My brother Mark and his wife, Rachel, are going to be spending Sunday night with us – hooray! However, Rachel is allergic to cats, and thanks to Pfennig the Wonder Shedder, this is a terrible house for her. Long ago when our friend Deborah (also very allergic) used to stay with us while taking classes at Concordia, we would do a yearly whole-house cleaning that included renting a carpet cleaner.  There’s no time for that now, so I’ve just been vacuuming the snot out of everything.
Now, let me go back in time a bit to when our old vacuum died.  It’s name was Excalibur (named by the company, not us), and it was a trusty companion. We bought it in Maryland – one of our first major purchases as a married couple, and that’s when I learned that Lloyd takes his appliance buying seriously. There’s all sorts of research involved, consulting Consumer Reports, pricing, shopping, pricing some more – perhaps haggling, blah, blah, blah. (I like to buy the cheapest thing I can find at Wal-Mart. ‘Buy cheap, regret later’ – that’s my motto.) Anyway, Excalibur died, and we limped along with our back-up Wal-Mart vac until I stupidly sucked up a screw with it and killed that, too.Â
We shopped and shopped and finally settled on – the Kenmore Progressive, with a Direct Drive Beltless System, gentleSweep Bare Floor Friendly brushes, 12 amp motor, automatic Dirt Sensor, a plethora of onboard tools, and….. wait for it….. the IntelliCLEAN Performance Indicator. This was a couple of months back, and since it has a readout display that looks a bit like Kit from Knight Rider that shows red when it’s picking up dirt and green when it’s deemed the floor ‘clean’, I thought I was using the IntelliCLEAN feature. But no! Last night I realized that I was just using the Dirt Sensor feature, which is not as sensitive as IntelliCLEAN. Pushing the IntelliCLEAN button showed that my previously acceptable carpet was, in fact, filthy. I commercial cleaned (during House) just one area of the hallway over and over and over, trying to get the reward of seeing the green light. Finally, after 12 cumulative minutes, there it was.  Green and gorgeous. So now I’m on a mission to have a green light everywhere I go.  Lloyd and I agree that this would NOT be a good vacuum for an OCD person.