I may not be a smart man, but I know what cleaning is...

We're in the middle of trying to sell our house, which I think I've mentioned before, and it's a little stressful for us, especially my wife.

We had an open house on Sunday and my wife left it up to me to clean up the house.

Over the course of the morning, she instructed me to vacuum, put away dishes, wipe off the counters, take out the trash, pick up Julia's toys in the living room, pick up my sphere of influence in the living room, open all of the blinds, turn on all the lights, put the cats in the pet carrier in the garage, give the cats food in the garage, put away any errant shoes, pick up anything on the floor, roll up the hoses outside, put away the Sunday newspapers, put away the clean dishes from the dishwasher, load the dishwasher with whatever dirty dishes had accumulated, clean the downstairs shower, vacuum the office, change the litter box, clean the toilets, wipe off any mirrors, dust shelves, swiffer the hard wood floors upstairs, pick up Julia's toys in her room, basically, a whole myriad of chores for your truly to do.

I'm sure that she's rattling off the list to keep her sanity, but it should be pretty obvious to me what needs to be cleaned for an open house. I have lived with her long enough to figure that out.

Obviously, she still remembers the days when I used to live life like a shopping cart guy that wore the same pair of pants for weeks at a time, lived with a brother that slept with so much cat hair on his bed blanket that he could have stitched together a fur coat, collected pop cans so infrequently from the living room that it seems like they were having a convention together, vaccuumed infrequently our extremely dirty carpets from our shoes since we (Bill and I) never took them off, allowed the kitchen to be overrun by mail all over the counter and dirt and grim from our cooking and basically cleaned thouroughly only when we were moving to a new apartment and Mom came to help us. Each time, Mom would swear that this was the last time she was going to help us and swore that she was going to turn us into Health and Human Services.

My friend, Jeff, who lived with us for a short time, used to refer to our cleaning not as cleaning but sporadic fits of straightening up. Not that my wife was any better, her apartment was neat, but her bathroom was way more disgusting than mine. At least I cleaned the toilet every now and then. And don't even get me started on the shower!

So Laura is explaining what to clean throughout the morning and each time I'm saying things like, "Yes", "OK, "Got it", "Gotcha", "Obviously" and "I understand what you telling me completely."

I then remarked that she must think that I am a moron if I can't figure out to put all of the dirty dishes in the sink prior to the open house.

This was followed by the usual reply, "Well, I never know with you..."

Driving with Julia to the YMCA pool, I call Laura (it's about 5 minutes to the open house).

She asks, "Did you get what I asked done?"

I respond, "Which is?"

"The cleaning and putting things away!"

"Cleaning? I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Oh HA... HA... HA... You are so funny!" Laura laughs sarcastically.

"Aren't I?"

"So funny! You are hiLARious!" again with sarcasm.

"I know! I should do stand up!"

"Oh you should!"

"I should start my own blog!"

Laura groans on the other end.

The open house went well. Laura made sure to call me to tell me that the realtor was impressed by how clean the house was. I can still surprise, I guess.