I’m a day behind where I had hoped to be at the beginning of the week. Discovering that the blocks were too low was a curveball I wasn’t expecting. I thought I would be done with the wall on Tuesday. I was also thrown off by the weather. The report said it was going to rain Wednesday, Thursday, and today, so I made plans to do other things, but it only rained yesterday. Had I known it wasn’t going to rain Wednesday, I would have finished smashing the concrete, and then today, I could have raised all the blocks up.

So, I’m a day behind, but what’s one day in the 13 billion years the universe has been around? It was nice to give my arm a rest for a couple of days, anyway. Despite two days off, my arm was still jelly. I tried to tag in my left arm today, but it’s really only good as support for my right hand.

To celebrate my release from the chain gang, I made Mediterranean Sweet Potatoes for dinner. So, not a bad end to the week.

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I’m a visual person; I want to see all the pages, posts, tags, categories, and links on my website in color on a single page. So, since it was pouring rain all day, I figured today was the day to make it happen.

One of the things that kept me from making a visual site map sooner, was not having a good way to make it. I recently discovered Apple’s FreeForm App, however, and it was the perfect app for what I wanted to do. Finding all of the links on my site was a bit trickier. After a long and frustrating search for where to find all of the links on my site, I finally ended up on Google Search Console.

I’m sure someone much more computer savvy than me could write a few lines of code to do what I spent all day doing manually. It could probably even be done with A.I., I don’t know. I work with what I got.

It’s not finished, yet, but when it I’ll post it here.

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When I was a carpet cleaner, there was nothing I hated more than working in the rain. I distinctly remember hauling my portable carpet cleaner up three flights of stairs on a 108º day in 2015, and I don’t feel an ounce of hostility about it, but I still bristle every time I think about any of the many, many jobs I had to do in the pouring rain because the client refused to reschedule.

Clients would call when the weather was sunny and warm – perfect for cleaning carpet – to schedule an appointment for the following week when it was going to be raining. I would point out that it was going to rain the day they wanted me to clean their carpet, and sometimes they would choose another day, but very often, that was the only day they could possibly have their carpet cleaned.

When I called a client to confirm an appointment the day before, and rain was forecasted for the next day, I tried to get them to reschedule, but most of the time, they refused. So, I cleaned a lot of carpet in the pouring rain. Then, during the weeks when it was raining, my phone wouldn’t ring. Carpet cleaning wasn’t even on their minds because it was raining. Huh?

The Man Didn’t Care If I Cleaned Carpet In the Rain

When I worked for Chem-Dry, they sure as fuck didn’t care if we worked in the rain. They weren’t canceling jobs for any reason. The owner, Bill, hired a guy because he had ten years of experience as a carpet installer. He thought he could add carpet sales and installation to his list of services and make the new guy, Kanan, install it. Kanan, of course, wanted to be a carpet cleaner because it seemed easier than installing carpet, and his body hurt from the years of abuse from installing flooring.

One winter day in 2006, Bill scheduled a carpet installation and told the customer that we could install the carpet even if it was raining. He told Kanan that he could roll the carpet out in the garage to make his cuts. Kanan got to the job only to find that the garage was filled with shit, so there was no room to unroll the carpet. He called Bill and told him they would have to reschedule, but Bill wasn’t having it. He wanted Kanan to finish the job that day. Kanan asked how Bill expected him to install the carpet in the rain when there was nowhere to lay out the carpet. Bill replied, “Well, how did you do it when you were a carpet installer?”

Kanan yelled into the phone, “We didn’t install carpet in the fucking rain!”

I was so giddy when he told me that later that day. Bill was a fucking moron, and getting stiff and yelling at him was the only thing he responded to.

Be Your Own Boss, They Said…

So, when I started my own business and had the latitude to make my own schedule, I began checking the weather every day. If a customer wanted me to come clean their carpet on a day that rain was forecast, I would inform them that it was supposed to rain that day. Most people had their heads screwed on right and realized the stupidity of cleaning carpets in the rain, but there were some who either didn’t care or, didn’t have a choice.

I could never understand it. Why would you want your carpet cleaned in the rain? In 2019, I showed up at a client’s house to clean her carpet in the pouring rain. I tried to get her to reschedule by informing her that the carpet was going to take a very long time to dry, but she just looked at me like I was a fucking idiot. I went out to my van and recorded a video about my thoughts on cleaning carpet in the rain. You can hear the rain falling on the roof of the van.

2017: The Winter Of Carpet Cleaning In the Rain

2017 seemed to be the worst year for carpet cleaning in the rain. It was an unusually wet winter despite not being an El Niño year. I had more customers keep their appointments despite the rain than I ever had before. One woman even had me clean her patio furniture in the pouring rain. Her fucking patio furniture! Why does your patio furniture need to be cleaned in the pouring rain? That was the closest I ever came to telling a customer to go fuck themselves and storm off the job. I went out to my van and furiously wrote this diatribe:

If I’ve done anything that sucked more ass than cleaning someone’s patio furniture in the rain I honestly can’t remember it. Seriously people, your priorities are all out of whack! Will your 16 year olds birthday really be ruined if you have dirty patio furniture? You need to find Jesus. Not that ridiculous Jesus that says that you need to buy your pastor a Bentley or the Jesus that says that the gay community is the root of all of your problems but the Jesus that was talking about the rich man and the camel and the needle. Did you ever see the video where the garbage man rips the mail box out of the ground and throws in in the garbage truck? I feel you brother. 

