I may have mentioned this before, but I saw an Oprah years ago where she was talking to a woman with lots of problems, and the state of her home was just one. They showed pictures of a kitchen piled high with dishes EVERYWHERE, and the woman said that that was just from one weekend. Oprah looked at her and said something like, “A kitchen canNOT get that bad in just one weekend.”

Guess again, O.

My kitchen tonight would have earned equally horrified gasps from her studio audience.

And it was PERFECT on Christmas Eve.

Which was Thursday night.

Today is Sunday.

And we were gone most of Friday and all day Saturday.

I’m not going to play the “If I had people to cook my meals and clean my kitchen like she does” game. It’s my fault that the kitchen looked like that.

And there are many many people out there, without maids, who would never let their kitchen look that bad.

I do have excuses. I was sick (really). I had to fill stockings and put out Santa stuff after everyone left late on Christmas Eve and then I didn’t want to spend Christmas morning cleaning the kitchen.

But really, it’s mostly that I haven’t been keeping up with my daily tasks, and so the job looms bigger than it does when I’m in the habit of cleaning up small messes before they get big.

Tomorrow is a new day, and I just spent the last hour cleaning it up so that now it isn’t that bad. Not perfect, but not talk-show-audience-gasp worthy.