In love with our new housekeeper

We've got a new personality here at our house, a conscientious worker who's really earning her keep: Our robot vacuum cleaner, Ruby.

Our old vacuum gave up the ghost in a puff of foul-smelling smoke recently, and we used the opportunity to purchase, as a replacement, a Roomba. So far, we love it.

The Roomba sits quietly most of the day, recharging in a docking station plugged into the wall. Whenever we tell it to, it takes off across the floor, vacuuming its ass off.

It's got an electric eye so it senses impending objects and slows down before it bumps against them, and it can get itself into and out of some tight spots, including the forest of chair legs under our dining table.

Ruby (apparently it's Roomba tradition to give them names) vacuums the entire house, under beds, the works. Much more thoroughly that I, personally, ever vacuumed when I was in charge of pushing the machine around the house. It's probably not powerful enough to handle a daily diet of the kind of messes left by kids and pets, but it seems perfect for our empty nest.

You'd think a robot vacuum would be a real time-saver, but I spend a LOT of time following Ruby around the house, marveling at the way she crawls along the baseboards or how she senses her battery getting low and finds her way back to the docking station all by herself.

I talk to Ruby the way you would speak to a pet or a small child. "Are you stuck there, Ruby? Getting tired?" Once in a while, she talks back, including a really cute "uh-oh" tone when there's a problem.

A couple of drawbacks: Ruby doesn't like the area rugs in the bathroom. Their edges roll up and get snagged. Uh-oh. Also, the Roomba works on an odd pattern that, while covering the entire area eventually, does leave weird tracks in the carpet, as if the vacuuming had been done by an extremely conscientious crazy person.

Now if I can find a robot to do the dusting . . .

And a birdbeak stereo . . .

I don't understand why, with all our scientific advancements in cloning, etc., we can't develop animals to do our household chores for us.

For instance, I would happily house an anteater-like creature that would hoover up my carpets. I'm tired of pushing around a loud piece of machinery that breaks if it picks up a crumb. No, don't try to sell me a better vacuum or a Roomba or whatever. I want a critter that feeds on dust.

Haven't these scientists ever seen "The Flintstones?"

PS: Birdbeak Stereo would be a good name for a band.

Clutter, clutter everywhere

After finishing some projects, I was tidying up today, unearthing my desk. I found birthday cards from three years ago. Earlier, I bustled around, putting away stuff all over the house and garage. It's been that kind of a day. Reminds me of a column I wrote called "Stuff It."

You can read it here.

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.

Rubik's rube

Erno Rubik’s got nothing on me.

Rubik is the Hungarian sculptor and architect who invented the Rubik’s Cube and other games. It takes a special sort of mind to devise such clever, addictive puzzles.

I have two teen-aged sons, so naturally we have Rubik’s Cubes lying around the house. My sons busily work the puzzles while simultaneously watching TV, texting on their phones, scratching, playing video games, listening to music and eating. Such are the nimble minds of multi-tasking youths.

My experience with Rubik’s Cube has been less casual. I sit down and give the cube my full attention, and after turning the colorful tiles every which way for 24 seconds, I say, “That was fun,” and toss it aside. Because that’s enough for me. It would take me hours of concentrated effort to even sort of figure out how the danged thing works, to get some type of system going, much less solve the puzzle, and it’s not worth it. The payoff’s not big enough for the time wasted. Unlike, say, a crossword puzzle, which only takes me a few minutes to work and the solution of which makes angels sing.

Scientists call the ability to see and manipulate objects in two and three dimensions “spatial visualization.” The term comes from the Latin roots “spatia” (or “shoulder”) and “visuali” (“door jamb”).

Several experiments have found that men tend to be better at spatial visualization. Yay, men! No offense to women, but we men don’t get many wins in our column these days. Along with spatial visualization, scientists have found that men tend to be better at lifting furniture, stealing elections and competitive eating. That’s about it.

Men’s special adaptation for spatial visualization, which may go all the way back to the days of prehistoric hunters, certainly explains teen-aged boys’ affinity for video games. I’m no better at video games than I am at Rubik’s Cube, and my failures led me to doubt my spatial visualization manhood. I felt intimidated. My sons mocked me, saying within my earshot: “Imagine the hefty Hungarian brain of Erno Rubik!”