Pissed Off And Soaking Wet

That still paled in comparison to a job I would do just a few weeks later. It was on Friday, February 17, 2017. I had just one job on the books that day and an easy one at that. It was a vacant office in a single-story building. Ordinarily, I would love to close out the week with a job like this, but not on this day. On this day, it rained harder than I had seen it rain in years. I tried to cancel the job, but the property manager wouldn’t budge. I begged, pleaded, reasoned, bitched, whined, and complained, but the new tenant was moving in the next day, so the carpet had to be cleaned right then.

It wasn’t just that it was pouring rain outside from the moment I arrived at the job until I left. It wasn’t because it took me twenty minutes on each job to get set up to clean – that’s twenty minutes of walking to and from the van. Twenty minutes in any amount of rain is enough to completely soak you down to your underwear. It was because, on top of everything else, my extractor broke down on the job, so I had to spend time trying to get the machine started again in the rain.

I’m Only Human

I blamed the property manager. Her stubborn unwillingness to reschedule this fucking job made it take three times longer than necessary. When I finished, she had the gall to ask me when the carpet would be dry. “Never!” I snapped. “It’s pouring rain outside, humidity is 100%. This carpet is never going to dry.” 

The rain stopped shortly after I finished the job. That is the one thing I can count on when doing a job in the rain. It will only rain while I’m working. When I got home, I took a long hot shower, contemplating my poor life choices. Then, I wrapped myself up in a blanket on the sofa, intent on not leaving the house again until Monday. 

I’m Finally Dry

My overarching goal ever since that day has been not to leave the house when it’s raining. I’m so grateful to be in a place in my life where I don’t have to leave the house on rainy days like today. I know I sound like a whiny little bitch who’s afraid to get wet, but that’s not what this is about. Just last winter, I spent the afternoon walking in the rain and photographing the rising arroyo because I wanted to. What I’m talking about is choices.

I’ve never had a job where I had a choice about whether I was going to work in the rain or not. I’ve never even had a job where I had the option to call in sick. And even when I started my own business, and I didn’t have any fuckwit asshole telling me what to do, I still had to go to work in the rain. Now, I can stay inside on a rainy day like I always wished I could when I was soaked through to my underwear, cursing my clients, and wishing I had chosen some other path in my life, and it’s everything I always thought it could be.

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Free Water For My Free Garlic

The other day, someone left a comment on one of my YouTube videos telling me that water isn’t free. I told them that it literally falls from the sky. As such, I thought this week would be a good time for planting because of the rainy weather we’ve had. It seems like it’s been raining forever, but it hasn’t even rained enough to soak the ground more than a couple of inches down. Normally, we have enough rain to thoroughly soak the ground by now.

We usually get rain in November and December, so the weeds start growing in the fall, and they’re knee-high by the end of January. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly things sprout after the first rain of the season. It’s almost immediate. After months of nothing growing in my backyard, suddenly, there are hundreds of tiny green plants everywhere—hundreds of plants that I have to pull out of the ground.

Every year for as long as we’ve lived here, I’ve spent Super Bowl Sunday pulling weeds. The weather is always nice on Super Bowl Sunday, the ground is still soft enough that it gives little resistance to my tugging, and I don’t give a shit about football.

This Is More Than Just La Niña

This year, though, there won’t be any weeds to pull because it just rained for the first time in about 9 months last week, so the weeds won’t be big enough to pull by Sunday. I could go out there with a shovel or a hoe and knock them down before they have a chance to get any bigger, but that’s not very satisfying.

Life Is Frighteningly Arbitrary

It’s ironic that I have a yard full of plants that I plan to destroy, but I spent a few minutes this afternoon sticking new plants in the ground. It reminds me of the time Bonnie bought glue traps to catch a rat that was terrorizing the garage. I scolded her for buying glue traps because they don’t kill the rat. You have to do that after it gets stuck to the trap. Or, rather, I have to do it.

Later that night, I found myself dispatching a terrified Norwegian Blue while Bonnie stood on the other side of the garage screaming at me to “kill it,” with our son’s pet rat perched upon her shoulder. It’s a tough old world, especially for the little things. My life probably isn’t dependent on the value I bring to the world, but for things like plants and animals, it definitely is.

You Better Hope Someone Likes You

If a plant has no purpose, it’s a weed, and no effort will be spared to exterminate it regardless of how naturally and efficiently it grows. On the other hand, if a plant is edible or even just beautiful, it can stay, no matter how much of a pain in the ass it is to grow. The same is true of pets. I’m not really sure there is any difference between a pet rat and a wild rat besides parasites and disease, but I know I wouldn’t invite a wild one into my house.

The scary thing is, I know there have been times in the world when a person’s life was dependent on their value. There might be places in the world where that’s still true today; I don’t know. It seems like we could be heading to such a dark place in this country in the not-so-distant future, and that’s more than troubling. It’s harrowing to think that a person could be discarded just because someone else can’t profit from them. Fortunately, people will always need food, and therefore, farmers… like me.

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