Litterbugs and housewreckers

Ever notice how dirty dishes multiply? Or the way one wayward sock on the floor soon results in a room’s total disarray?

Dutch scientists have proven the civic equivalent. A messy neighborhood, they found, led to an overall decline in behavior.

Lead author Kees Keizer of the University of Groningen reported in the journal “Science” that most people act appropriately to the circumstances, but some act lazy or selfish. When their actions are allowed to stand, others soon follow suit.

This is related to what law enforcement officials have long called the “broken window theory,” which says that signs of urban decay -- broken windows, graffiti, litter -- encourage petty crime.
Keizer told The Associated Press that while the researchers weren’t surprised that the theory held up, “we were, however, surprised by the size of the effect.”

For example, the scientists found an alley in a Dutch shopping area where people parked their bicycles. A “no littering” sign was on the wall. The researchers attached store flyers to the handlebars of the bikes, then watched to see what happened.

They found that 33 percent of the riders littered the alley with the flyers. But after the researchers sprayed the alley wall with graffiti, the number who littered jumped to 69 percent.

While such tests no doubt provided special insight into human behavior, the Dutch scientists could’ve skipped all that work. They could’ve simply asked those of us who are responsible for housework. We’re quite familiar with the broken window syndrome.

Take your kitchen, for example. If it’s clean and tidy, most people who use it are more likely to keep it that way. They’ll pick up after themselves, put their dishes in the dishwasher and mop up spluts on the countertops.

But leave your coffee spoon sitting out on the counter and see what happens. Within minutes, dishes and greasy utensils litter every surface, the sink is full and the floor’s freckled with sticky spots.

Say you move into the living room for some televised sports viewing. It’s lovely in there. The furniture gleams and the carpet is clean. But maybe it’s a little warm. So you remove your socks and set them in a tidy pile by your bare feet. Aah, that’s better.

By halftime, every horizontal surface is covered by open bags of pork rinds and pretzels, spilled salsa, random peanuts. The coffee table has more rings on it than the Olympic Games symbol. The carpet bears a fine coating of orange Cheetos dust. Perfect strangers have wandered into the room and are drinking your beer.

One little slip leads to a little mess, which results in ever-bigger messes until finally someone calls the Health Department and you have to move.

The slippery slope is steeper if there are children or teen-agers in the household. They go from “broken window” to complete slum faster than you can say “Pick that up!” One toy hits the floor, and the house soon looks like Santa’s sleigh blew up. Allow one stray sneaker and you’ll come back to a room that looks as if it’s been ransacked by looters.

Next thing you know, the children are engaged in petty crime. Then they’ll really be in Dutch.

Not-so-great room

Like many modern suburban homes, our house centers on a “great room” where the family does most of its living.

It’s an OK room, sure, but doesn’t “great room” sound pretentious? Seems like a real estate gimmick to me, though I suppose it would be hard to sell a house by advertising its not-so-great room or so-so room.

A great room performs the functions previously accomplished by a formal living room, family room, library/den/study and dining room. Today, we mush them all together, preferably open to the kitchen, which in newer homes is the size of a cruise ship.

The great room is a throwback to the “great hall” of the Middle Ages, the huge central room in a castle or manor house, with its feasts and fireplaces and animals underfoot. As homes got more complicated, the great hall gave way to collections of rooms with specialized functions: parlors, salons, drawing rooms, morning rooms, music rooms. This specialization continued until eventually, during Victorian times, there were rooms reserved strictly for fainting.

Today’s one-big-room model is great for entertaining, with easy kitchen access, open sightlines and high ceilings for the escape of noise and hot air, but the rest of the time, it presents problems.

For one thing, you’ve got to keep it clean. A visitor who walks in our front door can see at a glance everything from the living area to the patio to the kitchen. It’s readily apparent if we’ve left dishes sitting out or socks on the sofa. Ours has that “lived-in” look, with shoes and soft drinks sitting among scattered newspapers in the living room, and an array of battered pans on the stove. If we had a reception room or formal living room, we’d never use it and could keep it clean enough for visitors. Maybe.

The high ceiling lends a certain airiness, but all the heat goes up there instead of down by the furniture where we are shivering. And the whole area shares the same mingling aromas, which is fine until someone cooks cabbage.

It’s difficult to arrange furniture properly in an open room. Where do you put the reading lamps? How do you keep from snaking extension cords across the floor? Can you reach the end tables? Homeowners must rely on furniture “groupings,” which is a French term that means “take the long way around the sofa.”

Another problem with such floor plans is that kitchens tend to be too handy. Every time I look up from the TV, I see the kitchen. Look, food sitting right on the counter, just asking to be eaten! No wonder this country has an obesity epidemic. I, myself, currently weigh 723 pounds. At this point, I need a great room. A great big room.

Moms love the proximity of the kitchen because there’s a slim chance they might get help with the dishes if the rest of the family is nearby. At minimum, while Mom’s cooking supper, she can watch TV over her family’s collected heads.

A great room does give the family a wonderful place to congregate, if you like that sort of thing. Family members can multi-task -- cooking, eating, reading, watching TV, doing homework, clicking computers, sniffling, scratching, personal grooming, arguing, drinking, calling the police -- all in the same room at the same time. Until they drive one another crazy.

You can’t beat that kind of togetherness. It’s great.

Yuck-a-doo, it's a splut

Do you have spluts at your house?

Bet you do. You might not know it. Or, you might know spluts by another name. But you've got 'em.

Go look in the kitchen. Somewhere on that floor, no matter how recently you've mopped, there'll be a little splash-shaped sticky spot. That's a splut.

A splut begins its life as a simple drop. Juice, maybe. Spaghetti sauce. Some other substance produced by pets and/or teen-agers. Because of that old devil gravity, the substance reaches the floor, where it accumulates passing grime. Eventually, the splut becomes a noticeable smudge, growing ever blacker until somebody scrubs it away.

You won't find "splut" in the dictionary, but that's what we call those sticky spots at our house. Maybe you do, too. Or maybe you have your own word for spluts.

Families tend to accumulate made-up words like "splut" over time. Individual incidents inspire them, as do the peculiar behaviors of friends and relatives. If I said somebody "pulled an Uncle Charlie," many of you would smile and nod. Most of you would be thinking about different Charlies (presumably), but something each Charlie did slipped into the family vernacular, and it's been called an Uncle Charlie ever since.

Some families have secret languages of nonsense words, used to identify everything from favorite toys to favorite body parts. "Booboo" might mean "injury" at your house, but to your neighbors it's a bodily function and to the people across the street, it's their sweet immigrant grandma. Put these families together and say, "I gave their Booboo a booboo while she was taking a booboo," and it could mean most anything.

