Where are those brownies when you need them?

This past weekend afforded a lovely opportunity for my siblings to get together, with clear, mild weather following a couple of weeks of cold mush. My sisters and I spent most of our time working jigsaw puzzles, which gives us time to visit over an otherwise mindless but satisfying task. I figure any challenge is good for our brains at this age, and jigsaw puzzles put us head to head around a small table where we can visit as we play.

Friday night and Saturday were lovely, but Sunday would have been nicer if I hadn't known I had a rather large puddle of doggie puke to clean up when I got home. The out-of-towners in our crowd left around 1 with the last puzzle unfinished, so Margaret Joan and I huddled over the table for a couple of hours more to finish it up.

Shortly after we finished, I left her house and ran a couple of errands, then came home to several loads of laundry and the doggie puke. I put away my purchases, played a bit with the dogs, and shuffled laundry a bit, then I dragged out the carpet cleaner to see if I could do any more damage to the floor.

The first part I cleaned doesn't see a lot of traffic, so I wasn't surprised when I didn't see much water coming back up into the collection bucket. The next part sees more traffic and had another, smaller puddle on it, but I didn't see much return water there, either. After a bit more "cleaning," I ran out of water in the dispenser, so I unlatched the collection tub to empty the pickup water and get a refill.

The container holds at least a half-gallon of water, but when I lifted it out of the vacuum, it contained only about a cup of pickup. I know it can't possibly pick up as much as it puts down, but my recollection from the last time I ran it was that it should pick up half or more of it. This wasn't anywhere close.

For some inexplicable reason, I decided to hold the bucket about eye-level to check it out. I suppose lifting it that high unlatched the lid, and the bucket dropped out of my hands, bounced on the edge of the bed, and landed upside-down on the carpet. Only a few drops got on the bed, and the skirt has already seen much better days, but this was the floor I was attempting—clearly somewhat unsuccessfully—to clean. This wasn't going well.

I grabbed a screwdriver and disassembled the return-water pathway, cleaned out a bit of stuck lint, and made sure it was as clean as I could get it before I screwed it back down. I still wasn't too happy with the return rate, but I figured my next best shot was to refill the tub and try again.

When I snapped the tub back onto the machine, I checked carefully to be sure I had it snapped firmly into place and then rolled it over the spilled water. Sure enough, the cleaner slurped it up just as designed. I rolled back over the worst of the parts I had already cleaned and watched it suck up water as if it had never had a problem. I was finally on a roll.

After several starts and stops and some special attention to the big puddle in the hallway, I had at least made a cursory pass over most of the "exposed" carpet in my room. I found out I couldn't run around in sock feet because the carpet was still wet enough to get my socks damp, but I felt as if I had done a reasonable job in the artificial light.

After I had been up long enough for the sun to rise, I got to see the work I had done by daylight.

It may be the best job I've done with that little cleaner yet!