Suck Like Sixty

I broke the vacuum – for good this time, I think.

Well, first I should say: I sanded the door – for good this time, I think. With the #60 sandpaper Johnny told me to buy. Once I saw what it was doing, I understood how it was supposed to work, and realized how stupid I was to have ever tried to do it with the dumb 150. The door actually looks pretty good, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I’d harbored a thought or two of stripping those last bits around the windows and trying it with a coat of stain. But I’m not that stupid.

Here is exactly how stupid I am:

That orbital sander makes a heck of a mess. You’re supposed to have a vacuum attachment, so that all the dust it makes gets sucked up through the little holes. Not me. I got mahogany-colored dust everywhere. I had pink tears and pink boogers and pink toes and pink underpants – not to mention pink windowsills and floors. At least Johnny’d had the wherewithal to shut the door to the back hallway I was working in, so at least I didn’t get pink dust in the kitchen. Since the furnace is in there and everything.

So I grabbed the vacuum, changed the bag, and set to.

Sometimes the vacuum makes this funny, squealy noise. I’ve never been able to figure out what it is. It doesn’t seem to affect the performance of the thing, but it’s annoying. I’ve discovered that if you lift the vacuum up a little bit at one end and let it drop back to the ground, the impact makes the noise stop. Sometimes you have to do it a couple times.

But Saturday I did it like three or four times, from increasingly greater heights, and I couldn’t make the damn noise go away. It was driving me insane. I’d been sanding for an hour and a half – for the second time – and, while the dust was settling, I’d been out (ahem) chopping up last year’s Christmas tree. I was tired. I wanted a beer. I had no patience. Stop squealing!

In the process of picking it up and dropping it a few times, I discovered that when it was off the ground it didn’t make the noise (I can’t explain it, but it’s true). Now the smart thing, I realize as I’m typing it, might have been to just carry the vacuum around with me as I worked (the smart thing, that is, other than just letting it make the noise for three freaking minutes until I was through). But what I did, since I had a step stool out there already for reaching the high parts of the door, was to put the vacuum on the stool.

I can’t explain why it didn’t make the squealy noise from atop the stool, okay?, but just trust me that it’s true. Why would I lie? I’m admitting all the stupid things I do, aren’t I? I hardly have to make shit up…

So the squealy noise stopped and I carried on vacuuming. Doo-de-doo, behind the door, under the radiator, all the little decorative bits… now all that’s left is the far end of the floor and we are finished! I gave the hose a tug to wheel the vacuum down the hall and reach those last few feet, and

CRASH

The vacuum, which was for some reason propped up on a stool, came flying straight out through the air and landed, nose first, on the porcelain tile.

Whoops.

I carried on anyway, running the wand all along the few square feet that were left, and somehow didn’t even notice that there wasn’t any suction till I pulled the endy piece off to get at the corner.

So now the wandless wonder’s broke for good. I forgot to mention when I wrote about this the last time that we do have a little Roomba robot that Mom gave us for Christmas a couple years ago, but it doesn’t do so well with area rugs and anyway, for a while now it’s mostly just been going “toot-de-toot-toot” and spinning around in circles (I swear to god I never dropped the Roomba thing from any height at all).

So now we’re down to just this sort of dustbuster thing Mom gave us for Christmas last year. And a broom. Oh, and the shopvac—

Which, now that I think of it, may have been the better choice for cleaning up construction dust in the first place…


PS I have to go to work today, and I think I am the only person on the planet. So I might could use a joke or something when I get home...