My family adopted "wobblywad" from a magazine. You know when a table wobbles, and you fold up a napkin or a matchbook cover and you put it under one leg to steady the table? That wadded-up leveling device is a "wobblywad."

Years ago, after a small electrical fire in the condo we rented, the landlord hired a cleaning service to get the smoke smell out of everything. The cleaning service owner took one look at our smoky home, threw his hands in the air and exclaimed, "Yuck-a-doo!"

We've used "yuck-a-doo" to respond to every gross or disgusting thing that's happened around our home since. It's gotten used a lot; we have boys.

The strangest one goes back to before we had kids, to when my wife and I lived in San Francisco. Our apartment's kitchen was small, but it was lined with more ceramic tile than the space shuttle. My wife was in the kitchen. I was around the corner, in my traditional spot, sprawled on the living room sofa.

My wife shouted something. I didn't hear her clearly, so I said, "What?" She repeated it. I still couldn't make it out. "What?"

This went on a few more times before she stalked into the living room and said, "What do you THINK I said?"

"I don't know, hon," I said, carefully. "From in here, it sounded like 'Eep-a-deep.'"

Situation defused. She fell out, laughing.

Ever since, when people yell at each other from opposite ends of the house, with resulting miscommunications, we call that "Eep-a-deep."

Only one problem: Neither of us can remember now what the original phrase was. What was she yelling from the kitchen? "Time to eat?" "Need a treat?" "Eat a beet?" "Beep a beef?"

Who knows? But "eep-a-deep" lives on.

Next week: How to clean up spluts with a "footrag."

Conquering a mountain of stuff

Somewhere in your home -- spare bedroom, attic, basement, garage -- lives the Repository of Stuff We Don’t Use Anymore.

It’s a mystical place of letter sweaters and souvenir ashtrays, baby clothes and broken crockery, Magic Eight Balls and eight-track tapes, outgrown toys and outmoded phones and old jeans that’ll fit again after we drop 20 pounds (yeah, right).

Once in a blue moon, someone in your household will feel compelled to clean out this accumulated detritus. We could make better use of that space, the thinking goes, and we’ll never, ever need this stuff again. Why not get rid of it?

This is an admirable ambition, but, as with so many things, it’s easier said than done. Parting with your old stuff is a hard, dirty job that requires elbow grease and grit and resolve. Not to mention backache medication and frequent hot showers and, quite possibly, an expensive divorce.

At our house, the Repository of Unused Stuff was in our three-car garage. I don’t want to say how much dusty stuff we had piled up, but there was barely room for two vehicles. You do the math.

This heap of random stuff didn’t bother me. Sure, we’d moved it all a couple of times. Sure, some of the boxes weren’t even labeled. But I figured, as long as I could get my minivan door open and squeeze inside, everything was fine. The stuff wasn’t hurting anything. We’d sort it out eventually. Maybe a small fire would solve the problem for us …

My wife had other ideas. The stacks of sacks and boxes and assorted belongings bugged her. She’d put up with this stuff for years, and it was high time we did something about it.
Of course, she’s got no time herself. She’s busy having a career. So it fell to me to tackle the garage. She urged me to leap into action, in a sort of X-Treme Spring-Cleaning Challenge, and conquer Mt. Stuff with speed and muscle and brainpower.

I’m not a leap-into-action sort of guy. I’m more of a sit-and-ponder-and-sigh type. When I do finally take action, it’s almost imperceptible.

I oozed out into the garage and started opening boxes and sorting through sacks. I hauled off stuff. I threw some away. I gave a lot to charity. Gradually, the mound of stuff grew smaller.

The goal was to make that third garage useable. Our older son has a car now, and if we could lose enough stuff, he could park indoors. Not that he’s ever home. Not that we care if his filthy car sits out in the weather. But you’ve got to set goals to take on a job like this.

After I got rid of a lot of stuff, I ran into a true dilemma. What remained -- extra furniture, an old microwave, a portable TV -- would be perfect for a dorm room or a first apartment. If I kept it, with an eye toward my son moving out soon, then he couldn’t park in the garage. If I got rid of it, he’d have another excuse to never leave home.

So I took all that stuff and put it in his car.

Kidding! It wouldn’t fit in his car. And he wouldn’t take the hint anyway.

No, I’m still stacking and sorting and throwing stuff out. Slowly making progress. Someday, I’ll be finished. That old stuff will be out of our lives, once and for all.

Then it’ll be time to get some new stuff.

(Editor's note: After this column appeared, I found a way to stack all the future apartment furniture around the walls so our son could park in the garage. It's still there. He still hasn't moved out. Maybe I could just furnish the garage and he could live out there. . .)

Boom bird

They say that comedy is tragedy plus time, but some things take longer than others to fall into the category of "funny story."

Maybe enough time has passed that we can finally view with humor the Day the Turkey Exploded.

On Thanksgiving a few years ago, we stayed home, just our nuclear family of four. My wife was in the mood to whip up a traditional Turkey Day feast, which was perfect because our teen-aged sons and I were in the mood to eat one. The timing couldn't have been better.

We had turkey with all the trimmings, and the meal was splendid and everyone behaved, more or less. We groaningly cleaned up the kitchen and repaired to the comfy chairs in our sock feet.

As usual, my wife put the remains of the turkey carcass into the pressure cooker to make stock. At our house, this is as much a tradition as cranberry sauce.

The pressure cooker cheerfully sputtered and hissed in the background while we watched televised football and purred to ourselves and massaged our distended bellies, as if they were pet bowling balls.

A bang sent us all leaping to our feet, followed by enormously loud hissing. Sounded like a boiler blowing up, or an explosion at the steam plant. We spun around in wide wonder, and found that a geyser of steam had erupted from the little vent hole in the lid of the pressure cooker, spreading into a wide "V" before reaching the 12-foot ceiling.

Yikes, stand back! It's gonna blow, mama! Don't touch it!

We ran around in circles, screaming warnings, the dog barking, until somebody ventured close enough to turn off the burner. The geyser died away. We got the pot off the heat. We stopped yelling. All was well, except that half the kitchen was covered in greasy residue and little bits of exploded turkey.

It changed the complexion of our Thanksgiving Day. Once we stopped shaking, it became Cleanup Day. We threw out the damaged pressure cooker. We mopped and scrubbed the kitchen. We moaned and shook our heads and got snippy with one another over the best techniques for dealing with this disaster. We discussed calling FEMA.

I made a special run to the store for a clean sponge mop for the white walls and ceiling. Probably the only guy in town who bought a mop on Thanksgiving Day. The supermarket's sales-tracking computer is still trying to figure that one out.

The mop got some of the greasy steam residue off, but it quickly became clear the whole kitchen would need repainting. The damaging steam left weird white-on-white streaks, and the whole house smelled like turkey drippings.

