Quick turnaround
Good morning, all. Hope your weekend was exceptional!
A little behind the curve this morning, folks. Late yesterday afternoon, my son and I ventured down the road to Louisville, KY to Louisville Slugger Field. We went there to see the Louisville Bats take on the Rochester Red Wings in a minor league baseball game. Slugger Field is an exceptionally nice minor league park, always very clean at the start of any game and staffed with friendly and helpful folks. Last night was no exception.
One of my minor gripes in the past was the fact that the park did not accept credit cards for anything except souvenir and ticket purchases, but that is no longer the case, as most major concession stands now also accept plastic. That's handy, particularly for someone like me who got out of the habit of having cash available for, well, most every occasion.
And last night's tilt, which the Bats ultimately lost 6-5, was also exceptional, in that it was the longest game in the history of Slugger Field, lasting well over five hours. So yours truly didn't manage to return to home base until the wee hours this morning. Good fun, regardless, and since the game ran 15 innings, we were treated to a considerable amount of free baseball!
Since I'm a bachelor for a few days, as my wife is out of town visiting family, I took the opportunity to clean some carpet. We have a Bissell ProHeat machine for that task, and a couple of times a year I try to clean the carpet, to keep it looking and smelling as fresh as possible. It's not that physically taxing to actually run the machine, but getting ready to do it, and emptying the dirty water and refilling with clean solution water can be a chore.
Yesterday I tried something new. We had become disenchanted with many of the commercial carpet cleaning products out there (every machine maker has their own brand, of course) some time back, as most of these products seem to have way too much detergent in them, and foam and suds like crazy. So the last few times I've simply used plain water, as hot as I can get it, and that's done pretty well. But our soil level demanded something stronger than water this time. The Internet yielded a number of interesting suggestions in this area, but the one that resonated with me was to use white vinegar in place of the cleaning product. This mixes with the water on board and is what's sprayed into the carpet.
So I decided to use the upper level of our home as the beta test subject, and completed that part of the job yesterday afternoon. From what I can see this morning, the results are pretty good. Carpet looks much better than it did, and there doesn't appear to be any vinegar smell (which almost all of the online notations promised) except from the machine itself, because I left it out to use downstairs tonight. And the dirty water that I dumped from the machine was that--dirty. So I consider this to be something of a success.
And on the subject of vinegar, I'm also going to clean our windows this week with a squeegee, vinegar, ammonia and water, thus ensuring more rain for our area.
Wouldn't be one of my blog entries without mentioning the Cincinnati Reds, who apparently took a longer All-Star break than most teams and finally started playing better. After coming out of the break by losing seven straight games, the Reds have now won four of their last six and are only four and a half games out of first place. If you had told me that this team would have had this many players (I think it's up to fifteen) on the disabled list at different points of the season and would still be within sight of the lead, I would have questioned your rationality!
So it'll be another busy week for me, probably for you, too. Make it a good one!
A little behind the curve this morning, folks. Late yesterday afternoon, my son and I ventured down the road to Louisville, KY to Louisville Slugger Field. We went there to see the Louisville Bats take on the Rochester Red Wings in a minor league baseball game. Slugger Field is an exceptionally nice minor league park, always very clean at the start of any game and staffed with friendly and helpful folks. Last night was no exception.
One of my minor gripes in the past was the fact that the park did not accept credit cards for anything except souvenir and ticket purchases, but that is no longer the case, as most major concession stands now also accept plastic. That's handy, particularly for someone like me who got out of the habit of having cash available for, well, most every occasion.
And last night's tilt, which the Bats ultimately lost 6-5, was also exceptional, in that it was the longest game in the history of Slugger Field, lasting well over five hours. So yours truly didn't manage to return to home base until the wee hours this morning. Good fun, regardless, and since the game ran 15 innings, we were treated to a considerable amount of free baseball!
Since I'm a bachelor for a few days, as my wife is out of town visiting family, I took the opportunity to clean some carpet. We have a Bissell ProHeat machine for that task, and a couple of times a year I try to clean the carpet, to keep it looking and smelling as fresh as possible. It's not that physically taxing to actually run the machine, but getting ready to do it, and emptying the dirty water and refilling with clean solution water can be a chore.
Yesterday I tried something new. We had become disenchanted with many of the commercial carpet cleaning products out there (every machine maker has their own brand, of course) some time back, as most of these products seem to have way too much detergent in them, and foam and suds like crazy. So the last few times I've simply used plain water, as hot as I can get it, and that's done pretty well. But our soil level demanded something stronger than water this time. The Internet yielded a number of interesting suggestions in this area, but the one that resonated with me was to use white vinegar in place of the cleaning product. This mixes with the water on board and is what's sprayed into the carpet.
So I decided to use the upper level of our home as the beta test subject, and completed that part of the job yesterday afternoon. From what I can see this morning, the results are pretty good. Carpet looks much better than it did, and there doesn't appear to be any vinegar smell (which almost all of the online notations promised) except from the machine itself, because I left it out to use downstairs tonight. And the dirty water that I dumped from the machine was that--dirty. So I consider this to be something of a success.
And on the subject of vinegar, I'm also going to clean our windows this week with a squeegee, vinegar, ammonia and water, thus ensuring more rain for our area.
Wouldn't be one of my blog entries without mentioning the Cincinnati Reds, who apparently took a longer All-Star break than most teams and finally started playing better. After coming out of the break by losing seven straight games, the Reds have now won four of their last six and are only four and a half games out of first place. If you had told me that this team would have had this many players (I think it's up to fifteen) on the disabled list at different points of the season and would still be within sight of the lead, I would have questioned your rationality!
So it'll be another busy week for me, probably for you, too. Make it a good one!
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