Light vs. Normal

I was laughed at twice (by my loving wife and then by my loving wife and her friend) in the last week because I apparently don't understand the difference between lightweight and normal vacuums. We have been married for nearly 13 years now and we have had absolutely 0% success with vacuums. We have had many a model, both cheap (during the first years of marriage) and not so cheap (the last few years). About a year ago Kathryn bought a beautiful, as if a vacuum could be anything else, new vacuum and proceeded to let me know who good it was at what it did. I told her it sucked. :) She didn't think that was a very funny joke. Well, after a while of using this new tool it broke. As with most of the things we own that are of value, one of the kids decided that they would take it for a spin and proceeded to break it. I think it was Isaac but there are so many of them running around that I can't keep track.

So we bought a new vacuum. It was yellow now, instead of blue green like the last one which sat in our master bedroom closet and ate up a lot of space (it's not a very big walk-in closet, plus it has lots of Christmas presents), and that is all I really could tell you about it feature-wise. Soon Kathryn said it wasn't working so I unclogged a gigantic mess from one of it's hoses and now it works fine. But she wants a Dyson. Her eyes light up when that guy with the Australian accent comes on the TV and he says profound things about vacuums. So you eagerly look it up at Bed, Bath, and Beyond and almost choke on your cheerios when you see that it is $500. For a vacuum with a ball in the middle of it? Come on!

She wanted that vacuum, oh how she wanted that! She dropped several hints this fall about wanting it for Christmas so I decided to check it out and see if I could surprise her with it. She didn't like the one with the ball in the middle. 10 kids and a cat leave lots of stuff on the floor, cream-colored carpet throughout the house doesn't help either so we needed one that really sucked good. (That is so much fun saying, it is like when you are near a dam and you can say "We took the dam road . . . ", etc.) So I looked it up but there was a problem. She wanted this lightweight one but I am thinking to myself "Why does she want a lightweight vacuum when there is heavyweight work to be done in the home?" I puzzled over that and thought that the regular, normal vacuum is what she needed, not some lightweight sissy vacuum that was still going to cost me a small fortune. I hesitated and decided not to get it until I found out why she wanted the lightweight one when it was very obvious that we needed to do some heavy duty work with it. So, I found myself in a situation when she was talking about the vacuum and I suavely mentioned that I didn't see why she needed the lightweight when, duh, it was the regular, normal good vacuum that she needed. She looked at me and then laughed out loud at me for, if I am any good judge of numbers, 5 whole minutes. She had tears in her eyes as she explained that it only related to the weight of the vacuum and not to it's capacity to suck. Dumb man.



She giggled over that for a while and then I found out she told her friends and they both laughed out loud about it too. So feel free to laugh about out loud when you think about it. She is not getting that vacuum either. I don't want her to laugh whenever she sees it or uses it. Ahh, the plight of being an uninformed man . . . :)