We lived with the aroma for a while. It was winter, after all. Couldn't open the windows while painting was done. Better to have a house that smelled vaguely of turkey than one that reeked of paint. When warm weather arrived, we had the whole house painted. Now, there's no evidence that this was the site of the Big Bird Blast of 2005.

Maybe we should put up a plaque.

Need an idea? Get a mop

The one question writers are always asked: Where do you get your ideas?

There are plenty of smart-alecky answers -- from other writers, from yo mama, the "idea store," China, secret government files, outer space, LSD trips, Satan. But, for me, the one that's most truthful probably is: From cleaning toilets.

Some of my best ideas have come while scrubbing stuff or raking leaves or vacuuming or doing other repetitive, mindless tasks, such as snacking.

One, the physical effort doesn't require much brainpower, so my mind can think about other things. Two, my subconscious sees an idle brain and feels it must yark up some ideas to keep me from dying of boredom. Three, sweaty, hard work reminds me that I don't want to do manual labor for a living, so I'd better come up with some ideas pretty darn quick.

No matter what your area of endeavor, when you're stuck for ideas, it pays to go find some physical activity to do. In my case, that's long-overdue housework, but you aspiring geniuses out there can pick whatever works for you. As long as the task doesn't take much concentration, that "work zone" can be an ideal place for generating ideas.

For example, I'll be vacuuming and think, why, I could do a column about . . . vacuuming! And, voila, before you know it, I've churned out 600 words of pure drivel. Moments like these make a writer proud.

Or, I'll be working on a novel and get stuck on a plot point, some niggling little impossibility in the storyline, and I'll wander off from my desk to sweep or something. When I return, I will have solved the problem, often without realizing I was working on it! Usually, the solution involves erasing page after page of gibberish, but, hey, that's part of the creative process, too.

If you try this method, not only are you likely to have some mental breakthrough (as opposed to the mental breakdown that can occur while sitting at a desk, staring into a blank computer screen for hours), but you will have accomplished something else simultaneously. Your ideas still might be terrible, but at least the toilets will be clean.

Remember to keep a pen and paper handy so you're ready when you're struck by a bolt of inspiration. I often get terrific ideas in the shower, the one place in the house where I can’t jot them down. A finger on steamy glass is only a temporary solution. By the time I get dried off, the ideas have evaporated.

The manual labor method of creative thinking does have its hazards. You can wander away from your desk and never come back. And some chores present their own temptations. Go to make the beds, for instance, and, next thing you know, you find yourself curled up under the covers, napping. Kitchen work often involves consumption of so many calories that your brain can slip into a sluggish stupor.

Bouncing between your desk and physical labor works best if you have a home office. If you are in a regular workplace and are stuck for ideas, you can take a walk or do some stretches or do something else physical, but your bosses will start to wonder about you if they find you scrubbing the toilets.

The janitorial staff, on the other hand, will think it's a great idea.

The filthy truth

Do you know why, in war movies, soldiers smear mud on their faces before engaging the enemy? Because it makes them invisible.

Dirt has magical properties. We can't see it. It can be right in front of us, and we look past it or around it or right through it without registering the thought, "Hey, it's dirty in here."

Oh, we can see filth when it's layered on really thick, such as in a service station restroom. Then we get all prissy about it, tiptoeing and making faces and acting like our bathroom at home is always, always spotless. It's easy to get on your high horse when the cleanup is someone else's problem.

But most of us have dirt right in our own homes. Tons of it. Grit and grime and dust bunnies. Windborne sand dunes and tracked-in mud and a fine powder of pollen over everything. It's no wonder so many of us suffer from allergies.

Right now, you're probably thinking: This guy's way off base. My house is perfectly clean. To which I reply: Hahaha on that. Even the best-kept homes have dust bunnies hiding in out-of-the-way corners.

If you don't believe me, conduct this simple experiment. Go to the heaviest piece of furniture in your house -- the piano, say, or that stuffed-full dresser in your bedroom -- and move it out from the wall. Once you recover from the strain, check out the floor where the furniture stood.
Disgusting, right? Doesn't it make you want to rearrange all the furniture and clean under it immediately? OK, maybe not, but it does give you an inkling of what kind of filth you're harboring in your home.

Most of us reach a sort of uneasy peace with hidden dirt: We can't see it, so it must not exist. Better to think that way than to spend every spare moment scrubbing stuff. We've got important TV to watch.

But once in a while, harsh reality rears its ugly head. We move a piece of furniture or investigate a strange smell or look under a bed and we see that, omigod, we live like pigs.

This happened at our house when we hired a crew to paint our home's interior while we were away on vacation. This seemed like the perfect scenario. We'd come home from a week away, and our house would be dazzlingly clean and fresh.

Not so much. The paint looked great, and the painters had been careful to cover all of our stuff so they didn't get paint on it. But in the process of painting, they'd moved all the furniture around, freeing the hidden filth.

Holy dust mites, Batman. It took the whole family a full day of vacuuming and dusting and wiping stuff before we could, once again, persuade ourselves that it was clean around here. Clean enough, anyway. The dirt had slipped back into its invisible form, waiting for the next time someone moves a sofa to reveal grime and stray popcorn and loose change.

Once again, we'd reached a standoff in the war on dirt. At least we didn't have to smear it on our faces.

When laundry goes bad

Every family needs a balanced division of labor.

Each household has many tasks that must be done regularly, and it's only fair that spouses divvy them up, according to time and ability and personal preference. Once kids reach a certain age, many chores can be dumped on them, but it still should be equitable. That's the democratic ideal.

A pivotal moment in my marriage came early on, when my wife and I made the following pact: She would pay the bills and do the household paperwork, and I would do all the laundry.

This was an ideal division of labor, pegged to ability (she's a whiz at organization; I can't do math) as well as personal preference (she hates laundry). I quickly found that laundry was something I could accomplish while watching sports on TV. Like I said, it was ideal.

Things change, of course. Once we had babies, I started wondering if I was getting a raw deal. The amount of laundry quadrupled and I found myself trying to fold, oh, 700 of those little "onesies" every week.

But household paperwork got more complicated, too. Mortgages and escrow accounts and insurance premiums and stock options and credit card statements and other math-related stuff I don't even pretend to understand.

The laundry load got somewhat easier after our sons passed the diapers-and-urp stage of their development. When they hit their teens. (Kidding!)

As the boys got older, I required them to round up their own dirty clothes. I wasn't about to prowl their filthy rooms in search of crunchy socks and moldy towels. If they wanted their clothes washed, they had to bring them to the laundry room.

The flaw in that plan: They didn't care if their laundry got done. They'd happily wear the same pair of jeans day in and day out, until the pants could stand up on their own and they could just leap into them every morning. In fact, they'd think that was "cool."

