In Which Chaos Attempts to Redefine Itself As Cleaning.

Our house has been on the market for three months. Experts we know describe our local real estate market with words like "collapsed" and "dead" and "maybe you should consider renting."

Thing is, my house is *so nice*. I love it so much. It's very hard to see something I love so much get no love at all.

So you can imagine my excitement this morning to hear the magical questions "can you show the house" and my enthusiastic "YES!!" in response.

One problem.

The house was a disaster. Today was the end of a week that had a lot of priorities and housecleaning was definitely not one of them. At some point this week, K splashed half of her milk on the sliding glass door. It's still there, an amorphous body outlined in semi-transparent yuck, with long skinny legs where the milk ran down and puddled on the floor. The dining room table was buried under who knows what, and when I walked down the hall little ripples of pet hair floated behind me like a the wake of a canoe. My bathroom was a no-mans-land. The kitchen? Let's not talk about it.

I cleaned from the moment I heard the news of the showing until half an hour before they arrived, which is to say 9am to 2:30pm. And I wasn't even close to finishing.

After a few hours I just had to triage, which is why, frankly, the milk is still there on the door and if you look more than a few seconds at any floor surface you'll seriously call into question the origin of the 5 second rule.

The laundry was the biggest challenge. I didn't have time to wash it. I didn't have time to pretend it was clean and fold it. I couldn't just sort it and leave it in several huge piles on the floor. What to do, what to do, what to do?!

Hide it in the car, of course.

I hid so much laundry in my car that it is now impossible to differentiate between the back seat and the way back.

In the end, the cleaning was a relative success. I am reminded of a scene from the movie "Julie and Julia" when Julia Child and her sister look in the mirror all dolled up and one of them says "We look good. Well...good, but not great." That's how my house feels right now.

Now we just wait to see what the buyers thought.

(See that optimism? Buyers. Ha.)