least I have enough food to eat and books to read, but as I usually find myself scarfing down my food with one hand while holding a child and am much more likely to be putting those books back on a shelf rather then reading them, this attempt at comfort brings little.

Second, I would like to wash and put away all of the dirty clothes, as nothing brings more joy than schlepping bundles of laundry up and down two floors to the basement laundry room I share with more than a hundred other people and back. My cup overfloweth.

Perhaps my next goal, washing the carpets I have under the kitchen table, should go with the paragraph above, as they also have to go in the washing machines. If that is the case, then my third goal is to vaccuum, which is followed closely by my fourth goal: steam cleaning.

(Let me remind you here that I am old and have ridiculously lame aspirations for my weekend adventures.)

My friend, who I know is a true friend based on her willingness to share with me such a prized possession, has given me the great honor of borrowing her carpet cleaner (insert celebratory music here). With it, I will rule to domestic sphere, annihilating coffee stains and pet misadventures in a single blow. My carpets, and thus my entire being, will glow with an angelic shimmer, and people from near and far will bow to my feet in admiration. Then, I will eradicate hunger from the face of the earth with a wave of my (borrowed) upolstry attachment without even smudging my mascara. The world will be my shimmering oyster, and I will be its happy, precious pearl.

Okay, so I may slighlty exaggerate, but, on the other hand, I will be really glad to have a clean carpet.