Well, this was NOT the best Sunday I’ve ever had. I wasn’t feeling well most of the weekend – some sort of ear infection that’s been intermittent for the last month or so – and we still had a LOT to do on Saturday, along with a particularly unsavory task set up for Sunday.

Saturday

Saturday it was a trip to see my brother-in-law (and his girlfriend and son) strutting their stuff (you can see some pictures here. The weather was simply beautiful – 70 degrees, mostly sunny and just a hint of wind (until later). I wish I had been feeling better to really enjoy it. Instead, I was tired and felt like I was hungover, despite not having anything to drink for almost a week before (now that sucks). I took my camera, but had a bad angle for most of my shots – and my heart wasn’t into it. Going home, we put off the big excitement of the weekend – tearing up the carpet to make way for the installation on Monday.

So, to make the night go a little quicker, I turned on a hell of game – the Dallas-Seattle playoff game. It kept going back and forth, and at the end of the fourth quarter Seattle was up by 1, but Dallas was in striking distance, sitting inside the Seattle 10 on 3rd down, with less than 2 minutes to play. They didn’t make it on 3rd down so they went for the FG to win … and messed up the kick. Romo tried to run it in but a fabulous tackle brought him down on the 2 – GAME OVER. Unfortunately, that made Sunday even worse.

Sunday

Sunday, I got the joy and pleasure of tearing out all of the carpet in our basement and basement stairs. After our flood a few months back, we got the insurance company to come look, and they agreed that we needed new carpet. But it’s taken us a while to actually get the carpet ordered and set up for installation. Today was the big day, which meant that yesterday was a work day for me.

The day started out with putting stuff away so that we could move it upstairs and keep it out of the way. That took a while, particuarly adding in all of the cleaning, trashing and packing. Then we started on the carpet – which was more of a mess than we expected. Between 2 rooms and the stairs (about 600 sq. feet, but seemed like a square mile), it took us about 7 hours to cut the carpet into small enough sections to pull it up and roll it. The worst part was that the previous owners, who had installed the office carpet, had done such notable things as build walls over the carpet that they just let roll up the walls (instead of cutting to fit). A close second was the new workstations we had built for Blair and I – great work stations, but parts of them were built to be permanent and were a major pain-in-the-ass to get the carpet out from under.

The old pads in the office were a mess, too. Mostly disintergrated, they sent up plumes of presumably toxic dust every time we tried to pick them up and put them in trash bags. So much for all of the pre-cleaning we did! But we swept and vacuumed and did it all again, and moved all of the furniture including an entertainment center and a 55-gallon fish tank (okay, it was only half-full, but that’s still 500 pounds!).

Then came the even MORE fun part – the stairs. I think that the guys who put in this carpet had stock in a staple company. One stair had 86 staples holding in the carpet (yes, I counted – but just to make a point). Needless to say, that many staples makes it a royal pain to pull the carpet out – but even more of a pain to actually take out every last staple (my wife’s a perfectionist). Luckily, we were able to coerce my stepson to finish the job when our hands, backs and energy gave completely out. That was after 11 hours of labor – just in time to slip into bed and fall asleep between the weather and sports on the news. Heck, I think I was out between the ‘today’s high’ and the 7-day forecast myself. I know I fell asleep with my glasses still on…

On the plus side, we got to watch (well, somewhat, mostly it was listening in between cutting, rolling, yanking, etc.) another fantastic game. This time, the good guys won on the last-second field goal. I have to admit – it was a heck of an exciting game.

Epilogue
Coming in tonight – it was worth it to have nice, clean carpet again. It took me a while to get my computer back up and running (still not 100%, until I can get to the rest of the stuff in the back of the utility room), but it feels good to sit down and look at the new room. And the carpet stayed clean almost a full six hours until the dogs came running in from outside (LOL – oh well).