Daily Diatribes

There are some friends that are friends for life.  Gina is one good example.  She is my oldest dearest friend, who I met on the track at school when we were both in 7th grade and both obssessed with the television program MASH.  Ok, so we were a little geeky!!!  But when I spotted her across the track, dressed in a MASH 4077 t-shirt, it was friendship at first sight!!

She called me today, looking for something to do, so she came over to hang out with me.  We sat around and talked for awhile and then I offered to let her fix my vacuum cleaner.  I figured she would be up to the challenge.

I dragged it out and the fun began.  The vacuum is about 9 months old and it is a Hoover wind tunnel bagless.  I had noticed the other day a rather significant blockage in the tube area, but was unable to figure out how to remove the thingy.  I am somewhat mechanically uninclined, a trait that I inherited from my father.

I got Gina some screwdrivers and she started working.  Pretty soon, she sent me to fetch a coat hanger.  She cleverly twisted it into a functional utensil for grabbing clots of dog hair out of my vacuum hose.  She worked for about 15 minutes then sighed “If only we had some forceps…”

Well, believe it or not, there literally just happened to be a pair on my dining room table.  Not sure why they were there or how they got there.  It is almost as if the Holy Spirit anticipated my needs and placed them there for vacuum repair.

I fetched them for her and the real cleaning began.  I held the screwdriver to retract the lid of the tube place thingy and Gina used the forceps to began extracting large clumps of hairy gray matter.  Actually, the first thing I pulled out was a shell, but that’s irrelevant.

My job in the operation was to occasionally stand the vacuum upright and bang it on the floor several times before laying it back down.  This procedure, which can only be performed by highly trained professionals, loosened the clumps of hairy gray matter so Gina could grab them with the coat hanger and the forceps.

“You need to rake before you vacuum,” she snarled at me several minutes into the operation.  She pulled out about 1/2 cup of hairy gray matter before it got interesting. 

I recently completed a home improvement project, whereby I removed wallpaper from an upstairs bathroom.  Somehow, a significant amount of wallpaper made it into the vacuum cleaner, clogging up the hose.  I am not at liberty to repeat here the words Gina used when she started pulling out pieces of kitty wallpaper.  She did offer some helpful advice, telling me “if it’s big enough to see, you probably shouldn’t vacuum it doofus!!”

After a 45 minute, procedure, she removed the coat hanger and closed the incision.  She replaced all the parts correctly, with no extra screws laying around and turned it on. It worked perfectly, of course.

She gathered up all her tools and instructed me to put them in a box and label it “vacuum cleaner repair kit”.  Into the box will go the screwdriver, the coat hanger, and the forceps.  And if it sounds like a back alley abortion kit, so be it, but we know the truth!  Actually, we are going to start performing operations in my dungeon.  Look on MSNBC for more on dungeon operations. I am thinking we will start off with hysterectomies.  Gina will reach up with the coat hanger and hook a fallopian tube.  Then we will stand the patient up and I will bang her on the floor several times so the ovary drops down so Gina can grab it with a coat hanger.  I feel sure we can also do vasectomies with this procedure.  Any takers???

I am off to vacuum up all the shreds of hairy gray matter on my carpet.  Right after I take a shower to wash off the dust.  Then I have to find a way to repay Gina for spending her morning extracting clumps of funk from my vacuum!!!