I Heart the Service Industry

My mother is coming to town. Now, she has known me for 41 and 3/4 years. She knows I am a slob. The jig is up.

Why, then, did I spend EIGHT HOURS cleaning my house yesterday?

Back when we lived like normal people, we used to have a cleaning lady. I would come home at the end of a long workday, and do you know the house would sparkle? You could SEE through the shower door! The wood floors would reflect up and you could see up my skirt! You can imagine how the neighbors clamored to see that.

But not anymore. Now it's just me and my increasingly foul mood doing the cleaning. At least I have been regularly doing the Martha Stewart homekeeping technique every weekend, so the house is starting out somewhat okay. Remember that scene in The Color Purple, when she first moves in with her husband and the kitchen walls are black? That is how it used to be for me when I would try to clean my house.

But I am telling you, I slaved. I removed every knickknack and dusted it (and we are not minimalists; our decorating style is kind of 1950s grandma), then dusted all the furniture. I cleaned the outside and inside of the windows, and now when you look outside it is like you have been lifted from a great depression. There are actual COLORS out there! I swept cobwebs from the porches, and worst of all, I removed everything from the refrigerator and cleaned the whole thing top to bottom.

Have you ever removed your crispers to clean them out? Don't. Just go buy a new refrigerator. I know I have a large contingent of Christian women who read this blog, so I will apologize in advance. But I can assure you that the entire Osborne family, Jack, Ozzie, even that sister who we never see, the WHOLE CLAN did not say the "F" word in an ENTIRE WEEK more than I said it in that hour I spent trying to get those crispers back into their ding-dang slot.

Finally, I tried to clean the kitchen floor. I am ashamed to admit to you that I called our ex-cleaning lady and asked her how to remove my waxy buildup. I'll bet she had some buildup she wanted to wax off of me. I know that didn't make sense. Suffice it to say, she was probably annoyed. But she cheerfully told me what to do, and I spent 45 minutes on my knees, with a scrubby sponge, removing that buildup.

It is occurring to me as I write this that perhaps Alicia totally made that technique up to punish me for calling her for free advice.

Anyway, if you ask me, the house doesn't look any different. I hate everything.

And speaking of my eyebrows, I know I have told you before how much I miss going to Damone, my eyebrow guy. There is a Buddha statue when you walk in, and the Buddha is holding tweezers in his lap. They serve you mint tea. Often there are celebs. And when you are done, oh! do you look good. One of the things Damone or his cohorts did was trim my eyebrows.

So, yeah, I have the tweezers, but I was really hankering for an eyebrow trim, as I was getting a kind of Andy Rooney look, which is not flattering.

So what did Miss Resourceful over here do? I found the tiniest scissors we had, my eyebrow comb, and did a little Damone-action trimming.

Well.

Remember that scene at the end of The Wall (I assume you see a lot of movies, don't I?) when the main character shaved off all his body hair?

It was a travesty, and I am afraid I actually managed to FORGET that I had done this to myself and went to work that way, and you can imagine my panic when I looked in the mirror this morning. All I had at work was a brown eye pencil, which gave me a lovely Mommy Dearest kind of a look. Which is what everyone wants.

So I wiped my brows, hoped no one would say anything, and got to work. Later, I am toiling away, and I hear, "Hi June!" I turn around, with my Pink Floyd eyebrows, and do you know who is there? Do you KNOW who is STANDING in my DOORWAY, looking at my face, my "I thought they were binoculars but they were really helicopter propellers" face? The OWNER of our COMPANY! The OWNER, who I have never talked to before. The OWNER, who is very fancy and VERY well-groomed.

Perhaps my cleaning lady needs a helper.