I have to do chores now
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One of the things you come to realise when you move out of your parents' house is how much was done for you. For example, all I had to do was put my washing in a basket and, come the weekend, it would reappear on my bed smelling clean and fresh. Of course having your own place has its own perks too. For one thing, it's near impossible to be sent to your room, not least because all the rooms are yours. But that also means that you have more rooms that need cleaning.
Like most people, I do chores because I have to. There will always be something else I'd rather be doing. Chores are those annoying things that I have to do before I can do those other things. I don't know anyone who likes cleaning. Not really. I know a few people who say they like it, but if they were given the option of never having to clean again, my guess is they'd take it. If they didn't, I'd have to review our friendship.
The thing I don't like about cleaning is that it doesn't have a definite end point. If you have to paint a wall, you know that when the wall is painted you're finished. Cleaning is a continuous battle. You can only ever finish cleaning for now. Dusting is only done until more dust settles. Carpets seem to lose that nice 'just vacuumed' look within hours. And we're forever cleaning our kitchen, but kitchens in general seem to be demanding like that. In our case, it's a combination of the worktops and the cat.
Then there's the garden. Gardens don't just accumulate mess. They actively grow it. At the moment our garden is just grass. During the winter it doesn't need much care, but if summer ever arrives, that will change. The lawnmower has already returned to active duty. Our plans for this year involve putting other things in the garden that aren't grass, so I suspect there's even more work to come.
As a modern male, there aren't any chores I'm incapable of doing. I do, however, prefer some to others. That's not to say I enjoy them. I just mind doing them slightly less. If it has a plug, I'll probably get on better with it. Maybe it's my more traditional male side trying to convince me it's a power tool of some sort. It's a very loose application of the term, but a vacuum cleaner, for example, has a plug, makes a noise and performs a simple task. If it's enough to motivate that primitive part of me to get the job done so I can do something else, that counts.
At least once a week, we make efforts to blitz our house. My partner and I try and split the jobs evenly, alternating the less interesting ones, so we can get it done quicker. There's always that nagging feeling that we'll have to do it all over again just days later, but we get on with it because the thought of leaving it scares us more than the work involved. Clearly the days where things like that just magically happened behind the scenes in my parents' house are long gone. Perhaps my only hope now is that I can somehow train the cat.