# Housekeeping standards and my landlord.

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/housekeeping-standards-and-my-landlord/298191>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [April 7, 2005, 9:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/housekeeping-standards-and-my-landlord/298191 "2005-04-07T09:24:33Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Lissa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/85f322/32.png) [@Lissa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lissa)\
**Post date:** [April 9, 2005, 3:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/housekeeping-standards-and-my-landlord/298191/21 "2005-04-09T15:17:14Z")

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> [@CrazyCatLady](#):
>
> Oh, let me guess–she’s one of those people who, if you drop in completely out of the blue some random afternoon and today’s neatly folded newspaper is lying next to her easy chair or she hasn’t gotten around to putting away the freshly-washed dishes, she apologizes for the mess. My mil is like that, and her mother is even more compulsively clean. It’s just how they are. Somehow, that made it even worse at the time.

No. She’s the kind that wouldn’t leave out the clean dishes or leave a newspaper next to her chair in the first place. 😃

She has the astonishing and inexplicable habit of putting things away immediately once she’s finished with them. If the house was on _fire_ I think she’d finish putting away the dishes.

Once, a couple of years ago, I was over at her house until the wee hours of the morning, helping her can vegetables from the garden. We were all exhausted by the time we finished. The kitchen was a mess, with pots and pans everywhere, jars and whatnot. I said, “Let’s just leave it for the monring. I’m too tired to clean this up.”

My mother said to me, dead serious (pardon the pun) “Oh, no! We couldn’t do that! What if someone broke into the house in the middle of the night and killed us?”

I stared at her. “I think I’d be too upset at being murdered to care.”

“No, I mean the _cops._ They take _pictures._”

We cleaned the kitchen. Including mopping the floor. I really don’t think she would have been able to sleep unless we did. 😃

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