Friday, December 08, 2006

Scenes from a marriage

Our appliances are old. Very old. In fact, most date from when we were married 15 years ago. Our new frontloading washer and dryer, purchased a few months ago, don’t have the same feel as our old washer and dryer. They are too shiny, smug, and self-absorbed. We only replace things when they are spewing black smoke and emitting toxic fumes. It’s a philosophical thing (oh yeah, and we can’t afford to replace perfectly functioning appliances either, there’s always that…).

Last weekend when my husband pulled the vacuum out, he ran it over the metal strip that divides our hideous kitchen carpet from out terrible dining room carpet. This caused the entire bottom of the vacuum cleaner to fall off.

Now I had been looking wistfully at our vacuum cleaner for quite some time. There were days when I would pat its handle like you would a terminally ill pet and there were other days when I would hiss expletives at it when it failed to suck up things like, oh I don’t know, dust…

So my husband flipped it over and fiddled with it (because it’s more fun to fiddle than to clean). After a few minutes, he put it back together and turned it back over. He hit the switch and it started up.

“Shit!” he muttered.

“What?” I asked tentatively.

“I think I fixed it…”

2 comments:

Guinifer said...

Oh hello! That was hysterical! I've felt the same way about a few cars I've owned.

Shelly said...

After getting rid of all but a bit of carpet (look! Wood floors! Thank G*d, because the vacuum did NOT suck) we got a mini non-vacuum type of vacuum, because all we had any more was area rugs. Sadly, this thing doesn't have enough guts to deal with area rugs, so...eyeing the Dyson, thinking my 1st car costs less.