If you want to re-live your messier house renovations -- and don't we all? -- just empty the canister of your central vacuum system. Oh, boy. Plaster dust galore, with a thick layer of cat hair on top. My favourite.

Steve the Garden Guy is tidying us up for the winter even as I type, and I'm gathering strength to assault the mess that is the house. The cardboard scratcher that the cats absolutely love (and that saves the furniture) results in little bits of cardboard all over the sitting room rug, and if I leave it too long the house looks unspeakably unkempt. The other major contributor to general scruffiness is the white ceramic tile in the kitchen, which displays every fallen splotch and crumb like a Jumbotron announcement that Slatterns Live Here. So, you know, floors. Vacuum cleaner, scrubber, bucket. Bleah.

I must also go through the house with the spidey brush, a hemisphere of bristles mounted on a long handle for taking down webs from ceilings and other inconvenient places. The spiders are nesting now, so every room has a little clot of tightly-spun web somewhere in the angle at the top of the walls -- and every one shall be evicted! Doing away with the nests will not get rid of the spiders, but it will at least cut down the population, which is currently running a bit high for the comfort of this neatnik.

And that will be quite enough thankless labour for this week.