Just as I was wondering whether there was a cure for my spatial visualization shortcomings, a mental Viagra, if you will, I had a breakthrough. I saw that non-Hungarians such as myself face spatial visualization puzzles all the time in everyday life and manage to solve them just fine.

Take, for example, our laundry room. We have two (usually full) laundry baskets. We have a washer and dryer, the tops of which serve as the work surface. The washer’s a top loader. The dryer’s a front loader. No problem, the baskets sit on the dryer, right? Except the lint trap is on top of the dryer. So I have to move baskets to put clothes in or out of the washer and to start each new load in the dryer. Back and forth, open and close. I’m so accustomed to this routine, I do it without thinking. My movements are polished by repetition. The baskets slide back and forth and lids slam and, ba-da-bing, new loads of laundry are under way.

Take that, Erno.

Don’t even get me started on the proper way to load a dishwasher. Oh baby, we could be here all day. Nothing arouses my manly spatial visualization skills like a sink full of dirty dishes. The geometry of loading the big stuff and filling in with the smaller items. The proper tilt to catch the best spray. The ups and downs of silverware.

Whew.

Maybe I’ll try that Rubik’s Cube again.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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?"

Quaking with joy

As school resumes here in Redding, CA, seismologists report that they pick up actual Richter-scale readings from tremors caused by thousands of parents simultaneously doing the annual Dance of Great Happiness.

Parents rejoice because they know that -- for the next nine months -- their kids will be locked away seven hours a day in the care of others. Anticipating that they'll finally get some peace around the house, parents secretly dance themselves into exhaustion, then collapse in their filthy homes.

Yes, the beginning of the school year always is just cause for celebration. For work-at-home parents like me, it can be the source of outright delirium.

(Not that it wasn't wonderful to have my two sons home all summer. I wouldn't want to make that impression, particularly if the proper authorities happen to be reading this.)

The back-to-school exuberance doesn't last, of course. Eventually, parents must settle down and face the work before them. After a summer of children, the house and yard resemble a trailer court after a tornado. Clutter, clutter everywhere.

Sighing parents pick themselves up from their sofas and start putting away the flotsam of summer -- the swimsuits and the camping gear, the board games and the coloring books, the Game Boys and the baseball gloves. They uncover floors that must be mopped and furniture that must be dusted and Mystery Food under beds that must be disposed of immediately by teams in "hazmat" suits.

It takes a while to accomplish it all, but industrious parents can have the house back in shape around the time their kids bring home the school year's first report cards.

For parents who work in home offices, the beginning of the school year also signals the time to buckle down and get some work done. With the kids gone, we have no more excuses. All the unfinished work that accumulated over the summer must now be tackled.

Parents who allow themselves to be overwhelmed will find they don't get much accomplished. And, whoops, next thing you know, it's summer again.

Here, then, are some basic steps for stay-at-home parents who need to get back to work:

1. Find your desk.
2. Remove all clutter from desk, especially food byproducts and dirty socks.
3. Get organized. (This varies from person to person. Some consider themselves organized when their home office resembles a landfill. Others want to actually be able to find invoices, etc.)
4. Prioritize. Check those projects and deadlines, and categorize them according to which are most urgent.
5. Get busy. Grab hold of that most urgent work and get it done, then move onto the next.
Remember the clock is ticking: The school year won't last forever.

Work-at-home parents who follow these simple steps will find they can return to a productive lifestyle now that the children are safely back in school. They might even find that they make some money as they focus on work without distractions.

And that's a good thing. We parents need money. We've got to buy new dancing shoes.

Back-to-school means work for parents

This time of year, a hush falls over households all across America as the children head back to school.

Not only do the kids go away, taking their noise with them, but parents everywhere fall to their knees and give silent prayers of thanks for their tax-supported public schools.

Most fervent in this gratitude are we millions of parents who work in home offices. As the long, hot summer comes to an end, we might finally get some work done.

Not right away, though. First, we'll need to pull the house back together after three months of round-the-clock kid habitation. That means scrubbing and tidying and fishing the dirty socks out from under the sofa. Putting away the mildewed towels and swimsuits of summer to make room for backpacks and school supplies and winter coats.