It became an exercise in nagging. Eventually, the clothes would appear and I'd wash them, along with whatever crayons, loose change, gravel and live frogs happened to be in the pockets.

I was griping about this situation, and my wife asked why didn't the boys do their own laundry. I raised several objections, including a dramatic rendition of a washer overflowing with suds, right out of an episode of "I Love Lucy," but my wife persisted, and we gave the boys the bad news.

Mostly, it's worked out okay. I still nag them when it becomes abundantly clear that their clothes need washing. They, so far, have not filled the house with suds.

But I know they're cutting corners, which brings me to the Hideous Shirt.

Years ago, in preparation for an Ugly Hawaiian Shirt contest, I made a thrift-store purchase of a brown-green-and-gold psychedelic number I thought was a sure winner, but it didn't even place. Who knew how ugly those shirts could get? Whew.

My younger son rescued the Hideous Shirt from the trash, pronounced it "cool" and took it to his room. He never wears it, but it regularly shows up in the laundry.

I know how this happens. After the requisite nagging, he does a clean sweep, picking up all clothes, dirty or clean, and throwing them in the washer. I watch the never-worn Hideous Shirt cycle through the laundry, and I chew my lips over the inefficiency and waste.

At least the boys aren't trying to balance the checkbook. Imagine how hideous that would be.

Another year, another beer

The start of a new year is the perfect time to organize your home office (or even your cubicle in a regular office).

It's time to discard old calendars, and replace them with shiny new ones filled with blank pages. Time to "strip" old files. Time to clean off your desk, down to the naked wood. Yes, it's truly a time of "out with the old and in with the nude."

Many workers let this opportunity slip by because they're too daunted by their messy offices to even attempt such a clean-up. These same people find themselves pawing through garbage bags in search of receipts on April 15.

How to tackle such a big job? It's a matter of sorting files and arranging folders and stacking up those unfinished projects you lost six months ago. Here's what you need to get started:

--Boxes. Use those left over from Christmas. They're probably in the garage.
--File folders. Get nice, new folders. They're cheap.
--Large envelopes. Ditto.
--Extra-large trash bags. Preferably clear ones. You may be hunting something in the bottom of one later.
--Stapler, paper clips, rubber bands, etc.
--Beer.

Assemble these items in your office, roll up your sleeves and get to work.

(If your office has a door that locks, you should lock yourself inside. This will prevent those inevitable interruptions and provide a barrier to distractions, such as the fridge and ESPN. Also, you don't want your family or co-workers to see you like this -- sweaty, frantic and confused.)

Label the boxes and envelopes in a way that makes sense to you. For example, you might have envelopes labeled "IRS" or "Receipts." You can label file folders by the names of your clients, or by date, or alphabetically. If you're in a home office, you might have extra folders labeled "Bills" or "Lost Stuff" or "Kids' Homework???"

Once you get everything labeled, you should brace yourself with several beers, because it's time to start sorting.

Begin with your desktop. Desks are junk magnets, and the top of your desk is buried in stuff you don't need. Yes, it is.

Go through these items and sort them into envelopes, boxes, trash bags, etc. A good rule of thumb: If you haven't referred to a piece of paper in six months, then it's time to throw it out.

If you don't recognize an item, then it's also a good candidate for the trash. It probably belongs to somebody else in your office/household, and tough luck to them.

As you put items away, the landfill level will lower and you'll unearth other items that you didn't even know were there, such as your phone. File these away, too. (Though you might want to keep the phone in plain sight.)

After you've cleaned off your desktop, pause to reconsider your sorting plan. Do you need other categories, such as "Overdue Work" or "Overdue Bills" or "Whoops!" or "Mystery Folders"? Create these new categories and make sure you have plenty of room in the existing envelopes/folders/boxes, because your desk drawers and file cabinets come next. Drink several more beers.

Go through each drawer, throwing out old papers and arranging ones you need to retain. Be merciless. Don't keep anything you don't absolutely need. Otherwise, you'll be looking at these same papers next year, and they'll make even less sense then.

Drink more beer.

By the time you're done, you should be drunk and sweaty and perhaps naked. But there's still one more job to do: Cart off the boxes and garbage bags. Put them in the garage or basement or other storage area.

Make sure it's someplace convenient because you'll be looking through them again. On April 15.

Paying Mom what she's worth

Once, at a matinee of "Mission Impossible XXVI," we were agog as a swoopy drone aircraft fired missiles, blowing up a whole smoking causeway full of vehicles, trying to hit tiny Tom Cruise.

(They're CRUISE missiles! Get it? Huh? Here, America, let us hit you over the head with our collective wit.)

One of those strange hiccups of silence breached the Dolby SurroundSound just as an older lady behind us wearily said: "Right, and who's going to clean up that mess?"

Spoken like a veteran mom. One who's mopped up too many spills for one lifetime. One who's scolded so many sloppy teen-agers, she's tired of the sound of her own voice. A frazzled woman just happy to sit-still-for-a-change in an air-conditioned theater.

She couldn't quite relax into the moment. Actions still have consequences. Somebody's still got to clean up every mess. And, like many of us, she's worn out by the real world. One telecast disaster after another, all the bombings and tsunamis and hurricanes. And you just know, her tone said, that our tax dollars will be wasted, rebuilding the causeway that Tom Cruise blew up.

Which brings us to the cost of things.

Salary.com added up the top 10 jobs that make a mom's job description (janitor, cook, psychologist), put value to them and came up with this: Stay-at-home moms are worth $134,121 a year. Working moms would earn $85,876 for the "mom job" portion of their work, in addition to their actual salaries.

(OK, whoa, that's enough. If you are a mother, you need to stop waving this article in the faces of your loved ones. Right now. Yes, you've been telling them, all these years, how hard you work, but they're not going to start listening now. Someone could get a paper cut.)

And that's just the work that can be calculated. No one can measure all the sleepless nights and harried days of the average mom. The level of everyday worry that could take a woman to a place where she experiences automatic thoughts about the clean-up costs of computer-generated special effects at the movies.

The study didn't say anything about working dads' housework contributions or work-at-home dads or stay-at-home dads. We'll assume we dads would make a lot less if our at-home contributions were calculated. Some men do absolutely nothing (and you know who you are), and blow the curve for the rest. Even those of us who do the lion's share of the housework don't put the same amount of time and care into it that your average mom does. We tend to compact all our efforts into those frantic few moments before our wives get home.

Still, we'd be worth something. We could pro-rate it to hours spent per week on household chores (minus time spent on burrito breaks, wandering off and scratching), and come up with a pretend salary for all of us, too.

The comparisons might be embarrassing for the men. Mom's worth $85,876, on top of what she's drawing down at the rendering plant? And Dad's annual housework contribution is worth how much? Seventeen dollars?

