Mopping up

Woke up at 5:45 AM this morning. That's not the usual time I arise from bed. But I have admittedly started going to bed earlier these days because I am simply exhausted from jury duty. More exciting details on that, tomorrow.

Hopefully.

As I was moping around the house, I remembered I still need to pen one more blog posting for the week. And was coming up empty. Once you sink your teeth into the titillating details of a civil case that was supposed to last 4 days but is now on its 9th, everything else pales in interest. 

Believe it or not, I was coming up empty. Then I realized the topic for today was right in the palm of my hand.

Allow me to back up and stipulate that while in college I spent an inordinate time working. 

Not on school papers or science projects or even creative writing endeavors. I mean working. Putting money in my pocket by offering up my manual labor to the college dining halls. I washed dishes, I helped prep food, I stocked the utensils and I mopped floors. 

Damn, did I mop floors. I'm guessing in my four years at Syracuse I covered an area equal to the land mass the Russians have recently vacated in Ukraine.

It's more glorious to say I did all this to pay my own tuition. The truth is I worked so I could buy beer and weed, like my more affluent brethren at New York's most expensive private university.

As I mentioned my hands are no stranger to the sturdy well worn handle of an old style janitor's mop. And so it was with great excitement that I recently purchased the Bissell Power Fresh Steam Mop with Natural Sanitization, Floor Steamer, Tile Cleaner and Hard Wood Floor Cleaner with Flip Down Easy Scrubber 1940A.

I imagine you think I wrote that out for comedic effect, but that is the actual name of the product. To wit...

Perhaps an old man like myself should find other things to get excited about, but I simply love my Bissell Power Fresh Steam Mop with Natural Sanitization, Floor Steamer, Tile Cleaner and Hard Wood Floor Cleaner with Flip Down Easy Scrubber 1940A -- forthwith to be known as the 1940A.

Last night, following hours of riveting testimony, I came home, assembled the 1940A and attacked, with prejudice, the caked-on soot that had besmirched my hardwood kitchen floor for so many years. 

Mind you, I have been cleaning the floors regularly with my Bissell  (I love Bissell, I even love saying Bissell) CrossWave™ but never felt like it was getting down there into the phloem and xylum microgrooves that at one time circulated nutrients and water to the mighty red oak that gave its body up to my modest California ranch house.

And now? The kitchen floor is absolutely beaming. It's hospital clean, which is 180 degrees from the ancient bathrooms at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse which don't look like they've ever been cleaned since the joint opened its doors in 1957.

When court recesses today, I will speed home, fire up the 1940A, refill the tank with more distilled water and reclaim the barely-recognizable hardwood flooring in my den/office. 

Can you feel the excitement?