Daily Prompt: Those Dishes Won’t Do Themselves (Unfortunately)

What’s the household task you most dislike doing? Why do you think that is — is it the task itself, or something more?
Photographers, artists, poets: show us HOME.

My track record with cleaning the house is not great. My husband is better at keeping house than I am. Just the other day, he was telling his Mother that if I found a good job with good pay where he could be a stay-at-home, he would gladly keep the house cleaned. I reminded him that wouldn’t happen during deer, duck, or turkey season. When my sister and I got to the age where we could stay at home and watch ourselves until Mom and Dad got there, we were great at doing things “half-assed”. That was the word my Mom used for it. I guess looking back now though; we did do a lot of things “half-assed”. Laundry, dishes, straightening up the living room, our rooms, the trash, but I think it’s more because I would rather be outside than cooped up doing something inside. I’m a big procrastinator. So I’ve had to train myself to at least spend one hour… okay sometimes half hour, cleaning my own house.

In college, I didn’t have the luxury of two things (technically three) in most places I lived. I didn’t have a washing machine, dryer, and a dishwasher. Personally if not for all the money spent, I actually enjoyed going to the launder mat to get all my laundry done. I’m a do it all at once type of girl, so laundry wasn’t an issue. It was the dishes. I was horrible at them. I would cook stuff in one pot or only have baked chicken for dinner to keep from having a humongous amount of dishes. It seems like such an easy concept to clean up after yourself, but when it came to dishes, I was as stubborn as a mule being lead to water.

Now that I have my own house and a new dishwasher, I don’t mind doing dishes. Seems like the easiest task to do. Laundry is my second least favorite thing to do since I don’t own my own launder mat, and it seems that I have more single socks than pairs. I guess the number one thing would have to be vacuuming. First off, I can’t spell it. (Thank goodness for spell check.) Second, when we bought our house, a traveling salesman stopped by and talked us into spending $2000 on this Hyla vacuum. Don’t get me wrong. It works! But the fact that I am still making the payments on it when I could have taken an easier route and only spent $200 on a vacuum, bothers the crap out of me. What made me buy it in the first place was all those memories of my mom fixing belts and picking hers up and slamming it back down in frustration at whichever new vacuum it was that she bought this time. We were hell on vacuums growing up.

This Hyla vacuum is supposed to pick up everything including the dog, it’s indestructible, and it cleans the air. You have to fill it up with water and after vacuuming, you have to dump it. If you don’t and wait a couple of days, the whole house smells like wet dog. It really is a great vacuum. My husband, being the true cleaner of the house, loves to drag it out and turn it on for an hour to “clean the air” after he is done vacuuming. I don’t know how well it actually cleans it but it does smell better. This usually happens when I’m at home and want to talk and it sounds like the ocean has moved into our living room and causes me to get moody from all the white noise. After he is done vacuuming and “cleaning the air”, you would think that he would put it back up. Nope. It sits in the hallway in front of MY bathroom waiting to be put up by me. Being the rebel that I am, I usually give it a couple of days, let it stub my toe, curse at it, and then stick it back in its rightful place.

“Get in that coat closet now, you damned vacuum!!!”

Before I sat down here to blog about which chore I hated, I really didn’t know that I loathed vacuuming so much. I guess because it’s the last thing I think about doing. So there you have it, I hate vacuuming. Didn’t know it, but I do now. Dishes and laundry have more priority over floors and I hate our carpet anyways. It’s old and stained from the previous owners. I fantasize about having wood floors one day….sigh…one day…

~Kalamity