Mastering Difficult Concepts

You go through life learning new things all the time. How to talk, walk, make friends, eventually how to drive, etc. Some concepts are more difficult than others to master. For example, learning how to communicate with the opposite sex is necessarily more difficult than sorting laundry (although if I could sort men into three neat piles and treat each accordingly, it would be a lot easier. lol.).

For some reason, my sister and/or her children have never figured out that you need to change the bag on the vacuum cleaner occasionally. When I decided to return to school, I moved into a mother-in-law apartment in my family home. My sister lives upstairs with her three kids. From the moment I moved in, they have been harboring the mistaken belief that my vacuum is community property. My sister's excuse is that "her vacuum is broken and she's just borrowing mine." Since 2003, it has been on the fritz more than it has been working.

Now, am I so petty that I would actually care if someone uses my vacuum? No, not if it was taken care of. Yesterday evening, I grabbed my vacuum to clean the carpet for the first time since I have been home. I checked the bag beforehand (from long experience knowing that the bag was likely to be too full). Not only was it too full, it was overflowing.

This is really simple. Occasionally, one must check to see if the bag is overly full with the dirt you have been vacuuming up. They even make it handy and draw a little line on the bag itself to tell you where the "full" line is. The "full" line is actually about halfway down the bag, probably because air needs to be able to circulate through the bag. The bag is not meant to be full all the way up to the top, with dirt spilling out of it.

One would hope that this lesson would be easy to learn so that my sister and her kids could move on to more difficult concepts - like how to sort laundry.