Just. Don't ever do this.

Mondays are the days on our chore schedule when I vacuum the kitchen and laundry room, which is not as much fun as it sounds. The actual task doesn't take ten minutes, but the dreading of the task consumes at least an hour beforehand, and I think it could be fairly said that more time is eaten up in greater quantities as I contemplate doing the same little duty on the following Monday.

I have a loathing of housework detailed into an ART FORM.

So today, I was vacuuming the laundry room. And there on the floor in front of me was a cotton ball. Just a simple cotton ball. I'm not sure how it arrived on the laundry room floor, but there it was. So if you were pushing a sweeper and you saw a cotton ball on the floor, what would you do?

You'd sweep right over that little bugger, wouldn't you?

And that's what I did. And it took a whole four seconds afterward to realize what a big mistake that was. Because those bristled rollers under the sweeper that are called "beater bars"? Well, the beater bars viciously tore that cotton ball into dirty little shreds and refused to suck them up into the dust bag. No, the beater bars coughed the fragmented cotton ball right back onto the carpet, which I'd like to add is an extremely low-pile Berber type. In other words, to coax those grubby little shreds out of the pile, I'm going to have to lie on my face on the floor and pick them up with tweezers.

It's this kind of thing that gives both housework and Mondays a bad rep.