Contract Cleaning Industry benefits from Scrapbooking?

The problem with obsessional habits (ie scrapbooking) is the cumulative result on my household hygiene. Regarding cleaniness, there appears to be a direct correlation between the amount of scrapbooking-related time I spend outside of my family or working life, and the state of cleaniness or disrepair of my home.

When I say "scrapbooking related time", this is worthy of a definition in the first place. It used to be that time actually sitting down at my crafting desk, and creating an actual physical layout. It involved cardstock, photos and trimmers, embellishments, design and humming and hah-hing. Nowadays, the term is getting looser and looser (and the time - larger and larger). Many tasks, hobbies or past-times - if you analyse them for long enough - can be found to be scrapbook-related (SBR), I've found. My time spent at my computer, wandering around the world wide wonder of scrapbooking websites, forums, and now digital sites can be catergorised as SBR research. My time spent at my computer, with scanner and printer, can be catergorised as SBR archival treatment. My time writing this story, and updating my personal website can definately be classified as SBR time - heck, I've even developed my personal website around this hobby. No, there are no family photos (other than those found on layouts in the gallery) or links to favourite sites (other than SBR links, that is) or an About Me area telling all web-readers my general history. Okay, so there is an about me section on my SBR website, but it's really a resume of my SBR successes. Oh, and I'd nearly forgotten my leisure time activity of reading books. Not normal fictional novels, though - my reading time is spent going through the latest Scrapbooking Magazines or Idea Books. That's SBR time, then.

I'm not the only one having household chore problems, mind you. Many other obsessed scrappers admit the same thing. Possibly it's all to do with motivation or lack of it. When you start off doing a large layout, and spending literally hours doing it, and then you look around you and think, 'Hmmm, I really was meant to have done that vacuum cleaning this afternoon, but look at the floor now - there's no point doing it in this state..." This accumulates the next day, and next day, when you realise that life doesn't stop and God didn't send down the lightning forks just because you didn't vacuum this week. Then the next week...then you decide that a better domestic schedule might be towards taking the minimist approach - one spring clean a year, and hoovering and cleaning the guest toilet only when you know the mother-in-law is about to visit. And instilling the concept of all household members picking up after themselves, while you continue to scrap. This was an easy principle to instill in my baby daughter - she picked up anything on the floor and crawled it to the kitchen rubbish bin as soon as she was self-movable. The family cats are a bit of a problem, and I haven't found a solution to their bi-annual fur-shedding as yet. Other than inviting the mother-in-law around and using that as the inspiration to "tidy-up" and remove said hair from off the sofas.

One forum scrapper had this to say of cleaning in a signature today - "Keep it meaningful - scrap now, clean later (there's always more dirt!)" That's so true, why worry about dirt until it's stopping you scrapping, I say.

My MATH doesn't share the same theory as me now. I'm sure that he does more actual cleaning than I do. Very often the guilt gets to me, and I clean the toilet (something, admittedly, he doesn't do well). But more often than not, I don't let that guilt get the better of me, darnit! My daughter is being raised in a natural world, I tell myself. If she's going to go out and taste dirt in the garden, then why bother cleaning it out of her normal place of residence? She cleans up after herself, and she has learnt that a man (her father) can do cleaning too - that's right for the whole sexual revolution, surely? It's justice now, that the female in the house does little cleaning when there is far more important things to do, like, say, SBR stuff - right? Right?

Which brings me to my latest lottery-fantasy wish. I wish for a personal cleaner. One of those mad philipino or asian women who come in once or twice a week (after I've cleaned up, mind) to do my cleaning for me, and can't speak much english, but you can tell by their stern looks and tut-tuts that they think you're a heathen and dirty woman. A bit of a hoover, a bit of a floor wash, a bit of a dust, perhaps clean the stove too - nothing major there, harrumph.

Surely the cleaning industry has a lot to be thankful for from a scrapbooking crafting perspective. We must be a major benefactor towards their growth industry. If only I could make a bit of money out of my SBR time, to pay for a cleaner. Then I would have more, er, SBR time!