Smart Husband

I joked easily with my girlfriends about how I was re-integrating him to “helping” since he’d taken his sabbatical as I started feeling better – a year and a half ago! We laughed and I felt very pleased with my ploy.

Today, almost a week later mind you, I pulled the vacuum out of the closet only to find the dirt and dog hair still in the canister, very compacted.

Not at all happy, I dumped the contents into the trash can and set about doing my chores. As I vacuumed the first room, our bedroom, I convinced myself that I just had to do a couple of swipes to clear out the “dog” smell. However, I realized the machine was not picking up the dirt as it usually did. And there was this unusual sound, like a fast “click-click-click”.

I turned it off, raised the head slightly off the carpet and shook it a little, hoping to dislodge whatever was rattling in there, and tried vacuuming again. Still the “click-click-click”.

I shook it harder.

“click-click-click”

I finally resolved myself to having to clean out the head of the machine. I switched it off, flipped it over and began removing the long strands of dog hair from the bristled brush inside.

Aha! I saw the reason for the noise! It was a 2″ piece of wood from the dogs’ chew stick laying over the opening of the suction hose -perfectly wedged into the half-round dome over the brush mechanism.

I tried to pull it out with my index finger and thumb, twice. It wouldn’t budge. I shook the head some more – thinking surely it would come loose now that I knew what it was! Nope.

I stomped into my office to retrieve my pocket knife, swearing under my breath, and stomped back to the bedroom. I stuck the blade of the knife in there and carefully pried against the stick  – if that’s even possible when your as angry as I was at that moment.

I eventually broke the “stick” in two and freed it from it’s new home in my vacuum.

Ten minutes later, I was able to resume my chores, swearing to myself that I would NEVER, ever let him touch my vacuum again!

Well played dear husband, well played.