Far too many people associate 'spring cleaning' with the merry months of March through May. But remember, just because it's June it doesn't mean it's safe to relax, thinking that the urge to purge your house of any and all dirt, grime, and fast food wrapper buildup is over. This is a false sense of apathy, beware of it!

Any time of the year you might find yourself struck with the irrational impulse to scour your house above and beyond your usual chores so that all is fresh and new again. Otherwise sane individuals will be engaging in their usual weekend family activity of building beer can pyramids with their children and suddenly, without warning, will be struck with the crippling desire to see if the floor in the bathroom is still there. Millions of unfortunate people fall victim to this condition, one that is, happily, recognizable and easily avoided. Especially in our house, where "spring cleaning" means it's been a year since the last time we cleaned and has anyone seen where we threw the mop?

We've found that the impulse towards spring cleaning can be ameliorated by lowering your general standards of basic housework so that when the urge does strike it can be easily satisfied with a couple of swipes of a rag over the furniture, or by merely finding the vacuum cleaner before calling it a day.

Housework is a very occasional thing in our household. The prevailing opinion seems to be that if a neat area is that important to you, you should be the one to straighten it up. The prevailing opinion also seems to be that you can leave half-full cereal boxes open on the counter for weeks without harm, and that clothes are cleaned by piling enough of them up and waiting for a kind of mulching process to occur.

As often happens in a relationship, where my wife and I are concerned one of us is an incredible slob. I've never quite caught on to the need to do what seems to me to be unnecessary tasks such as making my bed (when I'll be using it again in only 17 hours), sweeping the floor (when the kids and pets will track sand right back in again) and washing dishes (when it's easier to just eat directly out of the refrigerator). With many couples this is a point of contention that causes no end of arguments and marital strife, until casual hints to pick up dirty socks escalate into what police and rescue workers refer to as 'a domestic.'

Unfortunately my dear lady wife is also a slob, and together we've passed these fine work ethics down to our children. If Martha Stewart ever walked in our front door I think there would be some sort of explosion.

Our house isn't a Health Department concern, usually. We have no open sewer lines or piles of discarded medical waste (our personal benchmark). We call it the 'lived-in' look. Much like a college fraternity's "lived-in" look the morning after a party, and a fire. And yet, we're happy, because we've managed to come to terms with our inner slob. In the never-ending battle against trash, we are the most passive of resisters.

Oh, sure, it can be a pain when there aren't any clean forks, and finding something to wear can take the better part of a day, and if guests come over we have to stop and remember where we left the couch, but we also have a lot more time for ourselves than do people who clean. Consider:

When you only do laundry on a lunar cycle, you quickly discover which articles of clothing are the most important to you. You can therefore wash only those, saving yourself hours of time and lots of money on detergent, money that can then be spent on buying new, clean clothes.

Dishes can be arranged in the driveway and cleaned by using one of those car-washing attachments for your garden hose. You can even open the canister on the hose and pour in some of that spot-removing stuff, if you want to get all hoity-toity about it. If you drag out your furniture, your dry-cleaning and your kids, you can get all the week's cleaning done at once, especially if you use one of those pressure cleaner attachments.

Invest in heavy, gothic castle-type draperies for all of your windows. These, combined with low-watt light bulbs, provide a pleasing old-movie feel to your surroundings. Direct lighting is not your friend.

If you don't care to vacuum regularly, simply use a rake to create a pleasing and aesthetically soothing design on your living room carpet. Incorporate the randomly-placed furniture and piles of Coke cans as symbols, representing a tigress crossing the sea with her cubs, or the Chinese characters for the heart.

Dusting takes forever. Use a hair dryer to even the dust into a uniform and therefore invisible layer.

When faced with a kid's room full of dirty clothes, mounds of video games, and the same wafting scent found in the primate's cage at the Central Florida Zoo, simply use a broom or spade to move enough litter aside until the door can be fully and completely closed. A job well done, time for a Coke. I think I saw one in the living room.

I've been experimenting with some disinfectant and explosive charges, hoping I can invent the sanitizing equivalent of a bug bomb, but so far I've been unsuccessful. Instead, trying filling your humidifier with bleach and leaving the room for a few days.

With habits such as these, spring cleaning is now such a ridiculous notion that its cleansing horrors may be completely ignored and you can rest easy again for another year. And yes, I admit I did exaggerate for comic effect.

The primate cage doesn't smell nearly that bad.