A male-like revelation

I love my vacuum. It's a Miele.

It's heavy-duty and gets up Goldie's hair and has fantastic features like retractable cords and good attachments.

My wonderful housekeeper, whom I adore, does not like my vacuum.

I actually think she'd really like the vacuum, if she could figure out how to work it. We had a bit of a learning curve early on, until I showed her that there is a suction button, but then also a brush button that both need to be pushed for the vacuum to work.

And the bag is kind of hidden (another feature I like), so there have been a few times where the suction has stopped because the bag was full.

At each of these occurrences, I made the fix and we went merrily along our way. But the vacuum has been the only thing the housekeeper has ever commented on. And you can really say she's complained about it a few times.

Yesterday she called again to say that on Friday, the vacuum didn't work. She thought it was completely broken.

I went upstairs to check it out, and after hitting the "reset" button (the one that was flashing red as in, 'push me! push me!'), the vacuum did it's job.

But this got me thinking about the times when I've complained to Mike that, yes, we have kitchen knives. But new knives would make it so. much. nicer. to cook and prep and dice and slice.

Or when I've made the declaration that I just can't possibly use the casserole dish anymore because it's so hard to clean, with each usage I can never get the remnants of the meal completely off it.

In other words, I had something that worked just fine. But if I was doing the heavy lifting, it'd make my world (and therefore his) all the better if you just got me one that was better.

So while I used my perfectly good vacuum yesterday afternoon, I realized that I just needed to suck it up (hardy, har, har) and get the housekeeper a new vacuum that she liked.

And that's what I did. I went to Target and got an upright, put it together, and kept the instruction booklet with it (because, after all, I still needed to get one with cool features like a removable canister for easy carrying up and down the stairs!).

I came to the revelation that since she was doing all the heavy lifting in this department, I really, really wanted to keep her happy. And if a new vacuum would do that job, a new vacuum it was.