Remember how I said I loved the new vacuum?

Yesterday, I finally ventured downstairs with it.  (I’ve had it upstairs, deep vacuuming the bedrooms and hallways and office spaces that were knee-deep in dog hair.  It’s been an uphill battle, really, and even though I’d gone over them once a day every other day, I was still pulling up dirt and hair with every pass, until yesterday, when I seem to have finally gotten it all under control.)  The living room area of our house is particularly nasty — the carpets are matted and ancient (at least 26 1/2 years old, with dirt probably just as old), and there’s a phantom cat-pee smell somewhere in it that we’ve tried everything short of a nuclear explosion to remove.

So down I go with the vacuum.  It was hard to push on the carpet, probably from the way it’s loose in some places and flattened in others.  (I have no idea why.  It needs to come out, but it’s over concrete, and I’m not prepared to put in a new subfloor over it at the moment.  Hopefully, we won’t be staying quite that long.)  I could literally do about a six-foot-square bit of carpet before I had to stop and empty the canister…it was *that* disgusting.

Mind you, I vacuumed regularly down there until the other vacuum(s) broke.  It’s not as if it’s been sitting without any cleaning for 26 1/2 years.  We’ve even steam-cleaned it to try and rid it of the phantom cat-pee.  Twice, just since the beginning of summer, even.

I noticed, taking the canister off, that it felt heavier than it had upstairs.  Upstairs, it had been largely full of dog hair and a minimal amount of dust.  But on the carpet downstairs?  Emptying the canister, I found that almost ALL of what was inside was dirt.   And not DUST, either….DIRT.  Like we’d been trying to start a garden in our living room.  That heavy, powdery dirt we get out here in farm country, the kind that blows around in the air and gets in your eyes and hair.  The kind that the whole “dust bowl” thing from the depression era was named after.

The carpet is perked up now.  Still not pretty, by any means, but it feels cleaner and looks a hundred times better.  Just from one pass with the Dyson.

Best of all, though?  I pulled out TEN POUNDS OF DIRT with that one pass.  Ten.  Freakin’. Pounds.  I know this because I weighed it.  (Yes, I might be a little quirky.)  I couldn’t help it — the bag I’d been dumping it in was so heavy that it got me curious, and I had to know.  Ten freakin’ pounds of dirt was lurking in my carpet, apparently hiding from the other vacuums.  Seriously.

My other bit of news — my husband’s leaving for almost a week, starting tomorrow at 7 a.m..  He has an out-of-town job that will keep him at least through Thursday, possibly as long as Monday or Tuesday of next week, depending on weather and extraneous construction factors.  (He welds when he’s not on stage.  I tease him about being too metal for metal.)

I’m sad about this, of course.  It’s the first time since we’ve been married that we’ll have been apart for more than 48 hours, and even that was only earlier this year.  I’m worried I won’t be able to sleep without him in the bed with me, or that I’ll forget to eat until eight p.m. and wonder why I’m feeling all woozy.  (I do that.  You wouldn’t know it to look at the size of my rear, but I really do forget when left to my own devices.)  I kind of miss him already.

The positive spin to this, of course, is that I have an uninterrupted week to get a whole lot of work done on this Project.  I’m hoping to take the before pictures of the house, and plan a few weeks’ worth of menus, and solidify my sleep schedule, and do a few preliminary decluttering days.  I’m hoping to spin the yarn for his holiday presents this year, and maybe get started on some knitting for the other ones.  And I’m hoping to have that uninterrupted time to think, too, about what it is I really want to get out of this Project, and out of this marriage, and out of this Life Together.  Maybe do some research or reading about marriage and wifeliness — if I can find any books that don’t piss me off too much.  (I’ve got two, both given to me by well-meaning, thoughtful friends, that just irk me to no end with certain parts of them.  I’ll review them here this week, too.)

I think I need a more specific road map of where I’m going, so that I’ll know when I get there.

But the house is going to seem awfully big and more than a little lonely without him here, too.

Expect lots of postings this week!  (Not that anyone’s reading yet, I think.  No subscribers on bloglines that I know of, and no comments yet.  I’m pretending I’m talking to a small group of you readerpeoples to give myself some accountability for posting, see, but I’m writing for myself.)