Homeland insecurity

I've spent every possible minute outside these last few weeks. Now that the sunny-and-clear postcard weather has given way to more seasonally appropriate fallishness, I have no excuse not to face up to the inside chores.

My goal today is merely to reach "drop-in clean": dishes washed (maybe even put away), horizontal surfaces decluttered, the Goodwill boxes I've been tripping over out to the car, my tent - still in the dining room - into the closet.  Drop-in clean, except perhaps for the muddy tracks by the back door and the beet soup splashes on the stove (I really should wipe those up), is more about tidy than about actual clean. It's a level of surface acceptability that allows you to open the front door if a friend stops by rather than hiding behind the curtains until she goes away.

Looming ahead like a grey storm front is the necessity of reaching "houseguest clean." A friend will be overnighting four weeks from now. This requires not only an orderly first floor, but clean bathrooms upstairs and down, and an inhabitable guest room. (The rest of the upstairs? Please, this is one reason bedrooms have doors. Doors that can be shut.)

Because my houseguest might wake up before me and decide to help herself to a glass of juice, I'd better mop up the hoison sauce that dribbled on the top shelf of the refrigerator - it's really sticky - and throw out the dried-up green onions that are in the vegetable drawer. Maybe I should clean out the whole refrigerator in case she goes looking for the milk. I never have any, which means she's going to go through the whole refrigerator before giving up. I should clean it. Or maybe it would be easier to just buy some milk . . .

I ought to dust off the piano, the coffee table and the guest room dresser. And Swiffer all the floors in case she walks around the house in her socks. I do that all the time, and you don't want to see what the bottom of my socks look like at the end of the day. It's all too much. (Too late - I already said she could stay here and she's not even coming to visit me; she's coming to town to see her nephew in a college play.)

I used to have a gauge by the front door with a sliding arrow on it that I moved up or down to indicate the Squalor Threat Level within. I adopted one of the TSA's slightly scrambled rainbows - green at the bottom for "no threat," rising through blue to yellow toward orange and the frightening red of "extreme threat."

Things rarely get that bad at my house but there are times when keeping conditions in the orange range is a mighty challenge. Most of the time, the squalor level here hovers somewhere in the yellow zone. On good days it slides down toward the blue, on more usual days it creeps up in the direction of the orange.
I know I have next to no hope of ever achieving the clear green of "zero threat"at the good end of the scale but I like to think that the blue of "very low threat" might someday be attainable.

I find the blue zone more desirable than the green, anyway. Not perfectly safe, mind you, but safe enough, with just a bit of an edge. We all need a touch of excitement in our lives.