Y’all are FUNNY. Hilarious, in fact. I loved, loved, loved and adored reading your answers to the lovey dovey quiz and am quite relieved to find out that I’m not the only one on this green earth who can’t resist answering a question relating to love and such. Or any question, for that matter.

(By the way, have you ever heard me ramble? Oh, no, you haven’t? Word to the wise: never ask me a question. Unless, of course, you have three years to sit and listen to the answer. And never ask me to tell a story. That would increase the time to about ten years. But I AM trying to practice restraint, even if you can’t tell. You know, this one time I was talking to my mom and she asked about something and I started to tell it and about four hours later… oh, wait, restraint. That’s right.)

But all that to say this: tonight my knees are red and rather sore.

But not because of my carpet or because I spent so many hours telling God the story about my need for restraint. It’s all the fault of that ridiculously stupid stuff called GROUT. Why people lay tile–which always involves this thing called grout–on floors is beyond me. Especially floors of houses wherein live small children.

See, here’s the deal. Every other month some of the ladies in our church have a little get-together. We hop around from house to house and the whole deal always involves a few small morsels (which we all tell each other we shouldn’t be eating because, oh, the hips! the thighs! the waistline!), some sort of fun activity and, of course, just a whole lotta talking and laughing and such, which is all ladies’ activities usually are anyway.

I’ve been saying for two years that I wanted to have one of these at my house, and was, in fact, supposed to host the January get-together until unforeseen circumstances (ahem) got in the way. But now the time has come, and if you’re a keeper of any home, you know that sometimes having a special activity is just the kick you need to finally tackle that mental to-do list which grows faster than even our children.

Wipe handprints off the walls.
Take a magic eraser to the scuff marks on the doors.
Wipe the walls of the stairway from the floor to about two feet high. (Certain tiny people can’t reach the railing and use the wall instead. Those certain people don’t always have clean hands.)
Take a magic eraser to those crayon marks in the corner. (Where was I when that happened? IS that even crayon??)
Clean out the pile of magazines two years high sitting beside the couch.
Do something about them two-story-high cobwebs. (Cathedral ceilings are pretty, but impractical.)
Do something MAJOR and INTENSE about the carpet. (Who puts white carpet in a rental house?)
Wage war on the grout.

So. I spent Saturday morning tackling most of that to-do list, knowing that by Friday I’d still have some light cleaning to do, but at least the BIG stuff would be dealt with already. You know, like the crayon marks.

But today… TODAY was The Day of the Carpet and Tile and Grout–the horrible invention. I started off the whole schebang by going to the gym. I figured it wise to work out my frustrations in advance. I don’t know if it helped. Necessarily. Then I came home, told the boys they’d be spending much quality time with Winnie the Pooh and Veggie Tales today, and proceeded to pull out The Beast, otherwise known as the Bissell ProHeat Deep Carpet Cleaner.

Let me just state now, for the masses ten of you who care that I have witnessed a modern day miracle.

There were spots on that white carpet that I’d worked on for the past two years we’ve lived here, and I was certain would be the cause of me single-handedly losing the safety deposit we put down on this rental. Can anyone say, hello, Mr. New Carpet Installer Man! And, goodbye, safety deposit!

But that Beast did it. It took them out like magic. MAGIC, I tell you. IT is the one who single-handedly saved that deposit.

Oh wait–it took out all the stains except for the turmeric stains that appeared last week, courtesy of a very small hand doing some very sneaky work. Turmeric, in case you aren’t familiar with the spice, is a relative of curry and, when in contact with fibers of any sort, basically becomes a dye. Which is all, of course, another story for another day. (And a story it is, too, because it combines with a couple other things that were all a little crazy, but as my friend told me the day one of the things happened, it’s called HAVING BOYS.)

But, unlike God, who actually DOES do miracles, my Beast’s hand is a bit slack when it comes to tile and grout. Apparently there’s some sort of attachment needed for that job, and I didn’t done got the thang.

This was where the battle truly began. On my knees. On the tile. With a bucket of Oxy solution and a scrub brush.

Let me tell you, people, the flooring in my house–both carpet and tile–hasn’t looked this good since the day before we moved in. It was a team effort, that Beast and me. We did it together, we did.

You want to know what my biggest payoff is here? What another friend told me when I mentioned this undertaking.

“You know nobody would have noticed if you hadn’t done any of it, right?”

Yes. Yes, I do, thankyouverymuch.

But I notice. It’s worth it to me to know my floors are sparkling and stain-free (almost–not counting the turmeric). I know how hard I worked for that level of CLEAN. I know.

On Friday, I’ll have my red, aching knees to happily remind me from beneath a skirt just long enough to cover them.

And now, I’m falling–yes FALLING–into bed. John rode his bike over 53 whole entire miles this morning, and I’ve tried all day to convince myself that one hour at the gym plus a day of hard labor house cleaning was about equal effort. So far that logic isn’t working. To make up for it, I told John to get me up at 5am when he’s up so I can be running by 5:30, but I have to say that right this very moment, my knees are complaining they don’t like the idea.

Build a bridge and get over it, sore knees, or else I’ll find someone else’s grout for you to scrub.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...