[H]ousework, if it is done right, can kill you. – John Skow, about the message of Erma Bombeck’s early columns in the 1960s,

We labor to make a house a home, then every time we’re expecting visitors, we rush to turn it back into a house. – Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. – Simone de Beauvoir