Why I don't need to clean

I don't need to do anything right now, I write that to convince myself. Rebecca and Jeff are coming up to visit us tomorrow. I am very happy to think of seeing them after such a long time away from each other. Together we do some our best thinking, laughing and crying. I have missed that. I have missed a lot of things on the trip that we are currently on. Things like sitting on the couch with friends doing nothing but enjoying each others company. Preparing meals for folks, eating around the table,being at a book store for hours on end just looking, and believe it or not having a weekday to figure out finances, appointments, filing and bill paying.
Anyway back to this weekend, so I am eagerly anticipating the arrival of my friends, wishing we could pack about a week of time into the almost 24 hours that they will be here, and I am also worried about our dirty house. I know that they aren't coming to see my baseboards, stained carpets or dusty surfaces, they are coming to see me and Doug, to love us up and revel in our presence, not to mention celebrating the fact that I got born 56 years ago next week. But old habits die hard and my knee jerk reaction is to throw myself into making order out of chaos, instead of sitting in my chair and watching the mindlessness of Wheel of Fortune. I am also listening to my husbands squeals of dismay and creative cussing at the malfunctioning carpet cleaner that he decided to resurrect from the corner of the living room where it has sat for the past several months internally caked with the leavings from his last adventure in carpet cleaning. The machine is apparently misbehaving and not functioning correctly or maybe at all. I am all for his attempt at cleaning the carpet in the hallway, it stinks, and look and feels yucky from Vinnie's liberal applications of territory marking urine, we spot clean it all the time but nothing hits the cleanliness mark like a good deep cleaning with the carpet cleaner. The problem is that while I admire and appreciate Doug's struggle with the machine and his desire to clean the carpet up, it triggers my "OH MY GOD, COMPANY'S COMING! TIME TO BREAK OUT THE HOSES!" gene and I think that I need to paint the house, clean everything in sight, prepare enough food for a small nation, write several meaningful poems to share, get a new haircut, wax my brows, paint my toenails and adopt an interesting orphan, all before the company shows up.
I have learned this lesson over ad over again, I remember being taken for an emergency counseling session years ago when I burst into tears and couldn't stop sobbing for hours. My unstoppable weeping was caused by the idea that despite everything I had done to prepare for company a 4 hour holiday visit, that I had no guarantee that everyone would be happy and engaged in the visit. It was heartbreaking at the time. It makes me shake my head and laugh now.
To be honest, I did put this missive down for about an hour and madly cleaned up the top layer of chaos madly, but in my defense, it was set off by Doug going to Home Depot in search of a rental carpet cleaner and me going in to the bedroom and finding that one of the cats had vomited all over our bed, rendering it unsuitable for retiring to tonight. After changing out a load of laundry that I had done earlier and angrily stuffing our duvet into the washer, I lost my resolve to sit and blog and went temporarily insane, washing the dishes, straightening the healing room, putting away the dehydrator goods and swabbing the counters- I'm better now, I will worry about tomorrow just then, tomorrow. For right now I am going finish watching Shrek three and putting this blog to bed.