But once the house is all arranged, we work-at-home parents plan to jump right into the fray and catch up on those projects that have been hanging fire while the kids were hanging around.
OK, so maybe we'll take a few minutes here and there to revel in the peace and quiet. The kids can be so loud, their noises so random and sudden and disturbing. Just having the home to ourselves again is a blessing we should take time to enjoy.

Solitude is great. No interruptions. No distractions. No dropping everything every few minutes to answer questions or referee disputes. A little alone time is just the ticket. Finally going to get some work done around here!

And if the quiet gets oppressive, hey, we can listen to our own music now. Enjoy some classic tunes without smart-aleck teens making gagging noises in the background. Nothing like an up-tempo soundtrack to help propel a person through a mountain of accumulated work.

When the phone rings, it'll be for us! All summer long, every phone in the house has been tied up by kids. Now it's our turn. We can spend the first few weeks of school yakking on the phone, catching up with our friends and family all around the country. When we're not busy working, of course. That comes first.

The kitchen sings its siren song, and that can be distracting in its own right. Now that the kids are back in school, we can finally have some snacks to ourselves. We can stop hiding our favorites, as we did during the summer so we had some chance of getting to them before the voracious, growing children scarfed them all. With fewer dirty dishes on the countertops and fewer sticky freckles of Popsicle juice on the floor, the kitchen's a more pleasant place now, a good spot to hang out while we stoke the engines and get ready to get to work.

Here's another thing: It'll be easier to get back in shape. We've got some major working-out to do, as soon as school resumes. Having the kids around is so exhausting, we've had no energy left for climbing Stairmasters or pumping iron. But, hoo boy, we're gonna get after it. Have to balance off that lonely snacking.

Plus, we'll have time to get lots of work done. Did I mention that?

Yessirree, now that the kids are back in school and the house is finally quiet, we work-at-home parents can hear those long-ignored deadlines, tightening around us like anacondas.

Gulp. Anybody for a Popsicle first?

Grin and bare feet

My son came home from school one day, and I met him at the door as I usually do, asking about his day and his bus ride and what homework needed to be done.

He looked me up and down, lingering at my feet, then asked, "Why do you have shoes on?"

An odd question, you might think, made even odder by the note of suspicion in his voice, as if I were up to something because I was wearing shoes.

But in the context of our household, the question made perfect sense. My sons know I work at home all day, and they know I usually do it in bare feet. If I'm wearing shoes, it means I'm either going somewhere or just coming home from somewhere, and the boy's natural curiosity makes him wonder.

(Our dog knows about my bare feet, too. He gets excited every time I put on my sneakers because he thinks it means we're going on a W-A-L-K. Sorry, but we have to spell it out. If you say "the W-word" within in his earshot, he gallops to the front door and spins in excited circles. Disappointing him makes him mope.)

To me, going barefoot is one of the joys of working in a home office, right up there with avoiding neckties and hanging up on telemarketers. But going around unshod is yet one more way that I'm set apart from other dads. Most dads go off to work in wingtips or brogans or steel-toed boots. For the kids at my house, "Men at Work" equates to "No Shoes."

It only gets worse in summer. Warm weather means shorts and T-shirts for me, along with the bare feet. I look like one of the contestants on "Survivor."

My kids have accepted this. Not that they've had much choice. I've worked at home for years now. They can barely remember when Dad went off to a real job.

If asked, they say that having me working at home is "cool." But then, that's what they say about everything that's even moderately acceptable. And it's what they say when grown-ups ask. For all I know, they tell their friends something completely different:

"Why's your dad home all day?"

"He works at home. He's a telemarketer."

Or: "He can't go out. He's got mental problems."

Or: "He used to have a job. But then he started going around barefoot all the time and they fired him."

I wouldn't put any of the above past my boys. They'll flat-out lie to their friends if they can get a cheap laugh out of it. I don't know where they get such behavior.

Overall, though, I think they truly like having a stay-at-home dad. There's almost always someone at home when they arrive from school, or in the event of an emergency. Dad's usually available to drive them places. They get out of a lot of chores because I'm at home all day, taking care of things. Their favorite clothes are regularly laundered. There's usually food in the house.

