On Saturday, I had an appointment scheduled to get the carpet in our living room cleaned. The house has lovely wood floors everywhere except the living room and I bet my Jeff’s hard earned money that there is hardwood hanging out under the plush, off white filth magnet. If this were my house, I might be ever so inclined to lift up a corner and take a peek, but I know my limits. This isn’t my house, so if I did do that and spotted wood flooring underneath, I wouldn’t be able to control myself and cut to three hours later and I’m standing in the driveway surrounded by 22×22 of broken dreams that I ripped out with my own bare hands.

It isn’t up to me and our landlord installed the carpet shortly before we moved in, so I try to keep it nice. And by keep it nice, I mean faint/die/come back to life armed with a spray bottle of Martha’s carpet cleaner every time Troy runs through the L room with his sippy cup filled with something that isn’t water while he’s holding it UPSIDE DOWN. For everyone out there that doesn’t have children, allow me to break it down for you with straight math facts: Kids + off white carpet = Bad. Squared.

I had to empty out the room before the cleaner person arrived and most of the furniture went into the hallway or the dining room or the kitchen. When I rolled up our huge brown hot fashion rug, I noticed that it had experienced wicked dye transfer and the carpet underneath the eight by ten rug was now an eight by ten spot that looked like someone had spread coffee grounds all over it. Note to everyone: Buy a rug pad. The cleaner person called about that time to inform me he was going to be late because of “traffic”, you know how crazy traffic gets at 7:45 a.m. in the woods. I welcomed the extra time to spray every cleaning product I had on the offending spot because you can magically erase one year’s worth of dye transfer in 20 minutes, DUH.

Actually you can’t and it just makes it look worse.

The late cleaner person who smells like he lives in a weed factory and is so high he can barely talk finally arrives and assesses the situation. He dicks around with equipment, water and products and starts going though the spiel about how the products are natural and green (the cleaning products or maybe weed, I’m not sure what he was talking about) and he sounds just like Beavis and Butthead. He gets started and water keeps leaking out of the machine, you know, because he’s stoned and didn’t hook it up right. I think at this point that Troy could be a cleaner person because he takes my vacuum apart all the live long day (excellent grasp of equipment) but he doesn’t do drugs (obvious job requirement) so he might need to look elsewhere for employment. Or start hitting the bong, we could use some extra income up in this b.

Stoned cleaner person stops halfway through the room and informs me that it isn’t really working and the carpet isn’t getting clean because it’s worse than he thought. Or he’s way more high than he thought and just can’t focus on the job at hand and really wants to hop on down to the 7-11 for the 2 for $2 taquitos. I can’t really blame him, the cream cheese/jalapeno taquitos are delicious. He loads everything up and tells me there is no charge and I thank him. When he leaves, I wonder why I thanked him because all he did was leave puddles of water all over my living room and my carpet still looks like shit. He could’ve at least brought me back a taquito, DAMN.

Five hours later, a visit from a super expensive truck mounted cleaner service run by people not on drugs, and a check for probably double what we would have paid stoner pants, we have spotless living room carpet. I still think I can see a faint outline of where the brown rug once was but Zoe can’t see it and I’m probably imaging it, like a mirage or it’s just a symptom of my post traumatic carpet stress disorder. Obviously the brown rug is looking for a new home, so I had to order a new one. Had to. I have also implemented a new house rule and you are now only allowed to roll or crawl through the living room. No feet are granted permission to touch the carpet.

The new rug is five to seven days out, so the furniture is not going back in the room until it gets here. Our coffee table weighs 3542 pounds and I don’t want to move it any more than I have to and honestly, I can’t come up with one reason why you shouldn’t have a couch in the kitchen.

Other than the fact you have to almost stand on it to cook your delicious frozen french fries, it really is a dream. I actually sat on it all this weekend whenever I talked on the phone, it made me feel very Sharon and Ozzie Osbourne circa 2003. Zoe informed me, “It’s like we’re rich, but we are still just regular poor.” That’s right, regular poor but with super clean carpet and a couch in your kitchen. Don’t forget where you came from.

I received a very nice email yesterday from a blog-less reader that was concerned about Troy. They were wondering why he wasn’t featured along with his sister in the field of yellow flowers and if he was alright. It kind of caught me off guard because most blog related emails I receive are:

Right now in Colorado, there are wild flowers everywhere, specifically black-eyed susans. At least that’s what google told me and I believe every thing that google tells me because google does not lie. Since I’m arty and crap, I told Zoe to get in the car because we were going to go make photographs.

I know exposing your eyeballs to my vacation slideshow is the equivalent of inviting you over to sit on my sofa covered in plastic to hear all about the Grand Canyon while my cat crawls all over you and puts his butt in your face and I chain smoke (Hi Aunt Margie), but I think you’re down. At least you get to view this from the comfort of your own home or office. Please know I don’t have plastic on my sofas, just $90 worth of pillows from Etsy. I don’t have cats nor do I chain smoke, but Troy did stand on my ottoman and pee yesterday while I was working my movie magic, so there’s that.

Thank you all for your words of encouragement regarding Battle Of The Leggings 2010. I would like you to know that Zoe went to school with leggings WITH a skirt and it went fairly smooth, I mean, nobody even cried. And by nobody, I mean me.

I received an email from Madison’s momma over at Raising Madison asking me to write a little something something regarding “my favorite birthday memory”. I medium followed the directions and I managed to mention vomit, squirrels and ninjas, so it’s basically the worst guest post in the history of guest posts.

It be helpful to my self esteem if you would run go on over and read my guest post here. PleaseohpleaseI’mbeggingyou. And it would be nice if you left a comment because her readers are probably all, “Damn, this chick is whack” and then my guest post will be have depression because it will be left with feeling that it isn’t loved.

Troy was kind enough to explain how Pez dispensers work, so now you know. Just to clarify, he has not had a lobotomy or is on heavy pharmaceuticals, it was just nappy nap time.