It's the Little Things...

After work today, I will pick up the kids and drive to the nearby over-sized chain megastore in order to buy a new vacuum.  It is not a particularly expensive vacuum (i.e., it is NOT a Dyson...oh, but that it were, though!), but it is all HEPA-filtery and pet-fur fighting, and it is a snazzy shade of red.

Mine, all MINE!!!

But, the thing is, I am stupid excited about it.  Our vacuum was broke-ish a few weeks ago, but it rattled and clanked on, but then earlier this week I realized that it was not so much "picking up dirt and allergens" as flinging them out and spraying them around room at a high rate of speed.  There was no actual sucking up and retaining of said yuckiness.

So, today I am giving in and taking the plunge.  Honestly, though, as frequently as we go through vacuums, it is not that big of a commitment, it just means I have to fork over more cash.  I think this is the third vacuum in the past 12 months.

I am not exactly WHY we are going through so many vacuums.  When I moved out of my parents' house, lo those many moons ago, I took with my my mother's hand-me-down vacuum.  It had served her well for, perhaps, ten years, and it gave me another ten years of faithful service.  But, admittedly, that was before I was "married with children."  I won't even tell you some of the crap we have dug out of the bowels of those poor vacuums.

The thing that gets me is actually not so much the high rate of vacuum turnover, it is how absolutely GIDDY I am about getting a new vacuum.  I can't wait to buy it, to put it together, and (gasp!) to vacuum with it for the first time (swoon!).

Maybe my giddiness has something to do with feeling like if my surrounding are organized and pulled together that I am, somehow, miraculously, more organized and pulled together myself.  Maybe it is a control thing (i.e., I am a neat freak and it makes me happy).  Maybe it is just an aesthetic thing; I like to be surrounded by things that are beatiful and artistic and seeped in memories, not piles of crap.  Or perhaps it is some combination of all of that.

At any rate, I am getting a new vacuum...and I will vacuum repeatedly...until I can't get anything else out of the carpets, and the cats run in terror, and the kids' blare their TV to hear it over the noise of me cleaning...and I will be smiling.