I have only one person to blame for copious amounts of my hair clogging my vacuum cleaner—my cleaning lady Vera.

We are gearing up to host a few neighbours for a March Break tell-all to hear about everyone’s exciting adventures this past week. What that means for us is spending the day frantically trying to pretend we are exponentially cleaner than we are.

I actually used attachments on the vacuum today rather than just sticking with old standby, the large robot head that started spewing smoke before I realized there was a hair fire smouldering around the short fibres of the brush.

I even vacuumed the stairs! We’ll have them all fooled.

The sad truth is, while cleaning parts of the house I haven’t touched in almost six years, instead of praising myself for the great accomplishment, I began to compile a to do list of all of the things we really need to clean.

Did you know for example, you have to wipe the groove in between the window sills in the basement bedroom even though no one uses the room or it will fill up with four billion dead bugs? How does one remove the carcasses and larvae from a space more narrow than a small child’s finger wrapped in a Windexed paper towel? Why did all of those bugs die? Did they see all of the other bodies and just collapse? The multi-bug funeral will have to wait for another day. I’ve got to focus on the things people might actually notice.

I’m looking forward to hearing all about how everyone spent their week but mostly, I’m looking forward to the looks on their faces when we tell them we actually invited them over to sell them candles.