"Poultry. Chicken. Hot."

So of course the world is filling up with parodies of Fifty Shades of Grey, because how not?

And of course some of them are cookbooks and/or otherwise foodie, because food-porn is rather funnier and often a hell of a lot sexier than porn porn.

And mostly I care not a whit, because parodies interest me about as much as porn does; but as it happens, yes, I am vulnerable to food-porn. And this is an excellent instructional video on how to truss a chicken.

Also, Patrick Stewart. And a young man with barely too many clothes on. And did I mention Patrick Stewart?

There was an old man with a beard, Who said, "It is just as I feared!"

Every other Wednesday, the nice women from the cleaning service (I call them the cleaners, Karen calls them the maids - the service is called Merry Maids, but "maids" has too many connotations for my English middle-class conscience - and why in the world did they ever get called char ladies, what is this meaning of char?) come by for an hour and make things scrupulous for us. Which is kind of nice, except that I have that possibly-English possibly-male OMG-do-I-have-to-talk-to-strangers-doing-work-for-me-in-my-house? thing, and mostly I hide or run away.

Also, there are the cats. Who love to make mad dashes for the outdoors while strangers are manipulating awkward armfuls of stuff in through the door.

So: ordinarily, I shut the boys in the back of the house, which means the mud-room and this my office/our spare bedroom; and I hang a sign on the door that leads through from the kitchen, that says "Cats! Please don't let them out!"; and the nice women do not pass the door, and I either hide back here with the boys or else I run away altogether, and all is well.

Except that no doubt you will have spotted the one tiny flaw in this process, which is that all the territory beyond the kitchen doesn't actually get cleaned by the nice women. And as we know, I am not so much down with the dusting myself. And mostly I don't care, because mud-room and my office; but there is that little rider up there, which says "our spare bedroom". I sit here typing, and there is a bed at my back with a duvet and everything, only waiting to be occupied.

Right now, it is waiting to be occupied by Karen's mother, who's coming to stay for Thanksgiving.

So, yeah. Today I have been obliged to stay in, and to talk to the nice women; and we did a complicated shuttling thing whereby I hid out with the boys in our bedroom while they did the back of the house here; and now the boys and I have come back here where we are accustomed to be, while the nice women do the rest of the house.

But. But-but-but! They have cleaned everything in all directions everywhere, and spare bedroom yadda yadda, but! This is my office! And in the tradition of fictional cleaners everywhere, they have cleaned my desk and moved all my papers and nothing is where it was and I don't know where anything is now and and and!

Urgh. I'm sure it's all terribly clean, but oh, give me a home where the dust-bunnies roam and the desk is left strictly alone. It may have been chaos, but it was my chaos; and now it's somebody else's order, and I do not like this, Gunga Din.

Ah, soddit

The whole house smells of the cleaners' numerous and noxious chemicals, which make my chest hurt.

And I'm getting nothing done anyway*, so I'm out of here. I shall walk downtown and browse the bookshop and then Macy's for food-porn accessories; it's the best we have to offer in walking distance. And I'll take the LHP, and pretend to myself that I might stop at the pub on the way home to do some work. We both know I'm only pretending, but hey.

*Apparently all I really want to do is lie on the sofa and drink tea and (re)read old favourite books. This is a little odd, as it's like being a younger me, when that was all I wanted to do all the time. In recent years I haven't been reading half as much, let alone rereading; this revisiting of old favourites has become the thing I do when I'm ill, only. There's a vague possibility that I was mildly ill a few days back (so coooold...), but that passed off by next morning, and there's nothing wrong with me now; except, except. It's probably just my native idleness rising like bog-oak in the mire, but oh: even leaving the house is an effort that feels almost beyond me. Even when the house is full of poison. Everything's heavy and hard, except for turning pages and starting the next chapter...