Dyson | 10:02

I am not a fan of cleaning. I love it when my house is clean and organized, but it never stays that way so I kind of consider cleaning a waste of time. I feel like all my mom did when I was growing up was clean. I remember her dusting a lot. I hate dusting and rarely ever do it. I have had the same can of Endust for about 3 or 4 years. I will suck dust up with the vacuum, but the real dusting only happens about once every 6 months. I’m desensitizing myself to my dust allergy.

One chore that I don’t mind is vacuuming. I used to loath vacuuming until I got my Dyson about 5 years ago. Now I kind of like it – I vacuum at least once a week, more if we have rice for dinner.

Every so often I have to face facts and realize that an area of our house has gotten completely out of control. That are is almost always me and Ryan’s closet. I don’t know what happens in there, but it looks worse than an episode of Hoarders – minus the rotten food, bugs and rodents. Today was the day that I had to clean the closet. I was starting to feel anxious when I had to get anything out of it since Ryan tore it apart last weekend looking for his golf shoes. I can’t blame it entirely on him – it wasn’t looking great before, but his careless tossing of shoes and clothes made the closet unbearable.

Yeah, I don’t really have a lot to say for myself. It’s ridiculous. After 2 full hours of folding, hanging, tossing and fixing (I fixed the clothes bar – you can see that it came off the wall in the last picture, above) I had this to show for my work.

I also have this to take to Goodwill.

I admit that I should probably have a bigger pile, but I have a hard time throwing out clothes. I still have a pair of socks from 7th grade and I still wear them. I also have numerous pairs of TED Hose, from numerous stays in the hospital, that I completely despise and can say with almost 100% certainty that I will never wear again, but they are brand new and I can’t seem to throw them out. Maybe I will run out of coffee filters and need to use them to make my morning cup of joe. Or maybe I can make sock monkeys out of them for the kids. Nothing says “I love you” like a hospital issued stuffed sock.

Considering I didn’t get rid of that much stuff, I’m pretty happy with how the closet looks. At least I know that if we put our stuff back in it’s proper place, it will all fit nicely and stay organized. I give us 4 weeks before it looks like a bomb exploded.

Finish this scene: A man is starting a new job at an office. He is dressed in a tie and has to shred some papers. What happens next?

Of course the man goes to shred the papers, leans over the shredder and his tie gets stuck. It’s so common that they even have stock photos of it.


I think you are supposed to pay for these, but I don’t mind the logo on the picture and I think of this as free advertisement for Shutterstock.com. Go to shutterstock.com for all of your stock photo needs!

I don’t wear ties and I am not a man, but I did pretty much duplicate this scenario today. I could piss off a bunch of feminists and say I did the female version of this, but I won’t. (But I just did…see how I did that?)

I was cold after I got out of the shower today so I put on a scarf that I crocheted myself. It’s a little long, but I was never known for my accessorizing abilities. Rory had eaten a donut in my room yesterday and the stale crumbs were sticking to my feet as I was trying to get ready, so the first thing on the agenda was to vacuum. I’m sure you already know where this is going, but I’ll finish the story just in case you have problems connecting the dots. I was vacuuming and leaned over to pick up a hair elastic before it got sucked up. The minute I did it, I knew I had made a horrible mistake. The fringe on my scarf got sucked up, tightening the scarf around my neck and causing an extremely loud grinding sound to come from my vacuum.

I have a Dyson and their big selling point is that they never lose suction. I can attest to that. It was actually the roller that grabbed the fringe, but the suction pulled those little pieces of yarn towards the death roller. Ryan was out running and I had this brief image of him coming home and finding me on the floor, strangled to death while the kids were obliviously watching cartoons in the living room. My first instinct was to just stand up as hard and fast as I could – kind of a clean and jerk action. It was only after I felt the scarf tighten even more that I decided to drop the stupid hair elastic and use my hand to pull the scarf out.

Did it occur to me to turn the vacuum off? Of course not. In fact I just continued to vacuum and I’m still wearing my scarf noose.