Vacuum

So we have out-of-town friends coming to stay this weekend...we do it every Labor Day because my husband's alma mater plays UNC (I use "plays" loosely; more like "gets creamed by") and so a bunch of his college buddies get together and have a great time. Luckily we have cohorts in the area, so we don't have to host the parties, just the family with kids (there is only one besides us so far). I love this because seeing Jack playing with other children is very cute, usually hilarious, and in this case both of the children are younger than him. And after the Baby incident, I'm interested to see how he acts around a legitimate one (Isaac, who is 6-months old, above).

So in preperation for having a crawler around this weekend, I got out our vacuum. I have not had much luck with this particular type of appliance throughout my life. Computers, automobiles, washers and dryers, they all love me. My vacuum does not. I am starting to become convinced that it is a conspiracy...and it sucks. Ha ha.

So this model is a Bissell and it is only 2 years old. I treat it well. I empty it's dust bin, I store it in a nice, quiet, tidy closet. I provide the finest electricity, and I never tangle the cord--I always snake it around the proper nubs. But this thing hates my guts. When it comes across an object larger than a grain of sand, instead of slurping it up with the fuzzies and dust it actually does manage to pick up, it crunches the offending bit into a billion mili-specs and belches the pieces all over my rug. THEN, as if enraged by it's forced-labor, it proceeds to cough up even more detritus--old pieces of yarn, peanuts, unidentifiable clumps of lint, etc. that I know it did not pick up in my house. One time it fired a hard, tan piece of something at my ankles (it can aim quite well) and upon inspection I found it to be a piece of old Zwieback cookie. Jack is almost 3. We haven't bought Zwieback since approximately 2006 (when I owned a different house and vacuum).

I don't know why I bother with using the vacuum at all except that our rug does get desperately crunchy with my eat-in-front-of-the-TV son and husband, not to mention our dogs who, while adorable, are quite snobby about finishing off crumbs. I would be happy to find another method of de-crumbing the carpet, but regrettably I have not as of yet. So I've resorted to using the Dust-Buster on most of the house...it seems to like me. We have a shared emnity of loud, useless, over-sized suckers.