Ashes be Gone!

I heard a funny story from a friend of ours on how her kids ended up spreading some of the fireplace ashes accidently onto their carpet. Well they ended up cleaning the carpet with clorox. Yeah, not a good combination.

Well, I wish I had the good excuse of just being a 6-year old kid but when Brodi and I had been married about 2 years, I had something similar happen to me. Brodi had gone out to dinner and I had the brilliant idea to clean up our fireplace. We loved our fireplace and we used it often so there was a lot of ash in it. So I started to scoop some of it out into a plastic bag but I became tired of that after about 30 seconds.

I wanted to get it cleaned out and done quickly so that I could go and do something fun for the rest of the evening before Brodi got home. I must have gone temporarily crazy because you wanna know what genius idea I had to quickly clean out our fireplace? Yep, a vacuum. Now, can I say one more time that I must have gone temporarily crazy.

I whipped out the vacuum and I got to work. I put the hose of the vacuum right into the ash and began sucking away. It sucked it up pretty well for about a minute and then clogged down a bit and then it hit me--what have I done? The rest of the evening was spent trying to clean the vacuum, which when you think about it--why should you ever clean out a vacuum? A gentle reminder to you all...the picture on the left is made for doing that while the picture on the right is not.

The next 2 years of owning that frakkin' vacuum was 'fun.' Every time we turned it on, it emitted a nice smoky smell as it vacuumed the room. The floor would look clean every time we used it and our house would smell like a forest fire. Every vacuum job took twice as long because we would walk around with Lysol hoping to clear out the fire smell. I was 26 years old at the time but I don't think I have felt ever younger.