Isn't mom in danger of pricing herself out of the imaginary market here? I mean, come on, $134,121? Who does she think she is, Halliburton?

One thing's for certain: At those prices, we can't afford to hire moms for the job of picking up after Tom Cruise. No matter how much they volunteer.

Quick, to the Crudmobile!

I know it's time to wash my car when the neighborhood kids use their fingers to write in the filth: SANDBLAST ME.

Some guys wash their cars all the time. The sky spits five raindrops or the wind kicks up a little dust or a weekend arises, and they're scrubbing and rinsing and patting dry, as gently and lovingly as they would a baby's backside.

I'm not one of those guys. I feel that a vehicle should be professionally washed once a year, typically in the spring, to get off the winter mudstains and road salt and spattered tar. The rest of the year, to heck with it. I simply don't care.

Some men take great pride in their cars. They motor around in their hot rods or their Hummers, stroking some psychological need by having the coolest ride, the loudest pipes, the biggest gearshift.

I drive a minivan. If my manhood were tied up in my wheels, so to speak, I'd be in big trouble. Once I took the aerodynamic-as-a-stick-of-butter family-vehicle plunge and gave up on ever driving a cool car, keeping the Nerdmobile clean seemed beside the point.

If my minivan starts to look too grubby, I might stop by one of those do-it-yourself car washes, where a pocketful of quarters earns a few minutes' wrestle with a powerful jet sprayer that will recoil and hit you squarely in the face if you're not careful, not that that's ever happened to me.

But those car washes don't really get a vehicle clean. They get it wet. Drive around until the water dries, then examine the exterior. All the road film and fingerprints will still be there. You'll still be able to read "WASH ME" on the back window.

A truly clean car requires scrubbing with a rag or those giant, thundering brushes in a drive-through car wash. Some version of elbow grease, either human or mechanical. I don't care enough to make the effort.

Sure, I could afford to have it done on a regular basis, but the truth is that it never even occurs to me until the van gets so filthy that the neighbors start circulating a petition.

Am I a total slob who can't be bothered to get off the sofa long enough to take care of his possessions? OK, don't answer that. I'll rephrase the question. Why do I (and guys like me, assuming there are any) not care about a sparkling car while, for other men, it's a top priority?

I think it's because I drove crummy cars for so long. Compacts with rusty wheel wells and Jeepettes with dented doors and "pre-owned" sedans with upholstery brocaded by baby spit-up. Washing those cars wouldn't have made much difference. In some cases, the dirt might've been all that was holding them together.

When I went shopping for the minivan, I intentionally got one the color of dust. Trying to hide my sloth from others, I suppose, trying to conceal the fact that I don't consider grime a crime.
But now that I'm thinking about it, maybe I'll troop down to the local car wash and pony up the bucks to get someone to scrub away the crud and chisel the bug guts off the bumpers.

Yeah, I'm going to get right on that, soon as the playoffs are over. I've got to get up off the sofa anyway. Some idiot wrote "WASH ME" on the TV screen.

Spillage, people

When you work alone at home, something as trifling as a spill can derail your whole day.

I was having one of those bumbling days recently, where I spill and drop things and walk into door jambs. Sometimes the gravity field feels screwed up around here. Not my fault that we live on the Cul de Sac of Gravitation Variation.

While mopping up a small lake of coffee, I felt the fizzle of my morning ambition. Another workday shot. A long comatose afternoon of ceiling-staring and CNN opened before me.

I know I'm crying over spilled milk here, and that many of you would give your eyeteeth to work at home all day and spill stuff on your pajamas. But this work-at-home lifestyle has its hazards: It's easy to get sidetracked when nobody's watching. Whole days can vanish. You spill a little coffee after breakfast; next thing you know, the family's home, wanting dinner. Poof.

When you work alone, a spill is an event. It bites half an hour out of the meat of your day. More if the spill results in emergency laundry. Much more if you manage to soak a deskful of invoices ready to go into the mail. (Allow bonus time for cursing and dancing in place.)

Because you can't just leave it there, can you? A spill must be remedied immediately. You must swab it up and get every little speck so it doesn't leave sticky freckles on the floor. Then you discard the paper towels and/or rinse and wring out the mop. Put everything away. Deep breathing to calm yourself, then back to your desk, where you were working on what, again? Plus, you still don't have any coffee. Which means another trip to the spill zone in the kitchen--

If you work in a regular office, with colleagues, a spill becomes a group event. But, generally, it's over quickly and everybody can have a nice chuckle and, whew, catch our breaths and go back to work.

In a small office, your workmates may help you clean up the mess or, at least, offer their sympathy -- "Oh, (insert your name here), you poor, clumsy thing!"

At a bigger company, you make a token effort to throw paper towels on the spill, then call the janitor.

Higher up the food chain, you have your secretary call the janitor. Then you square your shoulders and stand staring out the window until the mess is removed.

After a spill at a big corporation, you pick up the phone and have all the carpet replaced on the fourteenth floor immediately. Then you claim a tax write-off for hurricane damage.

When you work alone, there's no way to turn a spill into a moneymaker for the company. Just the opposite. You lose man-hours, productivity, concentration, the flow.

You may curse the interruption, but it's important to keep a spill in perspective. Don't give yourself a heart attack. After all, it's not the Exxon Valdez. It's a minor spill, a blip on the radar of your day. No big deal.

Even if you spilled the coffee in your lap, how hot was it, really? It had been cooling on your desk for minutes. You'll survive. A bigger cleanup, maybe a dry cleaning bill, but hey these things happen. Hardly worth mentioning to your spouse at the end of the day.

But if you spilled on those invoices . . .

Oh, you poor, clumsy thing!

The housework diet

Trying to lose weight? Now we know you can scour away those excess pounds.

That's right, cleaning your house counts as exercise. Depending on how hard you work, standard chores like laundry and mopping can burn up to 250 calories an hour, according to a recent article I read somewhere.

(It doesn't matter which article. These days, every magazine and newspaper and website is glutted with advice about diet and exercise. Everywhere you look, ominous ads and articles blare that we're being killed by our own waistlines.)

Whether you buy into the obesity panic or not, 250 calories an hour is nothing to sneeze at. I know from my expensive Dreadmill, which has more electronic readouts than the space shuttle, that it takes me about 40 minutes to burn that many calories if I keep a steady pace, walking to nowhere. Turns out, I could've saved my money and simply scrubbed stuff for exercise. I'd be just as fat, I mean fit, as I am now, and my house would be cleaner besides.

The article encouraged readers to find ways to squeeze more exercise into their housework. For instance, use time while you're waiting for the microwave or the coffeemaker to do stretches. If you have a two-story home, alternate activities between upstairs and downstairs so you get a free Stairmaster routine between chores. Sweep instead of vacuuming. Chop veggies with a knife rather than using a food processor, the article said, or do dishes by hand rather than in the dishwasher.