Of course, there's always the downside. Having one parent at home -- the neurotic, barefoot one, no less -- means they can't get away with as much as they might if they were latch-key kids.
They know Dad's there at the house, keeping an eye on the clock. If they stray too far or show up too late, he'll come looking for them.

And then they'll be in big trouble. Because it meant Dad had to put on his shoes.

Teach your children . . . work

Parents know it's difficult to keep children occupied during long, hot, school-free summers.

Sure, matinees and swimming and play dates are fun, and might even keep siblings from killing each other during listless, blistering afternoons, but who says summer should be all about fun? (Well, the kids do. But don't listen to them.)

Summer's a great time to teach your children about work. During the school year, they can beg off doing chores around the house, citing homework or time-consuming school activities. But in summer, we parents have the kids right where we want them: They've got nothing more important to do, so why shouldn't they help around the house?

Chores done by children not only lighten the load for parents, they teach the kids valuable lessons about work and cleanliness and city health codes.

Doing chores can complement their schoolwork. What is cooking, after all, but chemistry? Youngsters can learn much about biology by doing yard work. Math skills can be improved as the kids keep track of how many more chores they've done than their siblings. And, believe me, they'll be keeping track.

Kids can learn everything they need to know about diplomacy and negotiation as they try to weasel out of onerous tasks. (This will be a valuable skill when they grow up and have actual jobs.)

Of course, children require a certain amount of supervision. If the parent doesn't monitor the housework, the kids will do the bare minimum, and the parent will be right back where he or she started -- with a filthy home. The only difference will be that much of the filth will be hidden under beds and in closets. While that certainly works for me, it's not the preferred method.

Some chores are too dangerous for children. Anything involving a hot skillet or power tools, for example, should be left to adults. In fact, if the job involves any type of tools, it's probably better to just call a professional. You'll end up doing it eventually.

But as long as a chore is relatively safe and unimportant, children are perfect for the job. The kids might not perform up to your standards, but so what? If you have to go behind them and clean the kitchen all over again, what have you lost? You would've had to clean it anyway. Let's not lose sight of the main goal here: Chores keep the kids busy, and that's a good thing.

Let's look, then, at some chores that are appropriate for children, and the benefits and drawbacks of having kids do the work:

Picking Up Stuff

They're limber, they have young backs and they're closer to the floor. These factors make children better than adults for picking up toys and shoes and other detritus scattered around the house. Besides, they distributed most of the mess, shouldn't they pick it up?

Taking Out the Trash

If a child is tall enough to reach a bag of trash into the garbage bin, then he or she is ready for this job. Just don't be surprised when you find evidence of leaky bags dripped all over the floors.

Doing the Dishes

Whether you have a dishwasher or do dishes the old-fashioned way, kids can be a great help. Naturally, there will be a certain amount of breakage. And, the kids may not always put clean dishes and utensils in their proper places. Cooking can become a daily game of "Where's that ladle?"

Dusting

Give a kid a feather duster, and you can save yourself a lot of cleaning time. But this only works if you don't care how thoroughly it gets done.

Sweeping

See "Dusting" above.

Cooking

Summertime lunches of sandwiches or hot dogs are easy and fun for kids to prepare. Thanks to microwave ovens, children can cook their own meals without ever getting near an open flame. Caution: If your kids use the microwave a lot, they may get the yen to experiment. Keep an eye on the cat.

So, put your kids to work, America. It'll ease the parental workload and the whole family will benefit. Best of all, chores make the children eager to return to school in the fall.

Garage sale shuffle

'Tis the season of garage sales, as millions of Americans try to unload their accumulated stuff on the unsuspecting public.

It's the Great Black Market of summer, the annual redistribution of wealth. People out in their yards in lawn chairs, marking down their worldly possessions.

We've all got too much stuff, piling up everywhere and thwarting every attempt to park in our own garages. So we sell off some of it, thin the herd, streamline things around the house.
And, before you know it, the house is jam-packed again, and it's time for another garage sale.

Why does this keep happening? Because we're buying stuff from our neighbors' garage sales, stuff they in turn got from garage sales years ago. The stuff goes round and round, and you end up buying a Salad Shooter that's just like the one you used to have . . .

