New Vacuum

Well, I bought a new vacuum today. I had picked one out from the sears website, for $250. I thought today I would look around town just in case I could find it here. At Walmart I was looking at their vacuum and looking at a Hoover for $150. The one from sears got my attention because of 3 features; it can do bare floors, it has a small power head for stairs or pet beds and the canister can be removed to ease vacuuming the stairs. Well the Hoover at Walmart has 2 of the 3 features I wanted for $100 less, the mini power head and bare floors. It also has some other nice features. I thought about it in the store and decided that since I am saving $100, I could also buy the little spot carpet shampooer too for $100. We have needed a little carpet cleaner because of Miss Piddle Pants the cat, and ooops or sicky times with the dog. So I went and got a cart and went back to the vacuums to load up the one I wanted when I noticed that it is not $150, it is on sale for $88. You can't get better than that.

So here at home, I have already tried both machines. The vacuum sucks (which is good for a vacuum) really well, way way better than my old vacuum. Also tried the spot remover, it works well, not as good as the large commercial units, but gets the job done and is easy to use. Yeah!!

The Terrors of Flowers

I have a large flower garden, well to be more precise many little flower beds. I remember growing up having to weed my mom's garden in the hot sun and hating it. I also remember about the age of 12 having my own little garden and how much fun it was to plant everything, but that was where the fun ended and my little garden never got weeded and soon was overgrown that you couldn't tell it from the field beside it. And now I have many flowers and many weeds, the only good thing is they are perennials. My rule is if you cannot survive with minimal care then you do not belong in my garden. So slowly for the 2 years we have been in this house I have been trying to downsize my gardens. I would rather have a few nicely cared for plants than many wild weedy plants. Also with all the gardens and the dog pen we do not have that much grass, I like cleanly cut nice smelling grass. So today I killed some of the plants along the fence in front of the Virginia creeper that covers an arch. Why do we need plants there? Also they are kinda ugly plants, for all I know they could be special lifesaving rare plants, but ugly none the less. So I chopped them up and raked and raked the wood chips at there base. Finally got fed up with creeper vines tangling my rake and picking up sluggy wood chips and poky weeds, I decided to call it a day. At least it is mostly done. Now just have to pick up small pile wet slimy wood chips and put down some grass seed. Next target is the long oval shaped flower bed under a tree. I will leave the part directly under the tree, but why have flowers across the middle of your grass so you have to walk around. Those flowers hopefully will get moved to the flower bed against the garage to replace the ones we had to dig up when we got power routed to the garage. Then I plan to mulch wood chips over the flower bed at the west side of the house as they are mostly weeds and iris'. The irises will fight through the mulch, i would think, and then hopefully the weeds will die and maybe it will protect the little evergreens there. Also on the east side of the house against the fence I plan to kill those flowers and weeds and grass that in, just leaving the little crab apple tree. I told you, I have alot of flower beds, total maybe 12. Way too much for a non gardener like me. And if I get so inclined I can always kill grass to put in flowers or even a little vege garden. In this whole plant infested yard there is no veges at all. I also hope to one day convince Jon to gravel the small muddy patch of grass off the deck on the west side of the house where the dog pees all winter. It never seems to properly recover anyway. Lots of plans, I feel like I will never get done. But I did do alot last year, killing some huge ugly buggy evergreens and a few trees that would have had no where to go had they grown more, and cleaning all under the plum tree and hedge that was full of leaves and misc and rotted plums that smelled like bad liquor.

Vacuum

I hate my vacuum. We bought it about 5 years ago for about $80. It is good because it is fairly lite weight and it has a canister that you just dump to empty, no bags. But it is bad because the rotors do not work really well anymore. It is heavy to push on the carpet, maybe the wheels don't roll well and it is hard to steer, and above all it does not clean very good. It does not have much sucking power. I checked the rotor spins and the air sucks but still it does not pick up clumps of dog hair, let alone inbeded dog hair, paper, dust, mud, rocks etc. You have to go over and over a spot from different angles for it to even try to pick something up. After vacuuming the carpet looks greyish still just as if the dog hair, dust etc has been neatly pushing down into the carpet fibers to even the look. Thought the carpets are not great it is not their fault, after steaming cleaning them they looked remarkably different. We don't have much carpet but what we do have I would like to keep tidy. Also we have carpeting up the stairs and it is difficult to carry and work the vacuum on the stairs and it still does not get the hair etc. It works better to pick up the hairs and feed it into the mouth of the vacuum. Justin mostly vacuums the stairs because I hate it and it is difficult, but that being said they do not get done that often. So I am hoping to buy a new vacuum as soon as I feel we have a little extra money. I have one picked out that is moderately priced and looks ok. It is specially for animals, or so it says. And is supposed to pick up pet hair off carpets and furniture and stairs easliy. We shall see.