Today I cleaned the single most disgusting thing in my house, and it wasn’t even in a bathroom. It was the inside of the cabinet where we keep our kitchen trash. I didn’t touch anything in there, I just used the wet mop to clean all possible surfaces. It is now shiny and not nasty, hurrah.

Why would I do such a thing, given that general cleanliness ranks low on my current priority list? Why, funny you should ask—there was a reason! One of my overzealous climbing children thought he could maybe balance on the cabinet handle while washing his hands in the kitchen sink. And he could. Except that the cabinet door disapproved of his plan, and ripped its hinges right out of the wall. We now have a gaping, exposed trash cupboard where the door used to be.

Even that might not have been enough to get me to thoroughly clean the cabinet—wipe it down a little, yes; clean it, probably not—but I had to call our contractor to come fix it, and I happen to know from experience that he does not notice things like disgusting trash mess. He just puts his head/hands/tools right in there anyway, and I figured I had better not be the one to send him home with bits of banana peel stuck to his hair.

At any rate. I’m glad that the trash cupboard is sparkling and smell-free. But it does occur to me that—since I got rid of the old most-disgusting thing in the house—something else, by definition, must now be the new most disgusting thing in my house, which hardly seems fair.

I think the moral of that story is: don’t bother with the really nasty jobs, or else the less-nasty ones will want to be taken care of. Or: if you wait long enough, eventually you’ll find a good enough reason to do the things you avoid. Or maybe just: convince your children not to climb. One of those, probably.