“….the seventh the same, and clean out the stable.”

mia_mcdavid‘s mother is coming on Monday morning and we are frantically cleaning house. Well, actually just the parts of the house where she will spend most of her time. This is basic thermodynamics. You cannot reduce the overall entropy (disorder) of an isolated system, but you can reduce the entropy of part of it if you increase the entropy elsewhere. So as the living room, dining room, and kitchen get cleaner and neater, the piles of crap in our bedroom, offices, the basement, and the shop grow higher and broader.