forget environmentally friendly...

...sometimes you just gotta use the real stuff.

I'm cleaning house this weekend. Normally I do this before I leave on break anyway, because I tend to feel like the house is less likely to be invaded by mice if it's all clean, and also when you come back in January it's nicer to come to a clean house than one that's all grubby and horrible* because you were mired in grading.

So I generally take a weekend day sometime between the end of classes and my leaving town to clean.

(*This is a relative term. I cope well with clutter, but let there be one spot on my kitchen counter and I start to twitch and feel like my home is UNHYGIENIC!)

I'm doing it a bit early this year because Monday I am having workmen in, and I cannot stand for my house to be a mess when people come in to work on it.

(I also brush and floss like crazy before a trip to the dentist).

Part of it is courtesy, but a big part of it is I hate to imagine that the workers might talk about me behind my backs later - to roll their eyes over what a filthy house I have, what they found in the cabinets when they were working, how grotty the floors were.

I realize, this is very much what a friend of mine used to call a "my sh*t" issue - as in, it's something I deal with that's really not relevant, and it's related to stuff in my past and my personality. Back in high school, I had the misfortune to hear a couple of the "populars" talking about me behind my back. Oh, I called them on it. I stepped forward and let them know I had heard. And they tried to backpedal, to make nice, all that. But the damage had been done.

And of course, I wasn't full enough of self confidence to say to myself: "Well, that's just their opinion. And they are jerks anyway to talk about people behind their backs like that." So ever since then, I kind of go into panic mode: must not give people grounds to say rude things about me. Must be as close to perfect as possible.

So, when workmen are coming in, I clean.

And true, they probably HAVE seen far far worse than what I consider "filthy" for my house. And they probably don't care. But I do.

Workmen around here are not like Tracey's TLUF. They fall into four basic categories:

1. Tall skinny cowboy types who are unfailingly polite but don't talk much otherwise. They are generally good workers because they're not talkers.

2. Chicano guys who usually come in groups, who chatter amongst themselves (sometimes in Spanish, which makes me a bit nervous: did they just say melones? Could they be making rude comments about me in a language I don't really understand? Most of them are nice guys, though, and they work fast and are usually pretty polite.

3. Big chubby good-ol'-boy types, who will regale you with stories while they work if you let them. Usually they're pretty harmless and if they happen to say a rude word or get into a story that's a bit off-color, they blush and apologize to you for forgetting you're a lady. (If you saw the Dirty Jobs episode where Mike worked with the plumber in Oklahoma, you pretty much have seen this type). Sometimes they have to bring along one of the skinny cowboys if it involves things like working on a hot water heater that's back in a closet, or going into the tight crawl space under the house.

4. British or Scots ex-pats, oddly enough. Generally they don't talk much. Sometimes they're almost a little curt, especially compared to the Bubbas who will tell you all about their kid's football team. However, they tend to be the group most likely to give you an accurate estimate of what the work will cost, and they tend to have the most detailed invoices and receipts.

So I don't think any of those people would talk about the (imagined) "filth" in my house if I didn't clean: the cowboys would be too polite to mention it, the Bubbas would have seen far worse and are willing to cut people a break, and the Chicano guys are too busy working to notice. (The Scots ex-pats MIGHT make a tart comment to their business partners or their spouses later. They'd probably be the only ones to really care. And I can say that because I am at least 3/8 Scots.)

So anyway. Cleaning the kitchen, I got ready to do the sink. (Yeah, I know: horror of horrors, I don't scrub my sink every day*). It had gotten a bit dirtier of late, and I decided that the earth-friendly rainbows-n-unicorns cleaner I had been using just wasn't cutting it.

(*Flylady, which I KNOW some people love and use but which would be a little bit too controlling for me - apparently they even send e-mails out to tell their people when to go to bed - talks about "shining your sink everyday." And because I really do have kind of a dirty mind at times, that makes me snicker, because "shining the sink" sounds like a euphemism for something else...)

So I got out the Comet. I had had a can on hand from a couple years back, when one of the Cowboy-types came to do some work in the bathroom - he asked me to have some Comet available so he "could clean up properly" after the work was done. (And he did).

After a quick call to my mom (who knows more about such things than I do) to make sure it wouldn't ruin the stainless steel sink, I tried it out.

It made a big difference. Not only was it easier to get the sink clean than with the rainbows-n-unicorns cleaner, the sink was cleaner overall.

So, sigh. No more lavender scented earth-friendly cleaners for me, I guess. Because the industrial ones seem to do a better job. (Or at least I reserve the right to use the industrial stuff a couple times a year when I really need to get things clean).

Another thing about cleaning house - why I go all ballistic when I hear someone's coming over and rush to clean the house, or at least swoop all the unsorted mail and half-knit sweaters and junk into a back room they won't see, is that I have "pretend grownup" issues. As in, I'm afraid someday people are going to decide that, because I didn't marry and have children, I'm really only pretending to be a grownup. And someone will come to me and tell me, "Adulthood: UR Doin' It Rong!" and make me give up my job and house and go back to high school.

So for me, having a clean house feels like I'm showing the world that I am a REAL grownup, that I can manage to keep my house clean and that I don't really need to go back for remedial training. And I realize that again, that's very much a "my sh*t" sort of thing, that no one is REALLY going to claim to my face that I'm not really a grownup (and if they did, it would be extremely shabby of them to do so). But still, I feel pushed to clean my house even if someone calls me and says, "I have some AAUW paperwork to drop off, I will be there in 10 minutes" - I go into a 10 minute fury of cleaning the living room and perhaps even the bathroom (because you never know when someone's going to ask you if they can use your facilities).

The good thing is I get a clean house, though.

So now I have to go back to work - I need to sweep the dining room floor and change the tablecloth, sweep the living room, and finish cleaning the bathroom. (The kitchen, thank goodness, is done).