In Which I Reveal Too Much

     I am a crappy housekeeper. This is in no way my mom's fault - she has a lovely home which she dusts regularly, and she passed on the rites of such to me. I just failed miserably at internalizing them, along with things like how to change the oil in my car and how to calculate annual compound interest. My brain, lucky for me, retains like a steel trap wildly useful tidbits like what year Oliver Cromwell died and the words to every song we learned in fourth grade music class.
      We have lived in this house for seven (!) years, and there are parts of it that have not been cleaned since we moved in - under the stove, behind the fridge, that kind of thing. I dust more or less bianually. Most of the time it's the usual clutter of toys and papers and goldfish crackers and socks (I have silently gone on strike against picking up my husband's socks, so there are, as of this writing, eleven of them on the floor. I vacuum around them.)(If you don't think you're that petty, you just haven't been married long enough. But I digress...) I have actually considered posting a series of pictures of my day-to-day messy house just to make other women feel better about themselves, because it's something I have spent a lot of time being insecure about, and something useful might as well come of it.
     All this is to preface that Alec got it into his head today to drag the couch out from the wall, and we discovered that a colony of adolescent male gnomes had been living under it for quite some time, stealing and hoarding all manner of small toys, bits of food, and candy wrappers, and supporting an entire dust bunny ranch. There was even a spot in which something orange and thready was growing in my carpet. That has now been steam-cleaned at great length, but still, I had something growing in my carpet. This is horrifying, and funny, and it leads me to wonder if I have a special talent (what's the opposite of talent?) for this kind of thing, or if some seriously crazy shit is just the inevitable byproduct of a busy household.
      I'm going to contemplate that while I go eradicate the spiders from my laundry pile.