There's a whole food chain of kitchen gizmos and baby furniture and bowling trophies circulating untaxed through the economy. Some items -- and I'm thinking here of ceramic panthers -- have moved from house to house for generations.

Next time you have a garage sale, do a quick inventory. Half the stuff you're selling probably came from flea markets and other people's garage sales. Stuff you never should've bought in the first place. Stuff people were GETTING RID OF.

(Thirty percent of the stuff you're selling will be things you bought "on sale," even though you didn't need them. The rest will be wedding gifts that you'll never unload.)

Getting rid of it all becomes more complicated once you have children. Kids never want to get rid of anything, ever. Broken toys, commemorative T-shirts, filthy sneakers, rocks, bones, lumps of dirt -- all these things have great sentimental value to children.

This detritus accumulates around the house, filling our lives with sentimentality and whimsy and punctured bare feet. We parents can never throw any of it away because of Murphy's Law of Parenting: The item you throw out will be the one the child really, really needs to finish the big school project on deadline.

This law applies to all homework papers. No matter how much the parent may try to parse out a date or a grade or some other signal that each stray rumpled page is no longer current, he or she will make the occasional mistake and throw out the child's important homework. Or, worse, some other child's important homework. And the parent will never hear the end of it. So school papers amass around the house like bales of cotton on a riverboat dock.

Same goes for any plastic "action figure" or balsa-wood airplane. Throw it out, and it's the one the child was using to prove Important Facts About Gravity in the science fair.

Any teddy bear or toy the parent tries to discard will immediately become the child's favorite one. How could you possibly get rid of that broken Shrek we got for free at some burger joint? The child LOVES that toy and is now emotionally bereft and will require expensive therapy.

When spring cleaning comes around, parents are forced to engage in stealth operations to get rid of their children's stuff. We ship bales of old homework off to the dump when the kids aren't looking. We creep around in the middle of the night, stuffing toys into black trash bags, hiding the evidence. On the day of the garage sale, we ship the kids off to Grandma's to keep them from scaring off customers with crying fits in the driveway.

We roll out the bazaar of baby clothes and broken burger toys and ceramic panthers and important homework, and a few customers trickle by and haul off some of the stuff. American commerce carries on.

Unfortunately, most of the inventory doesn't move. All the unsold stuff must return to the "warehouse," otherwise known as the space in the garage where the car should live.

So what if we must park on the street? At least we've thinned the inventory. We've cleaned out closets and raked toys out from under beds. Our lives are organized and ready for summer.

Just in time for the flea markets.

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.

Don't touch that desk

I once worked with a persnickety bachelor who began each shift by hosing down his entire desk with Lysol and briskly scrubbing away all the unseen viruses and germs there.

We co-workers secretly made fun of him, cracking jokes about Felix Unger and the biological warfare of intentionally sneezing on his phone, but a recent news item shows he was right -- your desk is a veritable laboratory of sneaky bacteria.

A study by researchers at the University of Arizona found that the standard office desk has 400 times more bacteria than the average toilet seat.

The study said the worst places for bacteria were telephones, desktops and keyboards, which are the only parts of the standard office desk that get much use. Apparently, the only relatively safe place is the inside of your desk drawers, and it's hard to get any work done in there because the lighting is inadequate.

This study raises a number of questions:

1) Where did I put the Lysol?

2) Would it be safer to work in the bathroom?

3) Does the Occupational Safety and Health Administration know about this?

4) Which toilet seat was used as the benchmark for the study? And did that household include young boys who have difficulty with the concept of "aiming?"

5) What kind of scientist spends his time measuring bacteria on desks and toilets? And was the study federally funded?

6) Is there some way to blame the bacteria on Saddam Hussein?

I have no answers to these questions because I learned of the study in in a magazine called "Fast Company," and the one-paragraph article was short on details. "Fast Company," for those of you who've never seen it, is a hip business magazine for people who are too busy to read. It's aimed at those striving executives who have cell phones permanently glued to their ears and who take their laptops to church. Articles in the magazines tend to rely heavily on quotes from millionaire CEOs. The design is so splashy it's difficult to tell the articles from the advertisements.

Why, you may ask yourself, was a housebound writer type like me, someone whose idea of a hectic business day includes liberal doses of computer Solitaire, reading "Fast Company?" Well, it was in the bathroom at our house.

