This morning I learned that the newest worrying bio-hazard may not be bird flu. It may be much closer to home than all of that - specifically, in my vacuum cleaner.

The Hub asked me to ride in the car with him and tell him if anything was different about the problem I'd explained to him before he tried to solve it. After that, I came in and decided to vacuum the living room floor. I dragged "Hosni" - that's the name of my vacuum cleaner, for anyone just tuning in - out of the hall closet, plugged it in and turned it on. Out came the most god-awful, foul smell you can imagine. I mean, it was stomach turning.

I turned it off, unplugged it and wrestled it open to find that the bag had somehow gotten wet and burst. The inside of the vac was damp, the filter was covered with - well, I should have looked more closely. For all I know it could have been both new life AND new civilization! ....

But, I wasn't in the mood for contact with anything slimy. I heartily wished I had put on a pair of rubber gloves first. I threw the bag, and the filter into the trash and set about trying to clean the interior cavity where the bag had exploded. It was not a good thing. It required bleach - a lot of it.

I can't even imagine how the inside of the vac got wet. OK. I suspect a certain person who shall remain nameless might not have felt like running downstairs to get his wet/dry vac, but you can't just go around accusing people without proof. In my house, at least, it's still a free country. ( Besides, it's a hell of a thing to land with both feet on the guy who's out in the rain trying to fix your car on account of he probably screwed up the vacuum cleaner)

Anyway, however it happened, it was quite a mess to clean up. And, as I sat there with the bleach and water as hot as my hands could stand it I thought to myself, You know, when most people vacuum their floor it's just not this INVOLVED!

sigh.

The whole thing was very challenging to the dog too. Winston, our mastiff, has reached a sort of uneasy peace with the vacuum cleaner. You see, he has never been quite sure if the vacuum is alive or not. And he really can't be blamed for his confusion. Shortly after we moved to Main St from Massachusetts, I was cleaning the place up with the whole house vac. I had everything plugged in, but the the unit, which had a switch on the handle was off, and it was leaning up against a chair. Winston's bone was nearby, and as Winston got up to pick his bone up, the hose shifted. The hand nozzle slid down the chair, hitting the button and turning itself on - whereupon it seemed to go right after Winston's bone!

Winston backed up, startled. He had, after all, never known a vacuum cleaner to be interested in a bone before. He sat down, cocked his head, then looked up at me as if for an explanation. But I was laughing too hard to be of too much help to him, though I did get up and turn it off, and hand Winston his bone. "It's all right" I told him. But, after that, he gave the hose and nozzle unit a wide berth every time he saw it.

The Hosni model looks very much like the hose and nozzle unit of the whole house vac. It's one of those canister types of vacuums. Winston sniffed it suspiciously when it came in. Mastiffs, as you may know, are very conservative breed, so he's sort of suspicious of anything new that comes into the house, unless it is a person or another animal, in which case he just loves it - mastiffs are also very social.

Anyway, he didn't seem too bothered by Hosni, until one day over the summer when I was running the vac upstairs. Winston way laying down between the bed and the wall - he does try to get out of the way when the vac is running. It was then that I discovered that if you had both window air conditioners running, the light on, and tried to run the vac the breaker would trip and everything went off. So I stomped down to the basement to reset the fuse - only this was a much bigger deal than it sounds like, because at the time my back was in terrible shape and getting down into the basement, for me, was like an expedition on the lines of Journey to the Center of the Earth.

So, by the time I got the breaker reset and got back on to the main floor of the house, I could hear Winston, upstairs, barking furiously. I mean, he was giving it all he had - his best intimidate-em-back-off-bark. I couldn't imagine what he was barking at until I trundled back up the the top floor and saw the problem. I had leaned the hose and nozzle attachment against the canister part of the vac facing toward the dog, who was lying down in the corner when the power went out. When the power came back on, it must have created enough of a surge that the hose and nozzle part shifted position. The hose and nozzle lifted back up and were balanced on top of the canister and the thing commenced to run! Imagine what it looked like to Winston. He's laying there, the vac blocking his means of flight, I'd left, and all of the sudden the thing lifted up it's head and growled at him! Moreover, it kept it up, and refused to be intimidated by his scariest I'm-a-big-dog barking routine.

I turned the vac off and moved it out of his way. He hot footed it downstairs and out the open back door into the carport, where he could take a nap in the cool, peace, and quiet.

So today, when I turned it on and that terrible smell came out, Winston lifted his head and gave sniff. He turned and looked up at me in complete astonishment. I could almost hear him say "I didn't know those things could get sick!"
And I could tell he was really bothered by this. Because, sure the thing had growled at him once, but if it was sick....well, should he try to nose it and make it feel better? Or ought he to just leave it alone? Eventually, he decided to go lay down and let me take care of it, but I could see him pondering the situation from under the dining room table.

Anyway, it The Hub thinks that it is just a problem with the timing belt in the car. This may be covered under warranty, but, if it isn't, he doesn't think the car will leave me stranded. He thinks we can wait til we can get a couple of dollars together and then schedule it to be fixed. He topped off the fluids and when I started it up again, the engine light was off. Consequently, I feel much less worried.

Who knows how the dog feels.