Something is happening. 
This thing is happening all over the house.  I’ve cleaned the kitchen.  Twice, in fact, since I got back from my trip- but you wouldn’t know it.  I clean the daylights out of it, and within hours, heck, it might ever be  minutes – it slides back into it’s pre-cleaned state. I don’t know how this is occurring, since I’m not in the room when it happens… oh no.  I’m in the living room cleaning that like a sucker, because that scene won’t stay sorted either.  It’s the same all over.  I simply can’t get any traction on it.  I wash the dishes – there are more.  Right away.  The same number, along with a coffee cup that I found under the couch that probably has permanent coffee in it now.  (As an aside? Why Joe? Why put the coffee cup under the couch? I beg you, I just need a reason.  Was it secret coffee? Did someone arrive while you were drinking the secret coffee, and you had no choice but to ram it under the couch, concealing your caffeine? Were you reorganizing the furniture? Was there a table there when you put the cup down – but then you decided the couch should go back there after all, and so the couch sort of went over the coffee by accident?  Did someone come over, and you offered them a coffee, and then they put the cup under there to get you in trouble, because really Jody has always been like that? There has to be an explanation Joe, because really, it can’t be that a 43 year old man hauled off and started putting his coffee cups crazy places because his wife was in Texas and there was no-one to stop him.  It can’t be that. )

It wasn’t a surprise that the house was trashed when I came back.  The only person in the house who knows that the kitchen floor isn’t self cleaning can’t leave a teenager and a man who was born without the ability to see dirt alone in a house and expect any different.  They do their best, but I know that Joe made a special commitment to cooking this time around, and I know there’s no way he could cook and clean.  Something was going to blow, and it did.  (There was a pretty good quinoa salad in the fridge when I got here though.)  Like I said, the surprise isn’t that I need to clean and organize.  The surprise is that it won’t stay that way.  I can’t get any traction on the cleaning.  I do laundry, there’s no less laundry. I buy groceries, that afternoon we’re still out of apples and toilet paper.  I clear the accumulated junk off the dining room table, and the clutter is like dust.  It re-settles like I all I did was throw it into the air and leave the room. I clean, and the house un-cleans itself.  I can’t get it to really take hold and stay clean.  The whole thing is so hysterically funny that I can’t strop laughing – if by that you understand that I’m thinking about moving out and living in a tree in the park, it’s that funny. 

Anyway, here’s the thing.  As my friend Debbi would say, this isn’t my first rodeo, and I know what is going on here.  There’s a bad seed. 
Somewhere in this house, there’s an item of junk mail, or an old tee shirt, or a coffee cup that’s in the wrong place, and it’s contaminating the rest of the field of play.  The house is going to keep on resisting the clean and I won’t be able to get any traction at all, until I find this thing – correct it, and carry on. 

Sadly, there is no way to know what this object is.  The bad seed lurks, but it does not reveal itself.  Could it be one of the 23 sweaters hung by the front door? Won’t know until I put them all away.  Perhaps it is the old hydro bill jammed into Joe’s winter bin on the shelves? Gotta clean out the whole bin to find out. It might not be that at all.  It could be one of the nineteen half used shampoos in the bathroom that are there because Sam really believes that they do what they say they do and some days you want extra shine, and some days it’s all about volume.  No way to know.  I’m going to have to find a way to manage the nineteen shampoos before I know. 

Anyway, that’s a long way around saying that I’ll post tomorrow about the trip and the knitting and all that, but if you need me today, I’ll be ranting about bad seeds in my kitchen while disposing of all the expired vitamins.
Victory will be mine.