The only thing in my house that is not covered in dog hair is the cat.

As you can imagine, I vacuum a lot. I should probably vacuum a lot more often than I do, too. Sigh.

Housework in general is one of those confusing tasks in my life. I was taught as a child to do a job well and then it would stay done, but that doesn’t apply to housework. If you count cooking as a housework kind of job, then this gets even worse – do a good job, and everyone begs you to do it even more. Bah! I should’ve burned the first pot of macaroni & cheese years ago so that nobody would ever expect more from me.

I’m feeling a little gloomy today, I guess.

Fortunately, my chief mess-makers are now old enough to be mess-fixers. This is a good theory and I look forward to the day when I have it fully implemented.

Part of my challenge is that here at home, as I was professionally, I am an excellent worker bee but I never wanted to be in management. I don’t want to schedule a crew, I don’t want to train or conduct performance reviews, I don’t want to cheerlead anyone towards achieving their own goals and targets. I am not a motivator and I don’t want to have to fire anyone. I just want to come in, do my job, and then go home. But did you know? Parenting doesn’t fit this worker bee model at all.

Oh well, I guess we’ll all get there eventually. In the meantime, I thought it might be fun to share some fun vacuum-related happenings and random thoughts that breeze in between my ears while I vacuum.

My mind wanders when I vacuum. For me, vacuuming prompts “shower thoughts”, just a lot drier. Probably because between the noise of the vacuum and my deafness, I cannot hear anyone anyway, but at least when I’m vacuuming, no one talks to me. When the kids were little, they never stopped talking. Never. Never ever. So the roaring racket of the vacuum was a welcome hiatus from the nonstop chatter. 

Our dog Sammy was a husky/malamute cross who shed his double-coat at a rate of 6 to 7 kgs of fluff per day. (No, I didn’t really measure it. Who would do that?)

Alli, our German Shepherd, sheds less than Sammy did.

I have 50 times more hair all over the place from Alli, though. This is primarily because Sammy was the same colour as our carpet and I couldn’t see his pupper confetti so blatantly all over everywhere like I can see Alli’s black hair.

Having these goofy dogs is worth every bit of mess they make. Love is precious. This is probably true about my kids, too, but the kids make me a little crazier than the pets do so sometimes I can’t make up my mind. (Yes, I’m kidding. Mostly.)

Lots of people call the roly-poly dust & hair collections lurking behind furniture “dust bunnies.” My mom called them “dust buffalo”.

When my kids were toddlers, I didn’t want them running around loose while I vacuumed. This was important for some reason, probably a safety thing. So I’d line them up on the couch and they’d have to wait till I was done so that I could vacuum their toes – this was a big treat, and they’d wait and giggle and get all excited till I came along and ran the vacuum hose along their slippers. To this day, Mikayla will still stick her foot in the way so I can “slurp!” it with the vacuum so I guess it made a fun impression.

Rainbow: excellent for peach skeet shooting

I was once vacuuming in the kitchen when I heard a “clunk!!!!” and lost all of the suction power. I cleaned out everything I could reach or access in the vacuum but couldn’t solve the problem. I was convinced that something was in the hose, plugging up the works. Fortunately, that vacuum had the option (or weird design? Maybe you aren’t supposed to do this?) of connecting the hose to the exhaust port instead. So I did that, then opened up my kitchen door and aimed my hose outside. I flipped the machine on and shot a peach pit clear over my carport and into the neighbour’s yard! Vacuum issue solved.

Again, when the kids were younger, we made a big deal in our family about encouraging each other. So vacuuming was a great thing for a frazzled, depressed mother to do in my house because I had 4 kids sitting up on the couch, hollering “Yay, Mommy!!! Good job vacuuming!” I miss that.

Whenever I finish vacuuming the spare room and close the door, I always wonder if the cat ran in there and now she’s locked in. I always check; she never has. I will always double-check, though.

I mess up words quite often – I kind of remember the right one, but not quite – so I have occasionally called the lawn mower the “lawn vacuum”. Now that I consider how much dog hair I regularly deal with, maybe I should start calling the vacuum the “rug mower”?

My old blue vacuum often made a high-pitched ringing noise in the motor that sounded exactly like the phone ringing. I stopped & started so many times until I finally got that figured out.

Kenmore: tried and true

Years ago, one of our hamsters was a bit of an escape artist and would run around the townhouse, having a grand adventure. I think that Stuart Little was her hero. We only figured out where she’d gone because the cat wouldn’t leave the door to the under-the-stairs closet alone. After lots of exploration, we finally found the hamster – she’d crawled all the way up the vacuum hose and had snuggled up in the dust bag. Thank goodness we found her before we used the vacuum again! After that, and even though I was pretty sure we’d closed up all of the hamster’s getaway routes, I would count heads before I turned on the vacuum.

There’s an old cliché that “nature abhors a vacuum”, but I like mine. Yes, that’s a horrible pun and all out of context. No, I do not regret it.

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