That Sucks!

(Our new vacuum cleaner, that is.)

Our previous vacuum--previous as of this morning--has been smelling very bad each time we've used it lately. The carpets may have been cleaner after a once-over with that vacuum, but the house reeked of burning motor or burnt rubber. We'd open the windows and freeze for a little while until the smell abated or until we decided that the chill was worse.

Well, this morning Susan created a list of housecleaning chores for the day, and "vacuuming" was on it. We joked about putting on our coats and cracking the windows before firing up the stinky machine and wondered whether filthy carpets would be preferable. Susan opened the phone book to look up a local vacuum cleaner repair service and found one. She decided to make a quick trip over with the vacuum to see if they could identify/fix the problem.

She was gone for a long enough amount of time that I knew they couldn't have told her to leave it and return in several days for a repaired machine. I assumed that meant they were fixing it as she waited. When she returned home, she announced that she had traded in the stinky sucker for a brand new vacuum:


Ours is a bit darker shade of green, but that's our model: a Riccar R800 with lots of features--the primary one being that it sucks but doesn't stink. (Try explaining the humor of that choice of words to an English-as-a-second-language speaker.)

It pushes easily, lies flat for vacuuming underneath furniture, has easy-to-use attachments, is relatively light, and comes with a nice service warranty provided by the merchant, Clean Sweep Vacuum Center. Because our household features four ladies each with long hair, our vacuums always require periodic cleaning of the rollers to disentangle them of long strands of blonde hair. This model has an easily detachable bottom cover for ease of access to the roller for those periodic "haircuts."

It seems like a good purchase, although it's not necessarily glamorous to say that you've just spent that amount of money and gotten for it . . . a vacuum cleaner. Well, it was needed. Long live this sucker, and R.I.P. to the stinky sucker with whom we've parted ways.