STRANGER THAN FICTION: HOUSEWORK: GLOOM, DESPAIR AND AGONY ON ME

Tip One: Spray a little lemon Pledge in the air right before your in-laws enter the apartment. It gives them that "she-just-dusted" feeling.

I'm not sure how it happened, but everyone knows American society has an unwritten rule.

Men work in the yard, women clean the house.

Not every couple follows the rule, but most do. But what happens when your husband has really bad allergies and can't mow? Or what if you live in an apartment and don't even HAVE a yard?

Well, he kicks in and does his fair share of the housework.

HA HA HA HA HA! Get it? It was a joke!

I've been watching The Other Half's cleaning habits for the past several years now. When he had his own apartment, it was immaculate. You literally could eat off the floor without a care in the world and run your white gloves over the baseboards without a second thought.

Enter the wife.

Now the obsessiveness only applies to the dishwasher, which is loaded and unloaded in record time. But good ol' dusting, vacuuming and scrubbing out the toilet? Forget it.

I'll admit, now that we have free HBO, house cleaning doesn't mean as much to me as it once did. I have to invite company over once a week to be sure the place gets cleaned.

It was time to have Mr. Half's parents over last week, sending me into a cleaning frenzy while Mr. Half headed to the office to "work" on his day off. When he came back, I handed him a rag and asked if he would dust the living room.

I exited stage left, toward the soap-scummed bathroom.

When I returned half an hour later, Mr. Half was REARRANGING HIS CASSETTE TAPE COLLECTION!

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Dusting the cassette rack," he said.

"That could be done by running a feather duster over the cassettes."

"Yeah, but they were out of order, too. Should The Real McCoy go under `the' or `real'?"

Remembering the recent O.J. verdict, I killed him, dropped my bloody rubber gloves and ran.

JUST KIDDING!

At one point in my life, I actually enjoyed cleaning. The smell of lemon and pine. The sparkle of the toilet bowl. The shine of the counter top.

Then I decided to make extra money cleaning for The Mean Old Lady From HELL!

Every Monday, before my shift started at the newspaper in Sikeston, I went to Mrs. Mean's house, where she would come up with new and interesting ways to do housework.

For example, she wanted me to clean the plastic plants by spraying Lysol on the leaves. No rag, no water -- Lysol on the leaves. The shower doors were cleaned by rubbing baby oil on them.

No, I'm not kidding.

She had an ancient kitchen cart that I made the mistake of trying to move one day. The cart began shifting in an odd, unsafe manner, and the microwave on top of it began losing altitude.

I quit trying to move the cart.

Fast forward several weeks, when I was greeted at the door by Mrs. Mean holding a shriveled-up potato. Apparently she and Mr. Mean purchased a brand new microwave cart, and upon letting her old one crumble into dust, she found the 12-year-old potato, which she kindly saved to show me.

"My husband said I ought to fire you, but I decided to give you another chance," she said.

In no position to quit, I bit my tongue until the day she called to accuse me of stealing her toothpaste.

My secret was out. I, Heidi Nieland, was The Great Toothpaste Bandit.

I quit.

But enough of this droning on.

I'm still looking for haunted house stories, so call me if you've seen a ghost in your house, heard weird noises or seen things move without human help. This is going to be a light, unbiased, Halloween-related look at Southeast Missouri hauntings.

My number is 335-6611, ext. 160, or write me at the Southeast Missourian, P.O. Box 699, Cape Girardeau, Mo. 63702-0699. Act now!

~Heidi Nieland is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.