Magazines tend to congregate in bathrooms, and at our house the bathrooms are regular periodical libraries, where there's always something to read, no matter how brief the stay. In the bathroom -- where, let's face it, I'm a captive audience -- I'll read most anything, including the "Old Farmer's Almanac" and the kids' "Mad" magazines. No doubt all these magazines are infested with bacteria.

Anyway, occasionally I see something in these accumulated magazines that applies to our workaday world, and this bacteria study sure made me sit up (as it were) and take notice. A desk has 400 times more bacteria than a toilet seat? It's a wonder we don't all keel over dead every time we check our e-mail.

The results of the study should come as no surprise, I suppose. Even the worst housekeepers must clean the toilet every week or two, or the place starts to smell like the restroom at the bus station. Desks, on the other hand, can be cleaned less frequently, such as, oh, never.

Most desks are buried under files and calendars and power cords and reference works and Post-It notes and "Dilbert" cartoons. This clutter makes an ideal habitat for bacteria, who take to it like snakes to a woodpile. To clean your desk properly, you'd have to move all that stuff and scrub everything down and then put all the stuff back. And who has time for that?

Even if you're a neat freak who keeps all clutter hidden away, the type who can actually see your desktop, I'll bet you don't regularly police the area for bacteria. And, if you did, how could you tell when you'd successfully rid your desk of this invisible menace? You'd need a researcher in a hazmat suit to stop by and measure.

While he's there, have him check the toilet seats. And all the magazines.

Ladders, adders and TV cameras

"Extreme" sports are all the rage these days, feeding an ever-growing hunger for fast-paced action, sudden violence and crass "reality."

In case you've been living in a nice safe bomb shelter for the past decade, let me explain: "Extreme" sports (also known as X-sports, X-treme sports, X-tra Crispy sports and various other near-names) are those televised athletic "events" that involve elements of danger.

For example, a show called something like "Real Triple-X-Treme Real Sports Challenge of the All-Stars" might feature real juvenile delinquents on skateboards flying high off a plywood "half-pipe" at breathtaking speeds, performing various twirling moves in the air and almost landing in a pit of irritable vipers before being yanked to safety by a bungee cord attached to their feet. The show's shouted advertising slogan will be something like: "WHO'll still be standing at the END?"

This kind of programming is irresistible to a large, mouth-breathing audience composed entirely of those who wear their baseball caps backward. Since that's the perfect market for Zima, motor oil and other such products, these shows have proven to be commercial gold mines.

Naturally, such a restless audience grows increasingly desensitized to fake suspense and "real" mayhem, which means the shows must keep ratcheting up the level of risk so the goobers will keep tuning in. Before long, extreme sports will feature athletes who, at breathtaking speed, fashion their own bungee cords out of irritable vipers before leaping directly into a pit of bubbling lava.

Extreme sports is changing the whole definition of sports. Many of us remember when a "game" usually involved something called a "ball" and was played by professional athletes with recognizable names. Extreme sports feature athletes you've never heard of doing dangerous, unseemly things with strange combinations of equipment, such as a downhill snowboard race through a forest fire with each participant simultaneously lifting weights and playing the nose flute, all while being pursued by angry National Rifle Association members on snowmobiles.

So far, network producers have overlooked one area of real everyday risk-taking that should be considered an extreme sport -- homeownership.

American homeowners regularly take our lives in our hands, working around the house. We use dangerous, unfamiliar tools to attempt repairs we're not qualified to make. We use whirring blades and whipping plastic line to trim our lawns. We perform complicated aerial maneuvers involving aluminum ladders and overhead power lines.

What's riskier than mowing a yard dotted with hidden metal sprinkler heads? Is anything more dangerous than a power saw in the hands of a klutz? What's more thrilling than a fat man climbing a rickety ladder while wearing sandals and trying not to spill his beer?

Such everyday events may seem catastrophic in real life, responsible for property damage, divorce and overcrowded emergency rooms, but let's face it: They'd make good television.

All it takes is a little organization and a video crew, and we could take TV by storm. We could call the show "The Real Extreme All-Star Homeowners Challenge." Plenty of homeowners would volunteer to play, particularly if free beer is involved. We'd stage the events in the participants' own homes, recording their every move with handheld video cameras. Their critical neighbors would eagerly volunteer to be judges.

