Suck It Up

Last week my vacuum died and even a mediocre housekeeper like myself knows that sometimes you've got to get out the Hoover and pick up the potato chip crumbs scattered around the ol' dance floor. My vacuum had to be replaced.

Oh, Mary Lisa! I am so sorry! What a miserable use of valuable vacation fund dollars in these difficult economic times.

Thank you, friend and/or loved one. You are so, so right.

Now, I know some of you take your vacuum really seriously, but as we have firmly established by now, I find house cleaning to be a really questionable use of time. It does, after all, just get dirty again. Thankfully, a new issue of Consumer Reports was on the table. (Well, frankly, I don't know how new it was. There's quite a bit of stuff on the table that just gets pushed around to make room for things like eating and such.) Also, thankfully it was an issue rating vacuums and so, I just picked the top rated one in my price range and ordered it on the Internet to be delivered to my home (for 97¢ shipping!). Done, done, and done.

A few days later my new Hoover (No, really. It's actually a Hoover.) arrived. It's shiny blue! Very fancy! Very nice! Very loud! It has power steering or whatever you would call it on a vacuum! I started zipping it around the living room and quickly realized my old vacuum was probably on its death bed a lot longer than I'd thought. This baby was picking everything up. That's when I noticed a tiny red and green light flashing on and off at the bottom. "What is the meaning of this tiny light?" I asked myself.

I dug out the instructions. Now, truthfully, I didn't think I really needed to read them. What's to know? Turn it on. Pick up chips. But there in the instruction book it explained that this little light would tell me when the carpet was clean. Red means it's not. Green means it is.

Great. I figured it would be red all the time. Why do I need a vacuum to tell me my carpet is dirty. I can see that the powder blue carpet that covers my entire first floor is no where NEAR as lovely and pristine as when we moved in. We walk on it. I think the people before must have hovered.

At any rate, the light does turn green and my new vacuum has inspired me to vacuum other areas of the house that were in some neglect -- like under my bed. Well, under my bed as far as the vacuum will reach. You're not supposed to actually move your bed to vacuum.

Are you?