sneak attack visit

my mother and father called me this previous weekend to tell me that they will be visiting me Thursday this week. i, being the eldest of their adult children, and having moved farthest away, feel a certain level of ambivalence regarding my lifestyle. on the one hand, I've been living on my own the longest, and should, in theory have gotten the hang of living like an adult by now... on the other hand living just far enough away to avoid the parental-pop-in has my apartment usually looking as though a crazy homeless person has been squatting there, nice things, but all piled up on the floor and on table tops, and absolutely no clean dishes.

so i tried to clean for their visit, which i suspect was prompted by my recent break up. since they, i believe, are coming here to make sure I'm not drinking myself into oblivion over it, i decided to first take out the recycling. the bag of course was chock full of beer, vodka, and whiskey bottles (their fears are not entirely unfounded, but they don't need to know that), and now i fear my super will judge me too when he finds this huge sack of empty booze bottles. its not that I'm such a drunk, but more like it takes me a long time to take out the recycling.
after that i did some basic things like sweeping the hall, putting all my dirty laundry in a pile (as opposed to blanketing my entire apartment all spread out), and putting dishes in the sink. this is where it all falls apart... it looked pretty good to me... but when someone comes inside your apartment you see it as if with new eyes for its shocking filthiness, so i decided to leave and come back pretending to be my mother.
i walked in to an impassible hallway, but gave myself the benefit of the doubt that this isn't so bad, then i walked into the living room and cringed at the pile of god-knows-what stuff covering my table and imagined my mother going through and assessing the details of the contents of the mess. then i went into the kitchen where i (still pretending to be my mother) dropped to my knees clutching my heart and hollered "oh god nooooooooo" the place is quite a sight if you aren't used to it.

discouraged, I've given up. my new plan is to keep them so busy they don't have time to really look too close...

**update**
the busy plan was in fact scrapped and instead i went with a much more devious and fun plan... i got them wasted and in the morning hollered "oh my god look what you did to my apartment!" which worked beautifully.