Back online, but no political blogging today (probably)

Today will be another blogless day as I continue maniacally cleaning my new home — but I will be back tomorrow, rested and refreshed.

Whew! Thursday was a seven-hour drive from my old home to my new one. Friday was an orgy of cleaning. The place was filthy and I’m so OCD I can’t even handle things that are merely dirty. Fourteen hours of cleaning and I just tumbled into bed (which is actually a pad on the floor because the moving truck is . . . somewhere) and slept like a log.

Apropos the cleaning, I cannot recommend highly enough two Hoover products: The SmartWash+ Automatic Carpet Cleaner (which is on sale, while I paid full retail because I couldn’t wait) and the Floormate Deluxe Hard Floor Cleaner.

Regarding the first, I’ve owned many carpet cleaners over the years, but this was undoubtedly the best and the easiest to use. The carpets are actually lovely, plush carpets but when I started cleaning them I thought they were a shade darker they were so dirty. After several passes with the carpet cleaner, they are lovely to look at, feel good underfoot, smell good, and no longer offend my OCD sensibilities.

As for the hard floor cleaner, there’s a lot of hard floor and tile in this place. What I learned from my Dutch mother is that, whether you use a mop or get down on your knees to scrub, you’re just pushing the dirt around unless you make pass after pass after pass after pass over the floor until your mop or rag finally squeezes out clean. With a hard floor vacuum, it wets, scrubs, and sucks up the dirt. Done. I did still have to get down on my hands and knees for one floor, which had grout too old for the vacuum. It took me 2 hours, but I got it not just clean, but visibly clean (that is, I got the old grout back to something close to its original color).

Having done the deep cleaning yesterday, today is a day for replacing burned out bulbs, cleaning the inside of cupboards, scrubbing stovetops, etc. And, since I finally got internet back and my computer set up, a little update about what’s going on.

Even with internet, though, real blogging’s not going to happen. I simply don’t have the time to read and assimilate information. I’ll put up a separate open thread, however, for impeachment posts or any other posts. (And believe me, I’m not unaware of the irony that I haven’t been able to blog about either the impeachment’s stunning denouement or about Brexit.)

Image: Cleaning supplies on a white container by Marco Verch (cropped).