Spring cleaning

As the semester finally begins to wind down, I'm beginning an intensive, much-needed house cleaning-and-rearranging binge. It's what I've been working on most of tonight, and I've realized something.

I'm not sure which is more distressing: That I own two very nice vacuums (a Dyson PetVac I bought for myself, and an Oreck my dad and stepmom bought me, not realizing I had a Dyson), or that I actually use both vacuums on a regular basis. The Dyson is heavier and bulkier, but is better for edging and has a host of useful attachments - including an attachment for removing pet hair from upholstry, which by itself is pretty much worth the $300 I paid for the thing. The Oreck is a heck of a lot lighter, and really great for pulling out of the closet and giving the house a quick once-over. Plus, when one of them clogs up and needs maintenance, but I'm in a hurry because ZOMG GUESTS ARE COMING OVER IN TEN MINUTES AND THE HOUSE IS COVERED IN CAT HAIR, I can pull out the other vacuum as a backup.

It turns out, two very expensive vacuums are not too many vacuums in a house inhabited by three cats and three birds - especially when they are having a constant team competition to see which species can make a bigger mess of the house.

You'd think it would be the cats. Because, yes, it's a constant battle to keep the house from smelling faintly of eau de litterbox, and I regularly sweep granules of cat litter out of my bed. And, yes, there's cat hair everywhere: It clings to my clothing, makes my optical mouse do crazy things with the pointer on my computer screen, and accrues gargantuan dust bunnies - nay, dust hyraxes - underneath every piece of furniture in my house. (I'm not complaining, because I have made my very fuzzy bed and now I will lie in it - but, hey, at least it's downy soft!) And, yes, there is frequently cat yak to clean up.

But the birds do an astounding job of keeping up with the competition, especially for three very small animals confined to a cage in one corner of one room of the house. I'm pretty sure they coordinate their molting so that any given month, one of them is shedding enough feathers to make teeny tiny canary-down pillows. Also: You'd think that, even with the dove flinging millet out of the seed cup left and right, with the abandon of the world's pickiest ten-year-old (don't want THIS, don't want THIS), the seed would be confined to one corner of that one room. However, you would be ignoring the principal biological imperative of seeds: To spread. And they do. Everywhere.

So, needless to say, my vacuums get a lot of work. There are two problems with these industrial-powered vacuums:

1. My house is also full of cat toys. Either of my vacuums would be capable of sucking up an entire cat, were the felines not wise enough to head for the hills at the first threatening vacuum-growly noise. Vacuuming is how I find lost cat toys, because they get schlorked up from ten meters away and clog the hose.
   
2. My vacuums are expensive. My carpet is cheap. Consequently, entire rows of the stuff get ripped up from areas where carpet-seams exist. They say pets ruin carpets, but my pets've got nothin' on my vacuums for sheer, obvious damage done to the flooring. If I were going to be here more than five years, I'd rip the stuff up and just do the entire house in hardwood. And step on birdseed all day long, all over the place.
   

Also tonight, I undertook a truly frightening task: I moved a bookcase. In my home, this constitutes as terrifying and complex an ordeal as one might expect, second only to what would happen if rabidlemur and phoenix_born decided to move a bookcase.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure they can't actually move any of their bookcases. I sort of envision their bookcases being propped up against one another like a stone arch bridge, with any one of the cases being a keystone that is keeping the whole mass upright. If any one of those bookcases were moved, the entire house might just collapse around them.