Cruel and Unusual Punishment

I hate to clean. Really. Surprise, surprise, surprise. So taking my entire Saturday to clean the entire day (with a few brief respites for overeating junk food to comfort me), took a lot. And I'm not any good at it. I was scrubbing the stove and the black stuff will not come off. I got most of the grease off, but that black stuff. The first few pieces that I dryed with a towel--nothing came off on the towel, but by the last few pieces, well, let's just say that my arm got tired and maybe I didn't scrubb the last one as well as the first one. And I couldn't see. I almost had to go get my reading glasses to clean the dishes, but towels are washable, so whatever I missed, the towel caught.

So to say that after nine hours of work, that I had only scratched the surface, is putting it kindly. I could tell the difference, having mucked in the junk, but any outsider would still vote my house as the messiest (dirtiest) house in the country. So having been relieved of any duty to provide a trip to Disneyland, I received an opportunity to have Berna (our housecleaner that I can't afford anymore) come today. She's there right now. She would have done in 10 minutes, what it took me nine hours to do and she does it a ton better. So my nine hours of hard work was all for absolutely nothing. And I don't get to go to Disneyland.

The icing on this cake of punishment is that today is Caitlyn's birthday. Adam and I blew up a bunch of balloons, but we couldn't show them to Caitlyn before school (because Marisa was afraid that she'd throw a fit and not want to go to school--"school is boring," Caitlyn announced to me last week). So the balloons are hidden in my bedroom, which means that I will not have Berna clean my bedroom (because she is really efficient--those balloons would be toast).

No good deed goes unpunished, but this is cruel and unusual punishment. I don't want to go to Disneyland anymore, I just want to move away. Who needs Disneyland at Christmas, I've got my eye on a two bedroom, one bath with a garden courtyard, close to my office owned by a fellow in my Kiwanis club. There's a vacancy...