This weekend was great, I love great weekends. There was one miserable failure that made me miss the mark on a perfect weekend: My cat decided to explode a carton of Tide Clean Breeze all over my apartment.

Now. A little about my cat. She was born under my bed back in Michigan like 4 or 5 years ago, is all black and my parents gave her to me as a Christmas present this past year to keep me company. A new state, a new identity: Parker wanted to name her Backslash, after one of our named Foosball shots, but Zelda ended up winning out as proposed by Zach because its a girl’s name. Anyway, Zelda keeps my apartment messier than I’d prefer and this weekend she took it to an another frustrating level.

I went to the gym with Shayne and Zach only to return to Zelda under my couch (read: futon) like she knew she did something terrible. At first I was curious why it smelled like I was swimming in an air freshener, but then after seeing the ceiling of my kitchen glistening in blue — I knew it. Sure enough, she managed to jump onto my washer and knock off everything including a brand spankin’ new bottle of detergent.

Good news: Linoleum flooring makes clean up a Clean Breeze or so I thought. It took me like an hour to figure out how to clean it up and then another 6 (not straight) to actually execute the task. See, the trick was… I couldn’t use water and I wasn’t about to waste money using paper towels: The blue stuff happily stretched for a 10×10 foot radius… not to mention whatever splotches she-devil trampled around the apartment.

Solution: I ended up tying Zelda to a broomstick and using her delicate fur to clean up everything. Just kidding, I didn’t do that. I used beach towels. A lot of them. And then magically got rid of the evidence of disaster by putting them one-by-one in the washer. Turns out each one required two washes to get the soap out of them. It was magical.

I opened the windows hours ago and the fetor of Clean Breeze is still lingering ever so potently. Anyway… yay weekends!