300/30 day challenge

ok so this one is actually about a fitness challenge failure.  I don't like to quit these things but I can barely sit up today.  I started this 300 for 30 days ab challenge 4 days ago.  I just can't do another day of it.  It is so painful.  The exercises are great, and I will be adding them to my regular workouts but the number and rep counts are way to high.   How useful is a workout if you have to spend the rest of the day in recovery?  This morning I read through the comment section of the blog post and as it turns out this is actually just ab ripper ( I think it's from the P90x series) and if you do it every day you are at risk for actually ripping your abs.  My abs have survived 2 pregnancies so I'm not going to tempt the ab gods.

Ok so I'm not going to be finishing my 30 day challenge, but I do like the exercises demonstrated and I'll add them to my workout rotation.  So I guess there is a good thing that came from this failure.

ok so carpet is boring..

ok so Carpet is boring, but I have been obsessed with mine lately.  Zelda (that naughty little puppy)  is finally house broken!  Hurray! Hurrah! She wakes me up at 7am by sitting on my chest and licking my face till I take her out....cutest way to wake up ever!  But there are all these little wee wee spots by the front door and in the hall (two of her favorite spots to make a mess).  I did the whole iron out your stains with ammonia trick and it worked wonders, but it is slow and adding that much heat to ammonia really smells awful, and I'm starting school again in the fall and I'd rather not kill off my brain cells by cleaning.  Cleaning...what a waste that would be.

One day after I tried the ammonia and hot iron trick I found this pin that says I can dilute the ammonia in my carpet shampooer and clean my carpet with it.  AWESOME! So I did it today.  It works wonders.  Now I feel I must explain to you about my carpet, it looks like a drunken Kool aid man lives here.  There are little red juice stains everywhere!  Our carpet is terrible.  I looked it up to see how much it would cost to replace, it is 50cents per square foot, the cheapest carpet on the market.  The carpet is so cheap, that after every tenent management replaces the carpets (even after just a few months).  Anyways it's aweful stuff and it doesn't clean very well.   So no, the juice stains and the marker stains did not come out (by the way if you give my kids markers I'm going to let them use them at your house...you will need to repaint when they are done).  HOWEVER all the stains that I call the "brown" stains came up!  The dog mess, the chocolate milk that for some reason cannot be removed by convential methods, the food stains...and just plain ole dirt...up...gone!

I cannot tell you how happy this has made me.  I have been doing battle with this carpet for 2 1/2 years, since we moved in and Vi spilled the first cup of milk.  I have spent hundreds of dollars on this, I have tried every little bottle of stuff in the cleaning aisle.  I have had it professionally cleaned twice since we have moved it.  I have rented a professional grade cleaner, and now I own an upright shampooer and a little green machine spot remover.  All that and all I needed was a 1.25 bottle of ammonia. blerg.

A couple of disclaimers: Ammonia is a harsh chemical.  I am not a professional carpet person or even a very good housewife so use at your own risk.  KEEP IT AWAY FROM BLEACH.  If you mix it with bleach, open the windows and leave the house and call poison control...you have just created a fatal cocktail of chemicals.  Seriously don't do it.  And last but not least, as a friend of mine pointed out to me, ammonia is a component of pee so if you have pets, let it dry and air out and then use an odor neutralizer.  I'm using one called no-go, but you can find a variety of them in the puppy training section.  I reccomend doing this because do we really want to turn our homes into one giant wee wee pad for our pups?  I think not.  So far Zelda has not been attracted enough to the carpet to pee on it, so I'm calling this a success!

The Bad puppy Cure

Yeah sure she looks sweet, when she is sleeping.  But those of you who have had a puppy know they are little peeing machines!

 Zelda peed everywhere when she was brand new, and always right in front of the door because I don't have super speed skills when it comes to putting a leash on.

 I think we have finally come out on the other side of house training and I think I'm going to say we were successful.  But as I look around I see all these little stains she left behind.

I've tried regular carpet cleaners and they just don't seem to work very well on puppy stains. So I have been looking for any solutions to my stained carpet ( If we weren't renters I would just rip it up, I hate our carpet even without the stains)

Tonigh I tried this "make at home" cleaning solution, which is 1:1 water and ammonia. It worked great!

1. Find a "Bad Puppy" stain

 2. Heavily soak the stain in the ammonia solution ( #1 rule of ammonia is KEEP IT AWAY FROM BLEACH!!!! The combination creates fatal fumes)

3. Place a WHITE towel over the stain (only use a white towel so you don't transfer the towel color to the carpet and make the stain worse) and iron up your stain with your iron on it's highest setting.

 4. Go...EEWWWWW gross at the sight of the funky towel

5.  Be amazed! now to just repeat in small sections.  Ammonia is pretty smelly so make sure you do this only in a ventalated room and don't do it for more than a few minutes at a time.  I did three stains tonight and tomorrow I'll pick another spot to do. (that dark spot in the bottom corner is a shadow of my elbow not another stain....don't worry though there are plenty more for me to practice this technique on).

sorry the pictures aren't great, I forget to turn off my camera everytime I use it so the battery is never charged (plus no one wants high def pictures of a puppy stains...bleh)