Organizing Tornadoes

This week has been a bit of a surprise.  So many things I have been putting off dealing with are now actually being dealt with...or at least starting to be dealt with...or, well, something like that.  At any rate, at least I am not running wildly away in despair and frustration.  And yet, I still feel so...wary.  I guess I am waiting to see if things stay on track.

Last night, I dreamed of tornadoes.

Not just one, but a steel gray sky churning with uncountable tornadoes swirling and dropping down from the clouds.  I watched them from the 8th story window at work.  Finally, one of the attorneys said we might want to go to the basement.  (Attorneys are smart like that...you know, all those years of college and all...)  Then, I blinked and--out of nowhere--I was outside on a hill, the wind whipping around me.  I was holding my black cat, trying to cover his head from flying debris, and trying to watch the sky while I scanned for some low place in a field to try to take cover...

...then everything shifted, and I was at a house which, apparently, was owned by an old friend from elementary school and they were getting ready to sit down for dinner, and I was wondering what I would eat, since I was allergic to everything...  Finally, I left her house and walked a familiar sidewalk which led back to my childhood home.  Everything was disjointed and stressful and...exhausting.

I have not dreamed about tornadoes in quite some time.  They tend to be my nocturnal indicator that I feel like my life is out of control.  As a result, I feel a need to get my metaphorical house in order.  I think that I am feeling so out of control with so much in my life right now, and that I just really want to get SOMETHING organized, and I want SOMETHING to make sense.

And  maybe, just maybe, things are starting to make sense again.   (Knock wood.)

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.