Cleaner, Two are better than one, Been a long time, Smoked

Ever since I moved into my house I had wanted to rent a heavy duty carpet cleaner to potentially make the worn carpet look at least a little better. I have my own carpet cleaner but it’s light duty, doesn’t do a great job and makes a horrible sound like it has spun a bearing. I’m not sure why it took 18 months to do this but I did plunk down $30 to rent the unit from the nearby Ace Hardware.

It was easy to use and held a ton of cleaning solution. The 3.5 gallon tank lasted me long enough to do all carpeted areas in my place. The combination of it’s weight and high suction worked well at pulling dirt out of the carpet. When I dumped the waste water it was very dirty. Does the carpet look like new? Nah, not even close but it is definitely better than it was. The only thing that will make the carpet look new is replacing it although I might switch to vinyl plank flooring for those rooms when the time comes, I’m not sure. Anyway, the process was easy enough and cheap enough that I won’t be waiting another 18 months to do it again.

Saturday afternoon I opened up the new Inmotion E20 wheel I was sent for evaluation. It’s dual wheel configuration is unique and designed to lessen the learning curve for new potential riders. I unboxed it and got it on the charger but didn’t want to ride it until the following day.

When I took the wheel out the next day I chose to do so at the Greenway, a perfect place for low speed riding since the E20 top speed is only 12MPH. The two wheels initially felt like a hindrance as I am accustomed to one tire below me instead of two. My body adjusted to the different physics pretty quickly though and outside of bumping against the top speed limits of the wheel a few times I had a very enjoyable ride. At the end I ran into some One Wheelers that recognized me from YouTube. I had one of them that had never stepped foot on an EUC try the E20. Within a couple minutes he was rolling around which was exactly the intent of this wheel.

This wheel is extremely inexpensive by modern day EUC standards, currently costing $320. You can easily spend ten times that for a higher end wheel. Despite the low cost the build quality of the wheel seems good and it is feature complete. It’s intent is to introduce people to the hobby without the financial and physical impact that is typical. I think it does a very good job of accomplishing those two goals.

Later Sunday afternoon I had an idea that sounded good in my head. Go watch the Eagles/Cowboys game at Tacos N Tequila. It was the 4:25 game meaning I could grab dinner while I am there plus Sunday is 2-1 for house margaritas, a nice bonus. Well things did not wind up well.

Let’s first talk about the game. The Cowboys appear to be in near free fall and were just bad. Despite some early mistakes the Eagles slowly pulled away until the game was no longer a contest, winning 34-6. I’m not sure if the Eagles defense is that good or the Cowboys are just that bad. Regardless it was nice to watch them beat up on Dallas.

So with the two for one deal on margaritas you can have it one of two ways, two physical margaritas or one margarita with double the amount of tequila. My first four were the normal variety. I was feeling ok and had my two tacos and chips along with the drinks. For whatever reason I then opted to do the the double shot varieties. After the first one I was more drunk but still felt ok, ok enough to order one more. It was during the final double shot that I really felt the surge come on along with that siren that I had just felt a week prior at Juan’s party. It was time to stop.

I did not want to sit at the bar feeling this way so I made my way slowly back out to my car and just sat in it, for a long time. I was hoping that the feeling of nausea would subside but it did not. Eventually I popped my door open, leaned over the sill and was sick, it was awful. I went through the purge cycle four or five times, in between each I would just close my eyes and wish I was in the middle of a bad dream I could awaken from. After at least an hour I engaged full self driving in the Tesla and had a short but safe drive back home.

When I got there I still felt awful and fell asleep on my bed for probably another hour and a half at least before waking up to take a quick shower to clear any residual reminders from the experience. It was bad. I have not thrown up from drinking in a very long time. I think the last time was during Oktoberfest when my dad and step mom were visiting which might be close to 10 years ago at this point. I would be fine to not ever experience it again. I’m not really sure what drove me to drink to that degree but it presumably was not happy thoughts.

Despite a severe sleep shortage I had to wake up early for a dentist appointment which I was not happy about. I drug myself to the office. In addition to the cleaning they went in and touched up two fillings while I was there. Getting drilled on was exactly what I did not need at that point in time.

I was not feeling great all day but I did meet up with my buddy to play pickleball for a bit. Later in the session we played a guy older than me and his wife. They beat us rather easily all three games. He was extremely good. He said he played level 4.5 in the US Open which means he is probably closer to a 5.0 player. He was very aggressive and covered three quarters of the court. If our only concern was winning we could have targeted his wife a lot more but that is sort of lame IMO in recreational play. It was good experience having to work against such a high level player.

The rest of my three day weekend was spent doing a lot of nothing. It was all I felt prepared to do at that point.