Cleaning Up

Don't you love all the e-mails giving you new things to worry about? Like don't let your child play in the ball pit. Or call an environmental clean up crew if you break a compact florescent lightbulb. I've gotten those and bunches more. I usually check them out at Snopes before I become too concerned. I hadn't checked out the light bulb one until tonight. I needed to get a new battery for our thermometer. We've been bitten by a stomach bug and Gabriel felt feverish. So I went to the pantry and pulled the box off the shelf where the batteries are kept and one of those lovely bulbs came crashing down. Oh great. Now I had to go check out Snopes. I remembered something about never using a vacuum cleaner and calling a haz mat crew. Thankfully the haz mat crew is an unnecessary step although it would have been nice to have someone else deal with the mess seeing as how I have felt horrible all day. But sure enough, the vacuum cleaner is a huge no-no. Snopes had a link to a government page on CFL clean up and hopefully I have done the job sufficiently. Now I can go back to being sick. Thankfully we caught the bug before I broke the bulb or I would be worried all over again.

Something is Bound to Happen

Today I have been trying to get things ready for our trip to Virginia. I don’t feel like I have accomplished much. The kids are staying here with my parents, so I have been working on getting things in order so my mom and dad will know who does what when. We have been here for three months, living with two of the most generous, patient people in the world, trying not to drive them crazy or tear their house apart. Add five people to a house and something is bound to happen and today it did. John brought our printer/copier from the storage building and set it down temporarily in the living room. Sometime later, Holly happened to be in there and saw something that looked unusual underneath it. “Daddy, what is that stuff?” The answer was ink and lots of it! John picked it up and in a moment of panic, instead of taking it out the nearest door, he carried it down the hallway and into Gabe’s room where the box was, dripping ink all the way. Can you feel our hearts sinking to our feet? There we were looking at those dark black dots and spots of ink on the light beige carpet and praying it wasn’t the super-indelible-never-come-off-until-your-dead-and-maybe
-even-longer kind of ink. John immediately got my mom and she found some take-everything-out-even-ink kind of carpet cleaner and showed John how to use it. She and I worked on blotting as much of the ink out of the carpet with paper towels and John had the tedious task of cleaning it all up. Thankfully, most of it came out. There are a few spots that need some more scrubbing but you probably wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t said anything. Now if we could only get the ink off of our hands!