Just Us, The Perfect Brown Storm

Wednesday is our normal pickleball day. It rained yesterday morning, torrentially at times so I was ready to call off our games. I checked the cameras at the courts. Nobody was playing and the courts were soaked. However a little after 11 the rain stopped and some of the guys in my group suggested we give it a go. One of the guys said he would bring his leaf blower to help dry a court. I said sure, why not, it was worth a try.

When we showed up it looked bad. There was standing water everywhere however a few of the courts only had a little water on them. I used the court squeegee to push that off and then luckily the sun came out to finish the job. We were literally the only people playing in the huge 65 court facility. It felt weird in a cool way. We got our games in with out issue, well except for my falling flat on my back trying to get out of the way of a ball.

So yesterday I came home and immediately took Elsa for a walk as we always do. I was glad to see she did a number 2 on the walk since she did not make one yesterday. She was put on antibiotics for a UTI and a side effect has been her poop has been like soft serve ice cream. She just had her last dose on Tuesday so I was looking forward to more normalcy in that area. We got back home and for the first time my gaze turned to my bedroom and I saw it, an absolute apocalypse of brown.

As I walked into the bedroom the sheer scale of the disaster was revealed. Evidently during the day Elsa had a huge soft serve crap accident in my bedroom. My Shark robot vacuum which runs automatically at 1PM everyday then ran into and over it, continuing to “clean” the area. It evidently ran for quite awhile despite being filled with dog shit. I found it in my bathroom where it had trailed the mess in there, getting it on the floor, baseboards and two of the rugs. When I picked it up it the bottom was just nothing but brown with it being up in the motors, the brush area and god knows where else. I mentally wrote the vacuum off as a casualty to the shit bomb.

I was in shock as I took in the full scenario. Elsa came walking over like nothing happened, wondering what was taking me so long to make her dinner. I pointed to the mess and said “what did you do!” in my stern voice which sent her out of my line of sight. All of sudden any other plans I had for my Wednesday night were now replaced with disaster recovery.

I took the shit encased robot out and just hosed it off. Even if I was going to dispose of it I did not want to do so with it covered in excrement. I then filled the tank on my carpet cleaner and headed to the bedroom. There were areas of the carpet where the robot really ground the brown gold into the carpet and my carpet cleaner was not doing a good job of getting it up. I had to go grab my second carpet cleaning device, the SpotBot which does a more concentrated cleaning job. It’s designed for small spots. It did a much better job of cleaning the area but it could only do so one 10 inch circle at a time.

I wound up alternating between both cleaning methods to try to recover. Multiple times during the recovery I thought to myself “man it sure would be nice if I had someone to assist me in this” sharing both the physical and mental load. Reality soon returned and the me, myself, and I cleaning crew worked until almost 8PM cleaning the space. It’s much better but there still may be some spots that might need a round two of cleaning.

Years and years ago I had a similar incident where a Roomba ran over excrement but it was nothing close to the size of the bomb that went off yesterday. I hope to never experience that again, it was simply awful. When I get the new robot I might need to rethink it’s cleaning schedule.

Last year I had bought Christine a used XR so we could OneWheel together. I also referred to people that complain about the consequences of their decisions. The personal truth these sort of statements were based on still stings me. If I think about some of the decisions/actions that I made last year I clearly should have been the front runner for Idiot of the Year.