Those last suggestions made me say, "Whoa." The only way chopping veggies will help you lose weight is if you cut off a few fingers. And I'll do dishes in the sink when they pry my dishwasher from my cold, dead hands.

But, mostly, I like the idea of house-cleaning as workout routine, and I've dreamed up more exercises you can use to shed those unwanted pounds:

--Grout Stretch. Try scrubbing the bathroom grout after you've dressed for the day. You'll be forced to s-t-r-e-t-c-h across tubs and shower stalls so your clothes won't get wet and gunky. Keeping yourself suspended on toes and fingertips, while one free hand scrubs like crazy, burns more calories than Marine push-ups.

--Kitchen Race. If you have teen-agers in the house, try to supply food faster than they can eat it. You can cook, serve and load the dishwasher all at the same time, trying to keep up, but their appetites still will win.

--Toilet Bowl Bulimia. The more disgusting the toilet bowl you're cleaning, the more likely that you'll lose your lunch. Works best in households where boys reside.

--Television Scavenger Hunt. You can walk for miles, trying to find the remote control, all while bending and stooping and getting that heart rate up, up, up. Cursing can be aerobic, too.

--Rearranging Furniture. Moving heavy sofas and chairs is a good workout, and can help your home attain a "new look." Also, you'll be forced to clean the floor where the furniture formerly sat because it's covered with dust bunnies, loose change and escaped M&M's. Caution: Eating the old M&M's negates the calorie-burning effect.

--Stubbed-Toe Dance. A night-time event that frequently follows Rearranging Furniture.

--Climbing the Walls. Another exercise most common in homes equipped with teen-agers. Remove cobwebs while you're up there.

So, get cleaning and get fit, America. A sparkling home and a slimmer you awaits.

If that's not incentive enough, try rewarding your efforts with M&M's. Look under the couch.

Trick-or-trash

For parents, here's the true meaning of Halloween: For the next several months, we'll find candy wrappers stashed everywhere in the house.

Long after all that sugar has been consumed, digested and expended as frantic misbehavior, the packaging remains behind -- stuffed between sofa cushions, hidden under beds and shredded in the clothes dryer. Everywhere, really, except in a designated trash receptacle.

This is the result of two factors:

1) For our safety, federal law requires that each piece of Halloween candy be individually wrapped in tightly sealed cellophane with the same half-life as plutonium.

2) Children, as a rule, have no notion of putting things away when they're done with them. This includes trash.

Most grown-ups, finding themselves with a fistful of Jolly Rancher wrappers, would hoist themselves up off the couch and throw them away. They do this in the vain hope that such physical movement will burn up some of the calories they just consumed. More importantly, they know that, if candy wrappers are scattered everywhere, their homes will resemble the city dump.

Children don't mind if every step in the house brings the crackle of candy wrappers underfoot. They'd be perfectly happy living at the city dump. Why? Because, at the dump, no one would scold them for making a mess. And even the most stringent parent wouldn't expect them to clean it up. Not without a bulldozer anyway.

If you don't believe this, go look in your children's rooms. Odds are that most everything they own is on the floor. Sift through the toys and lost homework and stray shoes and dirty socks, and you'll likely find some candy wrappers from last Halloween.

Parenting experts tell us it doesn't have to be this way. By exercising firm parental control and a basic system of punishment and reward, the experts say, parents can teach children to clean up after themselves.

To these experts, we parents out here in the real world would like to say: Bwah-hah-ha-ha-ha! Whooo! Stop, your killing us. Whew.

Teaching children to keep their rooms clean is like teaching a cat to drive a car. Given enough time and fortitude, you might be successful, but you won't be happy with the results.

At our house, we regularly rag our two sons to pick up the clutter that's ankle-deep on their floors. They humbly decline. We force the issue. Grumbling, the boys clean their rooms. Where does all that stuff go? Under their beds.

We parents didn't snap to this technique right away. As long as we could walk across the room without risking serious injury, we were happy. But, eventually, we noticed the legs of the beds were no longer touching the floor. . .

I once visited a family and was stunned that the junk in their kids' rooms was not ankle-deep, but knee-deep. In fact, I wouldn't have entered the rooms without first donning hip waders.

The parents showed no embarrassment over this situation. Housework, they said, wasn't a high priority for them. And the dad had a unique way of dealing with the problem. Once a year, he goes into the kids' rooms with a shovel, scoops everything into trash bags and throws it away. Everything, boom, into the garbage.

This would never work at my house. My kids have been known to fish their precious belongings out of the trash and put them back where they belong -- under the bed.

So what's the answer? I don't know. But here's something you can try for Halloween: Dole out the candy one piece at a time. Make your child trade in an empty wrapper for each new treat.

You parents can reward your resourcefulness by eating some of the Halloween candy yourselves. Hide the wrappers between the sofa cushions, and the kids will never know.

Today's rap: 2 Cool 4 Chores

Dear Parents:

I found the following on the Internet. We'd always suspected a conspiracy. Here's the proof:

TEENAGERS' GUIDE TO CHORE AVOIDANCE

By "2 Lay-Z"

Yo, dude. If your parents are like mine, they're always laying some trip on you about doing "chores."

Man, they just don't get it. We teens can't be bothered by stuff like dishes and laundry and yard work. We've got more important things to do: Kickin' back. Hangin'. Setting a new high score on our Playstation 2 (and, yeah, yeah, the parents paid for the PS2, like we haven't heard that a million times).

Parents think they've gotta teach us "responsibility" and "pulling our weight" and stuff. Like we're gonna learn anything from doing laundry. All we learn is that work is never really done. You wash the clothes, you wear the clothes, you gotta wash 'em again. How's that gonna prepare us for the Real World? Ain't like we're gonna have a job where we do the same thing over and over, every damned day, right?

Teens across the nation gotta share the 411. Here are some time-tested ways to dodge chores:

1. The Maynard G. Krebs Memorial Panic Response

Named after that beatnik dude on the old "Dobie Gillis" TV show, this reaction involves screaming "Work!" and fleeing the room. Not only allows you to escape, but also alerts your siblings.

2. Amnesia

An old favorite. "I forgot" is like a miracle cure, man. There's no argument for it. Your parents get in your face about why you didn't do some chore, and you say, "I forgot," and they lose all their steam.

3. A Matter of Taste

No matter how slagged your room is, say, "I like it this way." Even if there's so much stuff on your floor, you can only walk around on stilts, the parents will hesitate. They're thinking: Well, if the kid likes his room this way, who am I to insist? While they're dithering, you can escape out the window.

4. Denial

"What work? I don't see any work."

5. Defiance

Outright refusal is sometimes effective, especially if the parent is too tired to argue. Caution: Can result in loss of Playstation privileges, injury or even death.

