I have hitherto been contemplating the importance of a clean room. As many of you ought to know, my room is shared with an 8 year old girl. Suddenly the thought of total chaos comes to mind, am I correct? Frequent attempts have been made to teach the 8 year old girl (who will be 9 in 11 or so days) how to clean up the room. When this is foolhardily attempted, the girl will start, clean for about 30 seconds, and then find the bucket of Barbies that she had not played with for quite a while, and go to it. Then about 15 minutes later her mother will call her down to practice her piano or something like that, and then after about 2 hours the older sister will come in and see the room, still a mess, and added to the previous mess, a new mess which she finds tedious.
This happens about twice a week on normal circumstances. Then the older sister (that's usually me) picks up not only her own (very very few) things lying about, but also her little sister's (very very many) things which lay about. All the while she has to listen to some tedious book (either Gulliver's Travels, or The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin) so she can say that she is being productive and doing school while she cleaning. (I have never known why, but whenever mum says "Let's do chores for an hour" she never means to clean up anything but the downstairs...strange.) (in case you are wondering, she says "Let's do chores for an hour" a lot.)
I wrote a poem once about doing chores, but I don't know where it went.

Joanna

Was that long enough?