My wife is a fan of the cable TV reality show "Dirty Jobs" - so much so that I've noticed a definite deterioration recently in the messiness of household chores she asks me to do.

"Dirty Jobs," if you haven't seen the program, follows a craggy, good-looking former TV pitchman Mike Rowe through a workday in the life of the most disgusting professions you can imagine - processing smelly seafood in a fish factory, collecting bat guano for fertilizer, combing creek bottoms for edible wildlife or cleaning septic tanks.

A few months ago, after watching an episode about Rowe raking mud on a Hawaiian taro farm, Victoria sent me outside to clean the rain gutters - which were full, of course, of rotting leaves. Following another show on pig farming, she pointed out that our dog Annie had eaten something that disagreed with her and thus urgently needed a bath. Guess who got to do that?

Then, after a segment on ostrich ranching, I had to go clean the outdoor grill.

Makes me wary of going near the job-jar.

But the worst is yet to come, I'm afraid. There's one dirty chore Victoria has so far reserved for herself, and it's a task familiar to any homeowner with three dogs and a fenced backyard.

So our Saturday-morning conversations go something like this:

Me: "What's on the agenda for today?"

Victoria: "I'd like you to clean the garage, please."

Me: "But I cleaned the garage last time."

Victoria: "OK, I'll clean the garage and you can do poop patrol."

Me, sighing: "I'll clean the garage."

Nor has Victoria so far sent me into the crawlspace beneath the house, looking for leaking pipes.

That's significant because the only access to the crawlspace is a hatch on the floor of the closet in my youngest stepdaughter's room. She's 16, so you can't see the floor of her room, much less the floor of her closet.

Recently, we had high-speed Internet installed, and the cable guy said he needed to go under the house to complete the job.

"You sure about that?" I asked.

"Pretty sure," he replied.

Then I opened the door of Avalon's room, and he looked inside.

"Aaaah ... I'll just run the cable around the house," he said.

I wonder what Mike Rowe is doing Saturday?

Times-News columnistSteve Crump can be reached at 735-3223or scrump@magic-valley.com.