Gah, my house is a bloody mess!

Eating Bugles for breakfast, thinking, "migawd, I have to get my behoven butt on that exercise bike again soon," thinking righteously, yes, must exercise, but first I will jam another fistful of Bugles into my gob and wash it down with coffee.

Not that I can really see the exercise bike. At the moment it's covered with hoodies and fall jackets because there's not enough hangers in the closet and I'm far too lazy to go find some or buy some. And what do hangers cost anyway? Half a week's pay at least? Oh probably. I wouldn't actually know. I see hangers in the store sometimes and think, "who buys hangers?" I certainly don't, though it appears maybe I should. I dunno, hangers just appear at my house. Like they were dropped there by the Hanger Fairy, which sounds gruesome, now that I think about it.  *imagining a large-necked man in a black hood, twirling a plastic hanger in his bloodied hands like a venomous version of Annie Oakley*

You should see my house. It's disgusting. It looks like an episode of Hoarders.

All the extra kitchen chairs are in use as holder-uppers of things-not-currently-needed. Which means crap, quite literally. Holder-uppers of crap. It's all important crap but it's crap in a state of flux. Like, three of the chairs are loaded with stuff-that-goes-back-in-the-trailer. Anybody who has a house trailer and is a mad camping fiend such as myself knows all about that term. Camping season is not all about camping, oh no. It's mostly about hauling the same stuff in and out of the trailer from May through to October. In the spring we gather it all up, wash it and load it into the trailer: food, dishes, sleeping bags, towels, blankets, bug spray and vast vats of Tylenol, and we think, that's it! We've prepared the trailer for another riotous season of outdoor pleasure!

Alas, after our first weekend camping, we have to unload unused food, dirty dishes, smelly sleeping bags, sodden towels and moldy blankets. I wash it all, except the food of course, because I hate it when marshmallows get balled up with used Kleenexes in the washing machine, and then carry it all back to the trailer. This back and forth goes on every time we go camping. Which, as you know, is a lot. There is a veritable path worn between the house and our house trailer. Some days I think we should pave it and paint passing lanes. In the spring we carry out this ridiculous procedure with dough-headed and fresh-faced enthusiasm. At this time of year, not so much. In fact, the stuff that needs to be put back in the trailer has been sitting on the kitchen chairs for so long that I fear it needs to be dusted.

That's not the only thing clogging up our living room at the moment. Another two of our chairs are being used to hold up an area rug, which is drying at the speed of a hibernating tortoise. It was rather gross, the rug was, having been the targeted area of the cats who prefer to spew hairballs and stomach curds onto a soft surface, rather than the much larger and easier to clean hard floors which surround it. It had gotten so bad that Dave and I were sitting on the couch one day sniffing the air and asking each other if we had recently vomited and hadn't mentioned it.

"Did you puke, darling?"

"Not that I remember, dearest. Did you toss your cookies, sweetheart, because it does smell like ralph in here, and not your Uncle Ralph, although he is rather smelly, but not in a vomitrocious kind of way, more like a man who hasn't changed his Depends for a week kind of way."

We do try to clean up the stomach curds as soon as they land on the rug – if we see them land there. The problem lies in us not always being here to see the blessed event and, because our carpet is multi-coloured to hide the dirt, a job it does rather too well, sometimes we don't see the curds until our bare toes find their cooling mushness. Toes are like homing pigeons, aren't they? They have their own GPS systems, unerringly able to find cold cat barf in the dark while blindfolded. I have tried painting my toenails with thick coats of pink polish, ostensibly to block the homing talents of the toes (it's like wearing tinfoil hats to block the secret messages of governments and aliens, which doesn't work – parchment paper is much better for that sort of thing and also prevents your cookies from burning).

The problem with toes as they relate to cat barf is they tend to grind it into the carpet fibres so, after a while, the carpet resembles my son's hair after he has been overly generous with gel. Spiky and stiff ... paints a picture, doesn't it?

So we had been promising to take the rug outside and wash it with lots of strong soap and the garden hose on the first nice day, then hang it on the clothesline to dry. Which we did. Well, bloody hell, we haven't had two nice days in a row since summer ended. And it takes more than one day to dry a rug on a clothesline. It would partially dry, then it would rain and hail, then it would get wet again so finally we dragged it into the house and draped it over the kitchen chairs and now there it sits. Moldering away. Making movement impossible – my butt really is too wide to negotiate a big rug in a small house, not to mention all that stuff-that-needs-to-go-back-in-the-trailer.

The only good news is, with the rug up in the air, the cats can't puke on it. And it does block the view of the exercise bicycle, which means I feel less guilty as I hoover down the Bugles.