We recently bought a carpet shampoo thingee. My husband and son both mocked me resoundingly for wanting to “waste” money on such a frivolous thing, but I countered that it is easy to dismiss a home carpet cleaner as unnecessary when you are not the one who has to clean cat vomit or explosive canine diarrhea out of the carpets while attempting not to add to the mess by vomiting into it yourself.
Anyway, I stood there in the vacuum cleaner aisle for a while looking at descriptions and reading online reviews, debating over whether to get the cheapest one or to spend an extra $40 for the slightly larger model with more bells and whistles. It was a tough call. In the end I opted for the cheap one because, frankly, I am cheap. Besides, it had good overall reviews on more than one shopping website and based on the aforementioned reviews I knew it would work well for us. Since we bought the smaller model, it took even longer than I expected to clean the living room carpet. I’ll be honest you can’t really SEE the difference, because the carpet is sort of a mottled brown color so it hides dirt extremely well. However, it certainly did make the carpet feel softer, and if the color of the water is any indication it did pull out a significant amount of dirt. Of course shortly after I finished the dining room floor, Emerson came galumphing in from outside and laid down a bunch of giant muddy footprints over my freshly washed carpet. I was like REALLY, EMERSON? On the plus side, it gave me a chance to try out my shampoo thingee on a genuine fresh stain. It’s beautiful. Even my son agreed that maybe buying the thing was not such a waste of money after all.
In a completely unrelated story, have you ever been going through your old stuff and wondered what in the world your younger self was thinking when she did something?
In an effort to prepare for scanning my photos* which I have been meaning to do for ages,** I spent the evening removing my pictures from their albums. And by that I meaned I conned my kids into removing the photos from their albums while I made dinner.*** Periodically one of them would say “Oh I remember that!”, or “who’s that lady?”, or “what in the world am I doing in this picture?” About halfway through, my daughter exlaimed “I don’t get it. What is this supposed to be?”, and brought me this beauty:
I can tell vaguely from the shape of the small human in the haze that this is supposed to be a picture of my son, but I have no idea where he is, how old he is, or what he is doing that was so spectacular I thought it was worth documenting for posterity. Of course in the old days we couldn’t just look at the pictures right after we took them and decide whether to keep them. We had to fill the roll, then get the roll developed, and then decide whether to keep them so it’s not that weird for this print to exist. What’s strange about it is that not only did I keep the picture, I actually took the time to put it in the freaking album. Really, younger self? REALLY?
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* Don’t even say it Mary.
** Seriously Mary. I know you’re thinking it. Zip it.
*** After dinner I did the photos from the last half of the album that remained, but it was quite a small stack compared to what the kids had done.
Kari Rhymes with Atari 