I have a solution to this whole housework BS. This weekend we stayed at a Residence Inn. Get this — not only do they make your beds, clean the bathroom and wash the dishes, they’ll even do your laundry AND go grocery shopping for you! You just check off what you want on a little grocery list and they’ll bring it to you.

Of course like every good thing in life there’s a catch. It would cost us more than a month’s mortgage to stay there for a week, once you throw in taxes and fees. But still. It was a good fantasy.

The problem with recovering from surgery is that inertia settles in. The things you had to overlook because you couldn’t do anything about them have piled up, and now that you can do something about them, you long for the days of housecoats and slippers. My God the laundry pile is massive. I could make a wig out of the hair on the upstairs bathroom floor. And I must face this mess and tackle it. Why? Because it refuses to go away, no matter how much I ignore it.

Yesterday I wanted to run away from housework, take a long drive in the country, but Bob decided he needed to be an ant rather than a grasshopper and get his chores done. Which meant I should, too. Because I don’t have an excuse anymore — I feel great. I keep hoping that the mood to clean will strike me and make it all easier to face, but that mood never comes. I never ever feel like cleaning. Never. I just have to force myself to do it. And man does it put me in a foul mood. Yesterday I was on my hands and knees cleaning the upstairs bathroom floor and hating everything I could think of to hate. Housework makes me bitchy. And I can’t even blame PMS anymore.

But today I discovered something that makes it easier to cope with, and no, it’s not a pill. I got a splashy phone with an MP3 player included, so now I can put my phone in my pocket, stuff the tiny little ear plugs inside my ears, and make the world go away. It’s hard to hear, “Mama, can you get me some chocolate milk?” when you’re listening to Voodoo Chile. Until the voodoo child starts crying because nobody will answer her. But listening to my own private tunes makes me less inclined to hate the clothes or resent the dishes and the people who dirtied them.

Here’s my hope for the next cool gadget: Virtual reality glasses that make your house look clean when it’s actually filthy. You can wear them all the time and pass out extra pairs to your guests when they step through the door. Of course, there’s always the matter of “What’s that smell?” but they’ve already invented a solution for that: Febreeze.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about my new favorite TV show, Clean House, and included this sentence: “God, it’d be fabulous if a TV crew came over and cleaned up my big fat mess.”

At the time, I didn’t realize I was addressing Him directly, but apparently that’s the way He read it.

No, God is not sending over a crew of cute TV hunks to whip my house into shape. He’s sending someone better: the most organized person I know.

A friend of mine recently decided to start her own business helping people get organized: rooms, files, garages, you name it. In the e-mail announcing her new business, she said she would help the first three people who responded for FREE. I happened to see this e-mail and respond back within the first nano-second. So she’s coming over next month to assess my mess and help me deal with it once and for all.

And here’s the thing. She really needs someone to help her with her new website for her business. At some point as she was thinking about at all that webby/marketingy stuff she needed to do, my friend probably threw up her hands and said, “God, I could use a writer.”

So God, being the organized person He is, sensed the possibility of a prayer two-for-one and hooked us up.

Dear God, thanks for reading my blog!

Clean House, where have you been all my life? I’m talking about the TV show, not the place I live. I just happened to catch the show for the first time today as I was folding massive piles of clothes. I thought watching a show called Clean House might inspire me because I hate hate hate housework.

OMG, I love this show. It’s got everything I want in TV, which is basically the opportunity to revel in the problems of others to make myself feel better. In case you haven’t seen it, a family writes in to the show and asks this group of “house cleaners,” which are actually professional comedians in real life, to come over and clean up their horribly messy house. The family gets to spend the night at a plush hotel while the TV crew cleans up the mess.

I had about one-and-a-half episodes worth of clothes to fold, but even having only watched that much, I can tell the show really needs a different name. It should be called, “What the Hell’s Wrong with the Mama?”

These families let things go waaaaaay too far. It looked as if loads of laundry had exploded all over their houses year ago, and now stuff was growing out of it. And who’s fault was that?

I should be ashamed of myself for pointing a finger at the women in the families. There were other people who lived in their houses and were perfectly capable of cleaning them. But no, I blame the moms. For the same reason I blame myself when my house looks like crap. Because working or not, healthy or not, energetic or not, we’re ultimately responsible for what goes on within our walls.

God, it’d be fabulous if a TV crew came over and cleaned up my big fat mess. But then, I’d have to endure the psychoanalysis of all the other Clean House viewers, shaking their heads while they’re sitting on their couches, folding yet another load of laundry and feeling smug because at least their clothes were in a NEAT pile.