RAIN, RAIN

I admit it - I am not the best housekeeper in the world. Sadly, if I were to keep a prioritized list, cleaning my house would tie with exercise for last place. Yup, I've got cobwebs in my ceiling corners, dust on the tops of my picture frames, and all sorts of treasures stashed beneath my sofas. (Kids, where IS that video we checked out from the library a month ago????)

I do clean once in a while - when I'm not spending hours a day in my car or desperately trying to catch up on the laundry (yeah, right!) - and when I do, I usually pick some task that has been ignored for so long that I have to carve out a good portion of my day to deal with it.

Friday I decided to tackle my living room carpet. It's one of those 6X8 rugs that you find displayed outside of Wal-Mart once in a while, nothing too fancy but affordable. Of course, it's a magnet for every speck of dust and dirt in the entire house and looks grungy most of the time. I do vacuum it, but it doesn't seem to help much. That's probably because every time I buy a new vacuum, I just can't bring myself to spend more money than I did on the last one and always end up with the second to last cheapest vacuum Wal-Mart offers. (Second to last so I feel like I'm not leaving with a totally worthless piece of machinery.)

Well, Friday I vacuumed and it didn't make much of a difference. What to do? In the "old days" people used to hang their carpets outside and beat them, right? Okay - sounded good to me. I rolled it up, dragged it out onto the front porch, and draped it over a wall. But I had nothing with which to beat it (closest I could come to those old wire beaters was a coat hanger). True to form, I decided to deal with it later.

The next day was Saturday and I was too busy to deal with it. The day went by and as night fell, guess what? Yup, it started to rain. Not just any rain - thunder and lightening and major downpour kind of rain. And it's been raining ever since.

So I've got this soaking wet Wal-Mart rug hanging in my front yard. Can't bring it in until it's dried and who knows how long that will take in this weather. According to one friend, at least all the dust will be washed away. Hmmm... This could be a silver lining to my otherwise black cloud - or I've just managed to procrastinate cleaning that rug until spring.