Farming Out the Chores: Opportunity Cost Recovered!

I’m in love with Luz, the marvelous new housecleaner! To begin with, she cleans one heck of a lot better than I do. And to end with, this lady is making it possible for me to spend my time earning instead of scrubbing!

Today opened with a list of 26 to-do’s, extreme even for moi. None of them had to do with cleaning house.

Luz appeared on the scene shortly after I left to teach the high-intensity Eng. 102 section. She worked for about six or eight hours, doing a job that would take me about four hours to accomplish…but doing it about twice as well as I would have done it. Had I decided to do the housecleaning myself today, it would have left time and energy for me to accomplish exactly two of those 26 to-do’s: teach the class and drop by the credit union on the way home.

But…while she was here shoveling out the Funny Farm, I managed to get through all of these:

1. Download examples of citation and documentation from old editorial documents, to use as demo material for students
2. Compare diet/cookbook’s table of contents with 150 typeset pages, figure out what on earth the e-book designer is complaining about, and fix it (this, it developed, was a BIG job)
3. Enter website wrangler’s invoice in Quickbooks
4. Meet and teach class (with commute time  & item 5, occupied 4 hours)
5. Drive to credit union; deposit $1150 worth of checks to The Copyeditor’s Desk
6. Find the lost membership card to the Desert Botanical Garden
7. Reconnect repaired brand-new pool cleaner (it picked up a rock!); test; run
8. Read two sets of student papers (another fairly large job)
9. Walk dogs one mile (actually, did that in the early hours, before anything else came down)
10. Do physical therapy exercises (ditto)
11. Cook five pounds of dog meat; store for future processing
12. E-mail associate editor to coordinate workload while she’s in China
13. Intercept request for work from dubious client
14. E-mail associate editor to see if she wants to do work for dubious client
15. Send proposal to dubious client

Okay. Those last three were not on the To-Do list as of 5:30 a.m. They did surface in the afternoon. But otherwise…not bad, I’d say: 13 out of 26 items. Tomorrow no student papers are coming in, so I may get through the remaining 14 (plus a few regular Wednesday events) tomorrow. If I’d taken it into my feeble little mind to clean the house this afternoon, about all I would’ve done would have been to meet the class and deliver the checks, since cleaning would have occupied the rest of the day and left me too pooped to pop.

 In other words, the opportunity cost represented by four hours of housecleaning was recovered by hiring Luse to do the unproductive scutwork. During all the time she was heaving, hauling, scrubbing, and scouring, I was doing things that either do make money or probably will make money.

A-a-a-n-d…the sheets are clean, the dust in which one could write one’s name is gone from the furniture, the stove is clean, the kitchen counters are gleaming, the bathroom glows in the dark, the floors no longer feel gritty underfoot, the throw rugs have been hauled outside and beaten, the deck and the back patio have been swept, dusted, and cleaned, the Arcadia doors are so clean they look like they’re hanging open… So, so worth it!