Wednesday 13 July 2011

In Which I Fight Dust and Clogged Vacuums

I thought it must be time to post, because surely you're all wondering where I'd gotten to.

I could answer with the fact that I've been up to my eyeballs in study.  Well...not that bad.  The first week is all about introducing yourself all over the place.  But there was this one lecture of 55 minutes that wouldn't stream and required the downloading of another software program so I could download and listen to it.  Grrrr.  I'm sure I wasted an hour doing that before I listened to the lecture for another hour.

I could answer with the fact that I took the kids rollerskating the other day with some other kids in Miss Sunshine's class...plus a few requisite siblings.  They had a ball.  I got tired of yelling over the loud music in order to be heard.  Miss Mischief had the best time of all.  She's a tenacious child who taught herself to skate on $4 roller blades from an Op Shop and skated around the table on the deck outside.  It's not that big...but she learnt to skate pretty well.

What I'm really going to answer with is this:  I have been dusting.  Not just the quick flick of a Flylady feather duster.  Nooooo....when you don't do housework for a few months because you're too busy working and studying the dust gets stuck.  Did you know that?  Well, take it from me, it does.  So I've had to mix some water and vinegar and grab one of those cloth nappies I keep for such occasions and I have waged war on every dusty surface in my house.  Nearly.  I have one area left to go.  In the process of all that dusting, of course, comes vacuuming to get rid of the dust on the floor as well.  My vacuum has a particularly bad design flaw, which means the dust clogs up in a particular spot just near where the pipe attaches to the machine itself.  Did you know that kiddy chopsticks (the ones joined together at the top) and a metal skewer were actually invented for the purposes of unclogging vacuum cleaners?  No?  Well, I'm sure they were, because they work pretty well for such a task.

And now I'm paranoid about that amount of dust accumulating on those pristinely shining surfaces.  My feather duster has been out more this week than it has all year.  A task I believe the children will need to become familiar with once school returns as well.

Tomorrow, that last bit of dusting will be complete.  For now.

2 comments:

Left-Handed Housewife said...

I've got a couple month's worth of dust around here, too. Time to get at it! I'd not heard of dusting with vinegar, however. Is there a special reason for that?

Hey, dusting--something for the boys to do. Excellent. Thanks for the idea!

xofrances

Tracy said...

I used a vinegar/water mix. Vinegar is just a really good cleaner ~ cuts through a lot of stuff that was making that dust stay put. That, and I'm too stingy to pay for some fancy dusting/polishing spray. Vinegar is good for shining things up as well.