The high cost of a minivan

As I've mentioned right here, we went out and got my wife, Marci, a Toyota Sienna minivan last week.

She was worried about the car payment on the thing, largely because of the fun we had early in our marriage. Just a few years ago, we were so poor we couldn't pay attention. We were so poor, in fact, that we were were technically "po'," see.

We can swing the monthly payment for my wife's Sienna well enough, but we still remember what it was like to be broke and had rather not return to it. So we decided to cut out a few things, including the cleaning service we hired.

Now, I loved the cleaning service. My life has been one incident of trying to get out of housework after another and that cleaning service helped me realize my lifelong dream of making a mess and getting someone else to take care of it.

Back during the first year of my marriage, see, I was a jerk who refused to do any housework as such tedium interfered with napping and watching football. My wife worked on me and, over time, I took on more and more cleaning chores as we went.

So, a couple of years ago, I was standing in my living room with a mop thinking, "This sucks. I do this every week. I don't want to do this at all. I wonder how much it would cost to have someone else do this stuff?"

I talked to my wife and we wound up hiring a cleaning service. Yes, life was good. The service would appear every other Friday while we were away and I could come home to a clean house after work. It was like magical elves showed up, put my house in order and then retreated. It was a great feeling, indeed.

This weekend, however, I was back where I was two years ago -- I had a mop in my hands and I was dwelling on how much I hate it.


The whole thing started off badly because we haven't seen our mop in some time, so we had to dig the crud-covered thing out of the garage. I figured I had an out because the mop head was absolutely filthy. My wife found a new mop head, however. There was no out for poor ol' The Hawg.

So I wound up mopping the floor and a thought occurred to me -- mopping was invented by the devil. Yes, ol' Scratch himself came up with mopping as a way to get people to sell their souls. I'm almost certain that a few people have sold their souls to get out of mopping. That tricky Satan, however, is a sneaky one and he probably makes them mop in hell for all eternity.

Fortunately, I won't be stuck doing all the mopping this time around. Marci and I have agreed to alternate weekends. The devil and his sneaky, mop-wielding ways haven't gotten me yet and, God willing, they won't get her, either. Still, I can't help but think we're playing with fire as the temptation to get out of mopping is great, indeed.