I like to share my housekeeping advice.

I find that if you have enough interesting stuff around the house for people to look at then nobody notices that the house is a complete and total mess. (Especially if certain key surfaces are shiny and all the piles of books and papers and stuff are neatly stacked, preferably over the really bad stains.)

My other bit of housekeeping advice can be summed up in one word -- tarps. (Lots of things can be tarps -- rugs, tablecloths, sheets or bedspreads . . .)

And I like to think of cat hair as a mulch -- it keeps the dust off the furniture.

Linn