Innocent Bystander

The innocent bystander

A few nights ago we were watching TV in the living room, and we heard a very ominous sounding crash from the bedroom.  We decided to investigate since it sounded like the kind of crash that should really be checked on.  And Caroline wasn’t in the living room, which meant there was about a 99.99 percent chance she was involved in the crash.  Usually when Caroline is involved in something it includes mayhem and destruction. 

We went into the bedroom to find Caroline watching the water from the gigantic water bowl we keep in there gush across the floor.  We didn’t see her do it, but we’re pretty sure she knocked the bowl over while she was running around doing her speed kitty routine. 

The perpetrator 

We cleaned up the water; lots of towels and sopping, and dragging the soaked dog bed to dry out outside.   We also checked to see if Caroline was wet.  Her front paws were a little wet, so we dried them off and went back to watching TV.  We were a little surprised that Caroline had managed to spill that much water and not soak herself, but she seems to very rarely be the victim of her own misdeeds. 

A few minutes later Howard came wandering into the living room, absolutely soaking wet.  The poor little guy was totally soaked.  Our theory is that he was just hanging out in the bedroom when Caroline knocked over the water, and happened to be close enough to the bowl to get doused.  He probably ran, not wanting to get any wetter, so we didn’t see him while we were cleaning up the mess.

We dried Howard off and gave him some treats to make up for him being the innocent victim of Caroline’s antics.  Howard loves treats, so he seemed pretty happy with how it all worked out.

Simple Solution Review

***I’ve decided to start reviewing some products that I really like and think others might like too, and the ones that I wish someone had warned me away from.  Please note that I am not any kind of affiliate for these products.  Any links provided are just for your convenience. ***

This one was recommended by one of my pet transport friends, and it has become one of my favorite cleaning products. 

I love pets; we have five, we occasionally foster, and I sometimes do rescue transports.  The only bad side to all of that are the occasional pet messes.  For the most part I’ve been really lucky with the transport pets; they’re almost always very well behaved and very rarely make any kind of mess in the car. But accidents happen. 

When I was transporting this adorable little puppy his little bladder just couldn’t hold it until the next stop.  Unfortunately it soaked through the blanket I had on the seat. 

I cleaned the car seat as soon as I got home with a mixture of Lysol and water.  I thought everything was fine until the next afternoon when I got in the car and caught a faint whiff of urine.  I cleaned it again with Lysol, and again thought everything was fine.  The next few days were cooler and I didn’t smell anything.  Then we had a warmer day and the smell was definitely back. 

The next time around I tried straight vinegar.  I thought surely that since I was now driving the vinegar-mobile the urine smell would be gone.  Wrong.  The next warm afternoon yielded a urine smell with some vinegar undertones. That’s not a good smell!  Not good at all.

At that point I decided to check with some of my fellow transporters thinking that surely someone would have found something that works.  The two most popular solutions were cleaning the car with a carpet cleaner and Simple Solution.

Renting a carpet cleaner is time consuming and gets to be a little expensive, so I decided to try Simple Solution first.  I can’t remember how much the bottle cost, but I remember it being fairly comparable to (maybe a little cheaper than?) Nature’s Miracle (which I think is useless). 

The instructions were to spray the Simple Solution, let it sit, and then blot it up.  It didn’t even call for hard scrubbing!  Once again, the urine smell seemed to be gone, though by this time I was nervous.  The next warm afternoon came – and no urine smell.  Not even the faintest little whiff!

The Simple Solution worked!  It has been months, and we’ve had some really hot days, but the smell never came back.  We’ve started using Simple Solution for any pet related cleaning and it works great.  I’ve told several friends about it, and they’ve all said it works great for all of their pet messes as well. 

The spray has a very light, pleasant scent.  It reminds me of clean laundry, which is one of the things I like about it.  It doesn’t have that sickly sweet air freshener scent, though there’s definitely a scent.  The scent isn’t strong, it doesn’t linger, and it definitely works.