On my special summer schedule, Fridays are reserved for working at home. No, I don�t mean that I am telecommuting (or as a small child I know more accurately called it �telecomputing.�) I mean that on Fridays I leave the pressures of my office at work and deal with the pressures at home: cleaning, cooking, baking, and laundry.

I began the day by steam-cleaning the hall carpet. Our house has a peculiar (read: bad) layout. In the front is a kitchen next to a dining room that was the original living room before the addition of a living room in the back of the house in the 1960s. A long hallway comes off the kitchen and runs back to the living room at the back of the house. The front bathroom and all the bedrooms come off of that hallway.

That hallway is crucial. You cannot get anywhere of importance in the house without walking down that hallway. That hallway is important enough that we had a key rule about it: no running in the hallway. The occasions my children have forgotten that rule have created narrowly-averted disasters. I probably should have made a rule about dancing down the hallway, skipping down the hallway, and leaping down the hallway but I have failed to do so and we all still are sound despite Day�s best efforts.

I can only clean that hallway when no one is home and no one, other than me, will be home for a while. So, cleaning the hallway was this morning�s first priority. (Well, after having breakfast, of course. I cannot safely operate machinery without having had breakfast. Let me steam-clean before breakfast and I�ll be lucky not to steam-clean my feet.)

I followed that thrilling task up with laundry. I have never liked doing laundry. I find folding clothes to be one of the most boring tasks on the face of the earth. But someone had to do laundry and Mr. Philately was not here to foist it off on delegate it to. Laundry was followed by miscellaneous other chores and cooking a decent dinner. (I have to cook occasionally, just so everyone remembers that my frequent failures to do so are willful.)

But still, I had a better day than Mr. Philately. At least I did not have to contend with a flying cookie. I did not buy a so-called bagel at Einstein�s Bagels (which sells cakie-thingies that are NOT bagels in weird flavors that no self-respecting bagel would ever be.) I did not follow it up with some trail mix cookie. (I would NEVER eat a trail mix cookie if chocolate chips were available.) I did not open the packaging around my cookie only to have the packaging act like a slingshot and cause my cookie to go zzziiing across the room and have to smile sheepishly at the guy behind the counter (and be grateful that no one was hurt with my hockey puck of a cookie.)

Boredom beats flying cookies any day. Now let�s just hope the banana bread comes out smoothly.

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