How ’bout it ladies? Vacuum cleaners for Christmas? I am a member of that elite club of folks who have actually received a vacuum cleaner for Christmas. Or maybe it was my birthday. It had a tornado on it. I still have it. I was actually okay with that for a gift. We needed a new upright vacuum cleaner and money doesn’t grow on trees so why not buy something relatively expensive like that for Christmas. I’m sure there were other, cuter little presents too.

I have a love / hate relationship with that old vacuum as I do with most vacuums. It was better than the one it replaced, which was an *ancient* Hoover (I think) that Bolette gave me. That one got to be pretty darn scary toward the end of its life. It ended up over in kzoo and it didn’t return so I guess it got junked and good riddance. Still, those old-fashioned uprights with the brush roller thingies do NOT work well in a house where people have long hair and do beadwork and muck around with small pieces of hardware like screws and things. (Oh, flash memory here. The beach urchins were small and the grandparents were here for a visit and Grandroobly vacuumed my living rooms with Bolette’s old Hoover. He was good at vacuum cleaning.)

I have a somewhat better relationship with my ancient Electrolux, the one I got from my uncle Don when he retired his GP practice. It was old then and it is ancient now. It still works although it annoys me when… Well, I’m not sure how to describe this exactly but the bag doesn’t tend to warn me when it gets too full and the business end of the vacuum pops open without warning, scaring the beejeebus outta me.

Then there is the shop vac. Come to think of it, that was a Christmas present too. I got turned off by that thing almost immediately. I thought we bought it to suck up gloppy messes. Just about the first thing I did that day was make a huge gloppy mess. Was it cranberry sauce? I can’t remember. (I know it wasn’t vomit. That was a different Christmas. Yeek!) I got out the handy dandy new shop vac to clean it up and was told NOOOOOO!!! It doesn’t do that! What!?! Why’d we buy it then? So, I have never really gotten the hang of that thing.

Rooooomba! I love you. I coveted the Rooomba for years until I threw caution to the winds and bought one. (The GG was outta town…) Oh, there are things that Roooomba doesn’t do. It doesn’t climb walls for one thing. I need to get the Electrolux out and use its snaky hose to clean out the faaarplace or get at spider webs and things that are up high. But set Rooomba up to do a room or two? She goes over and over and over the floor picking up every last little scrap of whatever. I can go and do laundry or fling or whatever while she works. Sooooo loverly.

There’s a new fancy Roooomba that I covet that CHEWS UP HAIR! Yes, I have written about it here before. Go hug my shark if that bothers you. If I ever get around to replacing the Tornado Vacuum (aka upright), I’ll be looking into one of those Dysons or whatever they are. I know there is new technology out there and I am ready to embrace it. Who knew that one day, you could throw “irobot” into the great almighty google and your search would return more links to a vacuum cleaner company than The Alan Parsons Project (beware, it links to a six-minute video).

Who wants appliances for Christmas? Or not…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 4th, 2013 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.