free advice

If you are at home with your young children and you feel like your house is never going to get "completely" clean, or the laundry is never going to get "entirely" finished, or your To-Do list is never going to get "finalized", or you are never going to make a "gourmet" meal again ... don't sweat it.

It really is more important that you take your children for a walk, or build a fort with them, or teach them how to mix blue and yellow for green, or that you just sit and contentedly hold your infant because although your chores will always be there - your children will only be little once.

You might have heard that advice before.

But here's some advice you might have never heard.

If you move in to a neighborhood and plan on operating a carpet cleaning business out of your garage - just make sure that you don't live down the street from a woman who is employed as an environmental engineer and happens to be home from work on maternity leave. Because when she sees you illegally dumping your untreated water from the back of your big yellow carpet cleaning trucks in to the street and storm drain, she's going to go Erin Brockovich on you.

She would be the lady with the four small children and a zoom lens on her camera that was taking pictures of you, this morning. She would also be the one that considered, just for a moment, collecting an influent sample of discharge water in an empty baby food jar before it poured in to the storm drain.

And she'd also be the one that spent the better part of her children's nap time contacting the Homeowners Association, the City's Permit and Engineering Division, the County's Department of Environmental Health, and the State's Environmental Protection Agency.

Tomorrow, you might want to plan on a visit from the Regional Water Quality Control Board.

They can't wait to meet you.