I had planned to take a few days off work to relax, maybe do a little cleaning around the house, catch up on my Japanese studies, pay a few bills, perhaps even watch a little anime. Your basic five-day weekend.

Then I caught a cold, and by the middle of last week, was feeling pretty miserable. I spent the first two days of my mini-vacation lying around the house with a box of tissues and my last remaining caffeine sources. On Sunday, I finally managed to get a start on my spring cleaning. Spring 2007, that is.

Good thing, too, because I’m refinancing the house, and the appraiser was going to show up on Tuesday afternoon. I didn’t need to impress him with my housekeeping skills, but I did need him to be able to get into every room without tripping over the clutter or sneezing himself to death in the dust.

I’m not a very good housekeeper, you see. I’m a clutter-slob, and my usual practice is to let the stacks of books and piles of clean laundry accumulate until I can’t find a path from A to B, then spend a day tidying and call in a maid service to do the actual cleaning.

Unfortunately, I’ve been pretty busy at my current startup (now in 250 Best Buy locations, arriving in all Micro Center and Frys Electronics soon!), my office is 75 miles from my house, and I rarely have the (sweet, satisfying) luxury of telecommuting. The house has basically become an oversized hotel room that doesn’t have a housekeeping staff. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it didn’t smell; I can tolerate almost infinite clutter, but I can’t stand a mess.

[this, by the way, made life interesting in my rental days; clutter-slobs should never share a place with mess-slobs, but even worse is having two clutter-slobs reinforcing each others’ behaviors]

All told, I did about 24 hours of tidying, cleaning, and honest-to-gosh scrubbing around the house. By the time the appraiser arrived, I was getting unnerved by the sheer wrongness of having so much open floor space around the house, and I’d burned out most of the cold.

If I ever get the chance to retire, I’m hiring two maids. A sturdy middle-aged woman to do the cleaning, and a hot cosplaying coed to tidy up the clutter. Or maybe two of each.