6. The "Gaslight" Defense

Make the parents think they're losing their minds. Here's how it works: Parent tells you to do a chore. You ignore command. Parent comes around later, asking why it wasn't done. You say: "What? You never told me to do that." Shake your head sadly. Say something like, "Man, you're losing it."

7. Not Mine

This one works on any chore that doesn't involve your immediate room. Say a parent wants you to pick up stuff scattered around the house. You say, "That's not my stuff. Why should I have to pick it up?" This forces the parent to explain about "helping the whole family" and "the common good" and blah, blah, blah. Eventually, they'll forget the whole thing.

8. The Stall

All of these responses are variations on our main theme: The Stall. You're just buying time, dude. The longer you put off doing a chore, the better the odds that the parents will give up and do it themselves.

Remember: You're younger than them. You can afford to wait them out. Eventually, you'll go off to college or marriage or the Army, and you won't ever have to pick up after yourself again.
After you're gone, your parents will keep your room just the way you left it. Because they don't know how to walk on stilts.

Clutter sputter

Sociologists often study garbage to learn how society works, what we value, what we throw away. But it's our clutter that really reveals the way we lead our lives.

Every home has clutter. Couldn't a sociologist decipher the interests and values of the household by examining what's left lying around?

For instance, here are signs of an unhealthy interest in television: All chairs and sofas in the living room face a big-screen TV, and the clutter consists of wrinkled TV Guides, four different remote controls, empty chip bags and pop bottles, and a life-size cardboard cutout of David Hasselhoff.

You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that artsy-craftsy folks occupy a home cluttered with knitting needles, balls of yarn, silk flower arrangements, vats of potpourri, and plaster geese wearing cute hats.

When you enter a home for the first time, can't you tell immediately whether it houses children? Most homes with children look like the aftermath of an explosion at Toys "R" Us. Small kids can scatter toys faster than weary parents can ever put them away. The only answer, really, is to wait until the children get older, then move to a new house.

Teen-agers shed clutter like dandruff. Everywhere they go, they leave trails of compact disks and gum wrappers and leaky pens and electronic gizmos and rock-star posters and dirty socks and dirty dishes and unfinished homework.

Yes, teens' clutter output is prodigious, but what's truly amazing is that they don't know they're doing it. How many of you recognize the following conversation?

Parent: "Pick that up."
Kid: "What?"
Parent: "That. Right there. You just dropped that."
Kid: "Dropped what?"
Parent: "That! Can't you see that? Pick it up and put it away."
Kid: "Oh, that. OK." (Walks away)
Parent: "Where are you going?"
Kid: "My room."
Parent: "Well, pick that up and take it with you."
Kid: "What?"
Parent: "Aaaaauuugh!" (Bursts into flames)

If a team of sociologists studied the clutter at our house, they'd go away thinking my family had two major interests in life:

1) Reading. Which is true. Open books and magazines cover every horizontal surface at our house, including the floors.

2) Shoes.

We tend to be a barefoot family, which means all of us shed our shoes as soon as we land at home. Our sons' elaborate sneakers are so large, they look like furniture. My wife apparently believes her attractive shoes should be out on display rather than tucked away in a dark closet.

Empty pairs of shoes sit at odd angles all around our house, as if a cocktail party had been vaporized, leaving behind only the footwear. Or, as if the Rapture occurred and God said to the assembled, "You can all go to Heaven, but your shoes stay here!"

Once a week or so, we have the Great Shoe Roundup at our house, corralling them in closets, chasing down the strays.

Here's how I announce that it's time to herd the footwear. I say, "Hey there, buckaroos. Pick up those shoes."

And my sons say, in unison: "What shoes?"

Dodge city

Our 16-year-old son always demonstrates a quick wit when it comes to evasion.

I find him in the kitchen, arms loaded with six different kinds of snack food. He's clearly headed for his bedroom, where Playstation awaits.

Me: "Hey, I thought you were helping with the housework."

Him (without missing a beat): "I'm cleaning out the pantry."

Staging area

With home prices in the basement and the economy in the toilet, it's not the best time to sell your house, but circumstances sometimes force a move.

The first step is unloading your current home, and that brings us to Today's Important Real Estate Tip: To sell for a decent price, your home needs to look better than it ever did when you were actually living in it.

Real estate experts call this "staging" the house for sale, and they use the word strictly in a show-business sense, to mean creating a pretend world of order and style.

Basically, it means cleaning the house to within an inch of its life, accomplishing all previously-ignored repairs and making the place look as much as possible like a photograph out of Metropolitan Home magazine.

(When reading Metropolitan Home in the doctor's waiting room, parents may seem to be marveling at the modern, sterile rooms presented there. In truth, here's what they're thinking: "No children in that house.")

Staging your home isn't as easy as it sounds. First of all, your house is filthy. Yes, it is. You may think it's clean, but once you start rearranging the furniture and stowing stuff, you'll find crud you never knew was there. Secondly, you (and your children) have a lot more junk than you think. Thirdly, you'll see your home with fresh eyes, with all its shortcomings: faulty wiring and balky drains and jelly fingerprints and dappled carpet.

You've been living with these shortcomings for years, and likely have gotten where you don't even notice them anymore. But you'll see them now and, if you don't, the potential buyers will.

Selling your house boils down to this: People -- strangers -- come into your home and examine it closely. Your job, as the seller, is to persuade these people that your family does not live like pigs, and that everything is in good working order. You want these strangers to imagine themselves living in your house, arranging their own furniture in your familiar spaces.

If they can picture themselves in your home, they might buy it and you can get back to packing your junk into recently-emptied liquor boxes.

How to properly "stage" your home?

Let's start with the exterior. You want your home to have "curb appeal," which means you must freshen up the outside, tend the grounds, do something about those yellow dandelions that dot the lawn like dropped eggs. If the house's paint is peeling or you've got an old Chevy up on the blocks in the yard, you might need to hire professional help.

Inside, every surface should be cleaned off. Put away your knickknacks and bowling trophies and family photos. Potential buyers want to picture their own stuff on the shelves. If you can somehow get photos of their families, you might want to artfully arrange them somewhere.

The most common approach to hiding junk is to stuff everything into closets. Showing your house becomes a horror movie: "Don't Look in the Closet!" To keep potential buyers from opening closet doors, you may need to employ a basketball-style man-on-man defense. ("Put a body on somebody! Now!")

Once all your junk has been carefully hidden, you can go all-out in the cleaning department, rounding up dust bunnies and scrubbing toilets and scraping grime out of corners.

Work at it hard enough, and your house eventually will be sparklingly clean, and tidier than it's ever been before. The trick becomes keeping it in that condition while people parade through day after day. You thought it was hard to keep the house passably clean -- clean enough to keep the health inspectors off your neck -- wait until you try for Metropolitan Home every day for weeks.

