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.

Sometimes I read a little bit of the Bible before bedtime, mostly because I don’t know what’s in it. Growing up Catholic, we didn’t go to vacation Bible school, and if we did read the Bible, we tended to stick with the New Testament. So lately I’ve been reading Exodus, and it’s a lot different than the Cecil B. Demille version. For instance, I didn’t remember Moses’ wife being named Zipporah and his father-in-law being Jethro. I think they were called Susan and Bob in the movie. And I thought there were only seven or eight plagues but, no, there were 10. Some of them were just redundant. In the seventh plague, huge hail rained down from the sky and then caught the ground on fire. You could assume that that would pretty much obliterate all the crops, but then the eighth plague, locusts, devoured whatever was left. And what was the frog plague supposed to do, anyway?

But what’s surprised me most is the part about manna, the bread that fell from heaven. It would appear in the morning with the dew and melt in the midday sun. If you left it out too long it would get wormy, but it tasted like honey. So it was more like cookies from heaven. But here’s the line that really gets me: “The Israelites ate manna for forty years.” Holy redundancy, Batman.

I was thinking about manna yesterday as we picked up pecans out of the back yard. An autumn wind blew hard and steady all day, raining pecans from the heavens. Hispanic ladies walked up and down the street with their buckets. Cars pulled over on the side of the road by Highway 90 so people could scour the roadside park. Forty years ago when the October wind blew hard, people in this county picked pecans. They’ll be doing it 40 years from now.

Message to Boy’s friend: When you prank call someone, especially when they’re sleeping, don’t use your dad’s cell phone. We have caller ID, dude.