Cleaning Despot Empowered

I’m going to admit it.  I am totally gassed.  Yesterday was supposed to be a mundane Wednesday with the added benefit of a return to lunches with the son now that he’s through honeymooning.  That was before I remembered that the realtor is sending a photographer to the house today to take photos to market the house.

Son and I Yesterday

When we asked the realtor the other day what we had to do to prep the house for the photographer he looked around and said, “nothing – it looks great”.  I took the man at his word but he didn’t understand who he was dealing with.  My wife takes it to a whole ‘nother level when we have guests and the thought that potentially (hopefully) thousands seeing pictures of “her” house sent her into a cleaning frenzy.

I was sucked into the vortex upon my unfortunate return from work.  I was charged with power washing the deck and front porch and cleaning the huge window in the family room.  My wife is terrified of thunderstorms (I think that’s where Buddy picked up his fear from) and she will usually pester me if I’m outside if a thunderstorm is within fifty miles.  I guess her cleaning fanaticism overcame her fear for my safety because I was perched on a metal ladder extending a long metal pole to reach the peak of the window while a truly impressive storm descended on us.  I think she chose to ignore the elements as long as a single spider web remained on the window.  I usually love getting up close and personal with thunderstorms but I’ll have to admit to a touch of nervousness as the squeegee made its tortuously slow ministrations.

Buddy was sentenced to his kennel early on.  He’s been through this before (seen my wife in a cleaning frenzy) and knows he can do little right at this point.  The interesting thing was that he rode out the storm in fairly calm manner for him.  We may have stumbled on to the answer – get him into the kennel before the storm hits and leave the lights on.  We can no longer give him the storm stress drugs – Defecatapocalypse 1 and 2 clearly took that option off the table.

Once I was driven inside by the storm I was handed a paint brush and put to work spot painting the kitchen and cleaning baseboards.  This brought back memories of childhood as one of my mother’s most thankless chores that her children (my sisters and I) hated with a passion.  I was also instructed to clean the walls where “my” dog had brushed up against.  At this point I half way considered joining Buddy in his kennel.

I think my wife is enjoying the prospect of selling the house on only one level.  She’ll be able to maintain her preferred surgical suite level of cleanliness if/when people come to see the house.  For all the work I did yesterday I know she spent the entire day doing even more; kind of makes it hard to complain.  At least to her, I kinda hope she doesn’t read the blog today.  I guess she really is the boss of me (childhood argument 101 finally settled).