Somewhere during this process, you will have two predictable reactions: 1) Why didn't we keep the house this nice when we were living here? And, 2) Since the current house has turned out so well, maybe we shouldn't move after all.

If you find yourself falling into that trap, take the one sure remedy: Go look in the closets.

Springtime for hardware

Spring is a time of renewal, a time of reawakening after the long, dark winter. And we all know what that means. It's time to tackle those home-repair projects we are not qualified to do.

We're not talking spring-cleaning here. That's a given. As warm weather arrives, many of us (mostly female) feel the urge to refresh and renew, to scrub off the grime, the muddy bootprints, the road salt and dessicated leaves. The rest of us (mostly male) play along, sweeping and scouring, getting the house ready for the onslaught of our children's summer vacation.

Our topic today goes beyond simple cleaning. We're talking about all those home maintenance projects that we put off because it was too cold. We burrowed in through the winter, hibernating like bears, but now warm weather has arrived and it's time to throw open the windows, assemble our tools and hurt ourselves in new and inventive ways.

For instance, my wife and I stripped some horrendous wallpaper in our bedroom and then painted the entire room. The results are splendid and we feel virtuous because we did the job ourselves rather than hiring professionals. And, we'll no longer have nightmares because of that hallucinatory wallpaper.

But -- there's always a "but," isn't there? -- I made a few mistakes. I didn't wear a respiratory mask while scraping and sanding the walls and I paid the price over the next week as I tried to chisel hardened plaster from my sinuses. All the repetitive stretching and bending served as a harsh reminder that I'm aging. And, naturally, I had to make many trips to the hardware store for items I'd overlooked, such as mineral spirits. (I still don't know what mineral spirits are, but we have plenty now.)

Before tackling your springtime home improvements, you should remember some basic rules. These will help simplify your projects and you'll be better prepared. And, if you follow these rules carefully, you'll soon see that you're better off watching TV.

1. Ignore home-decorating and handyman magazines.

Those beautiful remodeling projects pictured in magazines can inspire you to attempt ambitious projects better left unimagined. Refinishing those hardwood floors sounds great, until the power sander leaps out of your hands and climbs the nearest wall. A new deck seems like a good idea until the ninth time you hit your thumb with a hammer.

2. There's a correct tool for every job.

You will not own this tool. Make another trip to the hardware store.

3. Paint can cover up many errors.

It can also cover your carpet when it spills.

4. Wallpaper is the work of the devil. Avoid it at all costs.

5. The use of basic tools can result in injury. But if you really want to spend some time in the hospital, step up to power tools.

6. Solvents, pesticides, herbicides, cleaning solutions, paints, root killers, roofing tar and many other home-improvement compounds are toxic and should be handled with extreme care.
Might as well just kill yourself and get it over with.

7. Avoid ladders.

Falling is scary, and that sudden stop can hurt. Plus, getting 10 or 12 feet off the ground gives you a new perspective on your house. You'll spot more chores to do.

8. Wear gloves.

Those of us who usually sit at computers all day do not have the proper buildup of calluses to protect us from blisters and splinters. Of course, gloves won't help if you insist on hitting your thumb with the hammer.

9. Fasteners -- nails, screws, bolts, etc... -- must be the proper size to do the job.

Make another trip to the hardware store.

10. If something is supposed to move and it won't, spray it liberally with WD-40.

11. If something is not supposed to move and it does, secure it with duct tape.

Those last two rules come from my in-laws -- hardy, self-reliant ranch folk who live 100 miles from the nearest home-improvement superstore. They're forced to do it themselves, and they know the simplest solutions usually are best. Here's one more from them, which has become the byword for all home repair projects in our family:

12. Get a bigger hammer.

Right tool for the job

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do I.

Vacuum cleaners may be the efficient way to remove dust and grime from your floors, but I prefer the physical labor and shush-shush resonance of a broom on hardwood. Plus, I can listen to Muddy Waters while I clean rather than wincing the whole time against the roar of forced air.

I feel the same way about lawn mowers. I use an old push mower than barely whispers when I give the grass a haircut. Not for me those blaring, polluting, gas-powered mowers. This stance was strengthened by my last encounter with a power mower, when I accidentally ran over a sprinkler head, sending dangerous shrapnel flying around the yard. I was uninjured; the mower wasn’t so lucky.

You probably haven’t given these matters much thought, but they’ve become philosophical positions for me since I left the corporate world to become a househusband. This proves either that: a) constant exposure to housework will lead to finding methods that work best, or b) I’ve got way too much time on my hands.

Maybe you’re thinking: Just like a man to overanalyze every little household chore.

Men love to solve problems and make decisions. It makes us feel important and competent and masculine. Most men would rather spend two hours figuring out an exotic labor-saving method for doing a job than the five minutes the actual job would’ve taken the old-fashioned way. Especially if the new solution involves power tools. Tim the Tool Man on TV’s “Home Improvement” makes men laugh because he hits so close to the truth.

No amount of technology or powerful chemicals does the job as well as elbow grease. And that, as women have known all along, is why it takes so much time. Most men think of housework as something you knock off in two hours on a Saturday. That’s because they’re not the ones doing it the rest of the time.

It’s easy to straighten up a house when the basics -- sweeping the floors and scrubbing the tub and doing the dishes -- are regularly kept up. Pick up a few toys, throw some newspapers in the recycle bin, fluff the pillows and -- voila! -- the house is clean.

But the basics are ignored at your own peril. Pretty soon, rambling herds of dust bunnies are running the place and you can’t go barefoot in your own home.

Men also tend to dismiss the amount of work involved because they suscribe to a cleaning philosophy best described thusly: "If you can’t see it, it ain’t dirty." Look under a bachelor’s sofa sometime. Brr.

The problem with being right here in the house all day, every day, is I’m always surrounded by the work. I start noticing things like dust. It’s a short hop from noticing filth to becoming obsessive about it. Pretty soon, I'm on my knees with an old toothbrush, trying to get the grime out of baseboard corners.

Oh, I can try to reach it with a vacuum cleaner, but that’s the coward’s way out and it never works anyway, even when I use one of those skinny corner attachments that look like a murder weapon. I can spend all day sitting and pondering, trying to come up with some high-tech answer. But to really get rid of dust and dirt, I’ve got to get close to it, become familiar with it, show it who’s boss.

And that’s hard, boring, physical work, which is why men find it easier to ignore dirt than to do something about it. And I don’t expect that to change, not unless more men end up working at home like me and paying way too much attention. Or, unless they invent a giant suction that strips dust, dirt, stains and old paint from the entire house with the flip of a switch.

Imagine how much power that baby would have. Ooh.