what's cooking?

I wasn't sure I wanted to share this story with all of cyberspace who choses to come here and scan my musings but it's part of my life, so here it is:

We had our carpets cleaned. 

I know-how boring is this?  But wait, here's the back story:

As you know we have three pets.  One 13-1/2 year old perfectly house trained tabby (unless he gets very upset about being overwhelmed with house guests of the 4-legged kind), an almost 5 year old Chihuahua who is (for the most part) house-broken and our latest adoptee Sunshine.  She's a year old Chihuahua-grayhound who is as adorable as they come but is still really working hard on her house-breaking skills.

Thanks to my high school friend Sue Haley, who has rescued probably hundreds of strays, she gave me lots of good advice with moving Pepper the tabby from CA to AZ, what to do with a tiny dog who has no idea what good bathroom etiquette is and now with the long-legged lovely who also has no idea why she should use the yard when her "brother" gets an indoor toilet.

Steve and I decided that it was high time to get the master bedroom/master walk-in closet and the "boys' bedroom" carpeting done.  We had already rolled up and thrown out area rugs that the 3 animals had overly anointed with the leftovers of life and smells and all the carpeting left was in the guest rooms and our suite.

I posted on Facebook to our community page:  Please I need a suggestion for someone to come and clean our carpeting. 

Our community is wonderful about sharing and they all sent over the name of a wonderful neighbor who had his own business in the area for 14 years.  So I made the appointment.  Not only for us, but for Adam and Sam's master bedroom as well. 

Remember our unplanned trip to CA at Christmas?  Well, Sunshine was so upset that she "went" all over their bedroom which caused their new rescue to join in on the rather poor behavior.

So there we were with an appointment made for carpet cleaning!  I was doing the Gumby version of a happy dance to rid our room/closet of stains and putrid smells.

Next on our list was to prepare for the event.  For those of you who can't imagine what we had to do-we had to clean and prepare for the cleaning.

Now the boys' room we simply put their bean bags on the beds and called it ready.  Our bedroom was pretty much the same.  Just had to move a sub woofer from the floor.  Steve vacuumed both rooms.

Then came the work.  Our master closet houses not only our clothes but our laundry sorter gizmo, Pepper's litter box and for some unbeknownst reason-lots of bags and boxes!

Boxes that once held stereo equipment, boxes that held phones we no longer own, gift bags that we had saved for "in case" we needed to put a gift in and these were both pretty and in good shape.  We also had bags for groceries that I never seem to remember to put in my trunk to actually use when I buy food.  Then there was a huge storage box that held, amongst other things, all the anniversary, birthday and valentine's day cards that Steve and I had given each other and every card our kids and grandkids have given up over the course of our almost 36 years of marriage.  It also had some photo packets with negatives, 5 hot wheels and a beautiful photo of our beloved first Sunshine. 

No kidding this was NO SMALL BOX.  I think it's about 3x3x3 FEET.  And there was another plastic storage container of receipts from who-knows-what year in there. 

So Steve took it all out and said, "I'll vacuum but you have to go through those 2 boxes and see what we can rid ourselves of-maybe we can cut down to one box."

Yeah, right.  I did manage to part with cards from people we haven't heard from in years and from relatives other than our kids.  It hurt, but I did it.

We also had a LOT of shredding to do from the "receipt" container.  We had some from Y2K.

Once our carpets were clean and everything put back in we were thrilled with the now sweet smelling rooms UNTIL we got our January cold snap.

Sigh-it started raining, the wind howled and so did our youngest fur baby.  She absolutely hates doing her business in bad weather.

It took 4 days before A) Pepper threw up on the area rug under the bed and over the wall-to-wall
B) Lucky threw up on the edge of the carpet and border of ugly bamboo C)Sunshine got spooked and both did #2 by the carpet by the door going out to the patio and did #1 in the closet right by the litter box.

You can't see me, but I'm shaking my head and re-signing myself to the fact that I'm first and foremost a parent and parents need to realize that their kids (no matter how many feet they have) will have accidents and I will always be needing to clean up after those mishaps.

Still we love them all and wouldn't trade them for all the new carpeting in the world.  We're a tad nuts.