Be kind to your knees…

You’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Some of you know that I’ve been working on steam-cleaning my carpets lately. I want to do as much as possible to leave on good terms with the rental company, which means not leaving dirty, worn-out carpets. I’m pretty good at getting the carpet a lot cleaner, and I own my own steam-cleaner. Except that one part, a part that is supposed to hold the dirty water in while I am doing the cleaning, and then from the cleaner to the sink, just a tiny piece of plastic that locks into a small hole to keep the water in, became damaged. I don’t know exactly when the damage occurred, or how, but it looks to me like someone tried to put it down a garbage disposal or under a lawnmower. So it mostly holds the water in, but sorta drips, too.

So I’ve been cleaning my carpets in a direction of travel that allows me to not carry the leaking-dirty-water-device over already-cleaned carpets. I’ve even been using plastic garbage bags as well as I could to catch the water so it would not make it to the ground. Except that some drips out no matter what. And despite my efforts to keep drying the kitchen floor, just now as I was nearing completion of the dirtiest floor (my front room), really just trying to rinse the already hand-scrubbed-clean carpet, I needed to empty/refill the ‘bucket’. Man, was I not expecting what happened next.

I suppose that since I was actually at the passage to the kitchen when it occurred, the machine had been maliciously leaking water onto the tile floor. Then some sort of partial vacuum was created around the bottom of the ‘bucket’ so that when I tried to pull it out, I had to pull harder than normal. And then it broke free and all of a sudden I was pulling hard against no resistance, with my bare, wet feet on the wet tile floor and then I wasn’t standing anymore. Now, I’ve learned not to reach out and try to grab things on the way down, as that usually just increases the damage, but man, did I hit the ground hard on my left knee and what now feels like both of my wrists.

I lurched up, dropped the ‘bucket’ in the sink to drain, and immediately poured myself a glass of caffeinated beverage to take some pre-emptive ibuprofin and tylenol with. Because although I couldn’t feel it yet, I knew how hard I hit the ground, and I knew there was very soon going to be pain. (For those of you who don’t know, caffeine speeds the absorption of ibuprofin and tylenol into your body. Excedrin, if you look at the active ingredients, is ibuprofin, tylenol, and caffeine.) Then I came into this room to collapse for a moment, to relax.

And my head managed to collide with something hard on the way down.

Which is nuts, because there’s very little left in the entire house at this point. The chances of my head colliding with anything on the way to the ground is slim. But, well… As I was trying to lower myself carefully to the ground, my left knee refused to cooperate and kicked itself out from under me. And it decided it was going to (hey! my right knee is starting to hurt now, too! no fair! I don’t remember hitting both knees!) start up with the pain, too.

So I’m taking a few moments to rest now and make this post and not stand up… and then I’m going to go for a walk and not steam clean for a little while. This can be much more hazardous than it looks.

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Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.