let's hose it down

For the most part, I think I keep my house pretty clean.  I am always on top of laundry and dishes, vacuum and clean bathrooms at least once a week, force children to clean rooms and do one other heinous chore on Saturdays, and most difficult of all -- manage to keep the paper flare ups (mail, schoolwork) to a low simmer.  I am not so good at dusting, wiping walls, noticing random clutter, bringing bags of Goodwill home, and probably millions of other things, but to make myself feel better I have a macabre fascination with shows like Hoarders and Clean House -- now at my fingertips any time I want!  It helps me maintain my feelings of smugness and superiority which are so important to my self-esteem.  


Well, we couldn't find the Ensign magazine for the whole month of February so we kept having to print off different things.  As I thought about it, I realized that we didn't have any of the other church magazines for that month so either: 1. our subscription had ended without me knowing, 2. the postman really wanted to read them, or 3. they were all three still in their plastic wrap somewhere in the house.  Then one afternoon I received a phone call from the gas company that my payment was very late and the next day a note came in the mail that our water bill had suffered a similar fate.  What was going on?  I began to suspect that there was a whole stack of mail hiding somewhere in our house.  I looked and I looked -- for about six weeks, but it was obviously very well camouflaged and I was quite certain that one of the children was responsible.  It turns out that it had magically become completely invisible by being set on a chair in the dining room.  A chair!  In one of the cleanest rooms in my house!  In that six weeks we had had at least three different families and the missionaries over for dinner.  How did we not see a pile of clutter???  It boggles my mind.  And makes me want clear it all out and start over.