Easily Amused

I had lunch today with some former co-workers I haven't seen in quite awhile, and as it turned out, two of them had plenty of hay-baling experience earlier in their lives. So I heard quite about about how hay is baled, moved, and stored. I wasn't taking notes, however, so I cannot write a very thorough review of what I learned--my apologies. I can say that some sort of spinning fork thing is how the circular hay bale gets started--the first bits get caught in that and then it builds up from there.

Meanwhile, my excitement for the weekend is that I ordered a home carpet cleaner. My sister-in-law has a Bissell that I have borrowed a couple times, and I've rented a Rug Doctor several times. We have new carpeting on the second floor of our house that is less than a year old, and the carpeting on the main floor is only about two years old. The new carpet is frieze, which apparently likes to be vacuumed more frequently than the dense pile we had before. I can promise myself I will begin vacuuming regularly, but that doesn't make it happen. So I also promised myself I would wash it several times a year, which gets a little expensive if you're renting a Rug Doctor each time.

Before we went on the Montana trip Tom noticed that one of his favorite web sites, NewEgg, had a Hoover for $149 (with free shipping) that had gotten pretty good reviews. After we got back from the trip, the NewEgg deal was still there, plus Amazon had the same unit at the same price. And thanks to my friend Sheila, who friended me on Amazon Prime, I was able to get it with 2-day free shipping from Amazon.

So it arrived this afternoon, and I commenced unpacking and assembling it. I was expecting an all afternoon experience, because several reviewers had commented that it required quite a bit of assembly and they wished it came a little more put together out of the box. Assembly turned out to be two bolts and one screw. (I decided that these folks should definitely avoid Ikea.)

My initial reaction is that it seems perhaps not quite as durably made as the Bissell, but I like the rotating brushes, and it comes apart quite nicely for cleaning. The Bissell has this ingenious scheme where there's a plastic membrane in the tank that allows the dirty water to refill the same tank the clean water is pulled from, but the Hoover has two separate tanks. (Reviewers who mentioned this difference seemed to prefer the two-tank arrangement. Obviously they are not engineers.)

I was a little worried that maybe the tanks were smaller, but I looked it up and they're both one gallon. I was surprised that I did our whole family room on one gallon of water--I didn't remember being able to do that. The machine handled very well and I was entirely satisfied at least on the first outing. The carpet looks much better, but I think I'm going to do it again on Sunday afternoon because the first "coat" took out tons of dirt. I'd also like to do the upstairs, but I might not get to that this weekend.

This is the beauty of owning your own. I don't have to do it this weekend. I can do it whenever I want! And I can do it more often this way. I kind of like cleaning the carpet, and it's not much fuss--these machines are really well designed so they're pretty easy to use. So I think it will really happen. Maybe I should hire out. I can clean carpets when I retire.

Hay!

Today we drove back across eastern Montana and western North Dakota to Jamestown. We're camped north of Jamestown at the reservoir campground. We drove for ten hours, got set up, and grilled a bison steak that we bought in Big Timber. It was great--so tender! A baked potato, some leftover carrots, a little salad and some cantaloupe--a great meal anywhere.

I'm convinced that one thing America does prodigously is grow hay. We must have passed thousands of bales of hay in the past week. If we were to do the trip again I would create a photo album of hay bale arrangements. Most of them are scattered out in the fields where they were baled. Often they are stacked in neat lines two or three tall. Today we even passed a couple balers at work, and a couple tractors moving bales. The landscape is absolutly covered with hay growing and hay bales. (We also passed grass along the sides of the road and in the off-ramp areas that had been baled.)

We did pass a lot of cows, and quite a few horses, and even some sheep who would be eating this hay, and I get that they eat it all year round. But we're talkin' really enormous quantities of hay.

Maybe if I drive around Minnesota I can find good hay bale sculptures to photograph. For a really thorough treatment I'd have to get someone to show me how the baler works to roll it up from the inside out.