Yeah – today is Cleaning Day!  The one day a month my Cleaning Lady tears up my house.  It was supposed to be Monday, but she had to reschedule.  Which really pisses me off.  Since she only comes once a month, things are getting pretty desperate by the time my day rolls around.  So putting it off for a few extra days isn’t pretty.  I have basically banned anyone from entering my house at all this week until she gets here to save us from our own filth.

Oh sure – I do clean in between her visits.  I still vacuum every week and dust when I notice there’s some laying around.  And of course I must do the bathrooms on a regular basis.  I  live with 3 boys – toothpaste and pee . . . need I say more.

But my little cleaning angel comes once a month to give it the good top to bottom once-over.  So that I can breathe easy knowing that at least once a month it gets a good scrubbing in those corners that I generally neglect.  Hey – I work all week and try to cram grocery shopping, laundry, yard work, kids sports activities and social engagements into a two day weekend.  Who wants to spend any leftover time cleaning?

Yes, I’m fortunate.  Yes, I really appreciate it.  Yes, I’d love to have her come more often than once a month, but I’ll take what I can and be happy about it.  And yes, I could be cleaning my house right this very minute, but I’ve decided to blog instead, and frankly that brings me much more joy.

And frankly she’s not really THAT good  (in fact she was recently fired by my friend that also used her).  Oh sure, a pretty good job once a month is way better than a not-done-at-all job, but I do pay her to clean.  And to clean well.  That was the deal when I hired her.  “YOU do the really good deep clean every month, and I’ll touch it up in between” I said.  Not the other way around.

But do you know how hard it is to find a really good, reliable, reasonably priced Cleaning Lady???  I’ve gone through a few of them over the years for various reasons (we moved, they quit, they sucked) and just the thought of having to go through the process of finding her replacement . . . well, I don’t even want to think about it.

But tonight I’ll come home from working all day and sitting in traffic for close to an hour, and I’ll open the front door to see the vacuum lines in the carpet, feel the squeaky-clean ceramic and hardwood floors beneath my feet and sniff the distinctive smell of Lavender Pine-Sol in the air and . . . ahhhhhhh . . . she’ll be worth every cent.