Since I've haven't been partaking in the going out to work ritual for some time now (okay, over a year!) I've had plenty of time to sit and home and watch the comings and goings of household entropy. Entropy, being a measure of disorder in a system, is concept highly applicable to households and shouldn't be confined to the physics lab.
State 1: A perfectly ordered household has the least entropy and is the easiest to maintain. Think of Bree's home in Desperate Housewives, or how you imagine Martha Stewarts home to look like - with a place for everything and everything in its place its like a crystal lattice. Stuff just falls into its place, easily with the minimum of fuss. Like a crystal lattice, breaking up such a system releases a lot of energy - usually in frayed tempers and displeasure of its disorder state from the household matre-dee. Needless to say I do not live in such a household, and in reality no occupied household exists in it either. Only virtual TV households and imaginary households do. Imaginary households are those where its occupants don't see an army of servants flitting around from day to day maintaining order - they only imagine they live in a perfect self-organizing household.
State 2: A less than perfectly ordered household requires the most energy to maintain. Like a sauce that never thickens, or a pot that never boils it is never really truly ordered. A constant input of time and energy is required to keep it in a semblance of order. Often such efforts are of the "move it to another pile and dust" kind. Another analogy would be tending a large pile of sand that is just a tiny bit to tall for its width. Little rivulets of excess sand will always fall down the sides in a chaotic fashion and must be constantly moved up to the top again. For the most part I live in such a household, although it periodically progresses to State 3.
State 3: A mostly disordered household receives some energy to maintain its order but not enough to bring it to an ordered state, but enough to prevent it from sliding into complete disorder, otherwise known as chaos. Instead of move it and dust it is mostly maintained by dust-in-place efforts. Over time some piles of disorder attract more disorder and will eventually overcome any semblance of order. Without a periodic injection of unusually large amounts of tidying energy this is just a transitionary state.
State 4: Household chaos. In this state there is no place for anything and hence nothing in is in its place, or from another perspective everything is in its place - anyplace! (Is that even a word?). No tidying effort is necessary, just sling anything anywhere. The probability of locating any lost item are basically that of chance so on average at least 50% of the household must be search to have an even chance of locating it. Like the perfectly ordered household, no real life household actually exists in the chaos state. Some, probably inhabited only by large numbers of children, approach it, but the perfect chaos is reserved for post tornado households where the "lift, shake and spin" has been applied. Or TV crime shows where some obsessive compulsive hoarder has been discovered (usually deceased) in an apartment filled with 142 cats, 34 dogs, 4,681 copies of TV Guide, 1,532 discarded pizza boxes, 423 sacks of trash, and quite probably a couple of dozen prying neighbors stashed in the freezer or under the floor boards.
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