The cleaner we borrowed from my parents uses a combination of heat and cleaner and water while it vacuums the whole mess back into itself. As I started in on the initial attack, I caught a whiff of a peculiar smell. "Na," I thought to myself, "nobody would just move furniture over that and not clean it up." Boy was I sorely surprised because not much later the wife gets in on the sniffing as well. Looking at me she asked if the dog had been in here. I shook my head and just pointed at the carpet. By this time the rug began to reek with the smell of urine as the cleaner was putting down hot water and detergent in a vain attempt to clean the stain out.

Now, for those of you without children or four legged pets a few additional things should be noted. In particular that different animals produce vastly different smelling pee. Humans in particular produce a very pungent smelling pee. Especially if said humans are slightly dehydrated. From say, drinking a bit too much beer or other alcoholic beverages. And it was this type of stench which was now emanating from the carpet area of the very slowly fading stain.

As the wife and I became more and more aware of what we were looking at, a rather incredulous thought came into our minds; What sort of person simply pees on their own carpet and never, ever, cleans it up?

The divorce which netted our house just became much more understandable.

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The rest of the "first weekend of cleaning" of the new house went pretty well. Most of the boxes which were stacked in our living room have been disgorged of their contents and placed upon the various bookshelves we have. There are several more boxes that need to be re-inspected before we put them in the down stairs storage area. But that is not nearly as daunting a task anymore.

The lawn seems to have responded well to its first mowing in months. I think the nearly constant rain over the last few days helped that some. In the next few weeks, I'm going to have to either get a rake or something and start to pull up the grass that didn't make it through the two months that nobody was watering it. I have some sun-loving seed already and a bottle of turf-builder and weed killer to spread over it afterwords. Hopefully next year it'll look much less dead. Of course there is the dog to deal with in that respect, too. Oh well, he has to poop somewhere.

Speaking of the dog. Here are some recent pics:

He's just under 40 lbs. right now and gets to go back in weekend after next for another round of shots and a quick check up. So far, the vet seems to be happy with how much he's grown, so I think we're going to be pretty safe from bone pain for the moment. He's lost most of his puppy fat and has recently decided that he loves tennis balls. I'm thinking once we get our adult teeth in I might get him started on some frisbee tricks.