Participants would race the clock while facing extreme challenges, such as an overflowing toilet with rusty parts flooding a carpeted bathroom. Each barefoot homeowner would be armed with only a monkey wrench and an electric hair dryer. Imagine the possibilities!

Sure, much of the work could be boring, but careful editing would result in clip after clip of homeowners skinning their knuckles and tripping over live wires and doing backflips off parapets while holding TV antennas. That, folks, is entertainment. If you don't believe it, ask your neighbors.

If such basic competition fails to keep our show's audience loyal, we can always elevate the risk and add to the gear involved. Imagine high-speed ladder-climbing by cigar-smoking men carrying buckets of combustible roofing tar and wearing heavy tool belts and funny hats.

Now that's extreme. If that's still not enough, we can always throw in a few vipers. Particularly if free beer is involved.

Washday blues

I'm about to hit an important milestone, and you know how much that can hurt.

Any minute now, by my calculations, I'll mark Laundry Load No. 10,000 of my married life.
Ten-thousand times that I've loaded the washer. Ten-thousand times that I've forgotten to put into the dryer the little fabric-softener sheet that my wife supplies. Ten-thousand times that I've been near-electrocuted by the resulting static electricity. Ten-thousand times that I've fluffed and folded and put away fresh clean clothes, only to have my sons throw them into the same pile with the dirty stuff.

Yes, 10,000 washer loads is a huge milestone, and it's depressing as hell. Why? Because, like most milestones, it's merely a marker on a long journey. I've got thousands more laundry loads in my future, and if that's not worth a ball-and-chain of dread, then I don't know what is.

How did I get locked into Eternal Laundry Hell? I made a deal with my wife.

Early in our marriage, my wife and I agreed: I'd do all the laundry (a job she despises) and she'd handle the bills and all household paperwork.

At the time, this seemed like a sweet deal. Laundry? Pish. It was just the two of us and, even in the years when the job required a trip to a coin-operated laundromat, keeping the clothes clean was easier than keeping track of insurance forms and credit-card receipts.

Besides, the thinking went, as a novelist I didn't need the burden of worrying about money; it could hinder my creative juices. Instead, I still worry about money all the time, but with a complete lack of knowledge of our household financial situation.

This has worked out very well so far. Our conversations about household finances tend to go like this:

Me: "How we doing?"

Wife: "OK."

Me: "Good."

Clearly, I have no idea whether the household paperwork has gotten harder over the years, but I'm fully aware that the laundry workload has increased tremendously. This is because we had children.

(Did my wife know kids were in our future when we set up this division of labor? Did she anticipate the approximately 17 jillion little baby shirts with spit-up on them? Hey, wait a minute . . . )

Each child doubles the amount of laundry in a household. How is this mathematically possible? I don't know. And how do families with six or seven kids keep up with it all? I don't know that, either. They must sleep in shifts so they can keep their washer going around the clock.

My laundry workload has fluctuated over the years. I do fewer loads per week now that my sons rarely spit up on their shirts. On the other hand, their clothes keep getting bigger and they insist on wearing the same jeans over and over. So it evens out in the long run.

These days, I do about a dozen loads per week, which comes out to more than 600 per year. It would be more, but many of my wife's clothes are "Dry-Clean Only." This is the only way she's found that will guarantee that I don't ruin her clothes by shrinking, staining, shredding or spindling them. Sure, dry cleaners are expensive, but she'll pay anything to keep her delicate dresses out of my clutches.

Everyday stuff -- jeans and T-shirts and socks -- get tougher to sort all the time because the kids keep growing. Now, they're both about the same size as my wife. (The dog's about that size, too, for that matter. Good thing he doesn't wear clothes.)

I'm forced to go through the laundry in slow-motion, holding up each T-shirt, trying to guess to whom it belongs by the message written on the chest. I often guess wrong, which results in the usual muttered complaints as the clean, misplaced T-shirt is thrown into the same pile with the dirty ones.

Then I come along, sighing, and gather up all the clean and dirty clothes and run them through the washer again.

Here's what I'm thinking: "10,001."