Vacuums

Long story short, there were some sparks and part of my vacuum melted. Uh oh.

With 4.8 kids, vacuuming is very much a daily chore, so I decided to meh it and buy a cheap one at Walmart to tie us over while we figure out what to do about repairs. At this point, I’m pretty certain I have some sort of curse in regards to vacuums, so I didn’t care enough to be picky when the darned thing is probably going to explode anyway.

I never go anywhere during the busy times, so it was life as usual when we set out at ten in the morning. We walked past a masked employee on our way into the store. I think she was counting people, but she didn’t say anything and hid off to the side. No awkward Walmart greetings.

It took some meandering to find the vacuum section. No one stopped us to interview us about our TV watching habits (or rather, lack thereof in our case).

I spent a moment wondering if I cared about the length of the power cord. Everyone who walked past gave us a wide berth, probably because of our horde of virus vectors freely releasing germs into the air with every breath. It was beautiful.

My husband and I came to a decision without having to constantly remind the kids to be considerate of others. I’m starting to wonder if a number of people were deliberately going out of their way to passive-aggressively treat my children like they were an inconvenience. It wouldn’t surprise me — I’ve gotten some pretty nasty criticisms over having kids, but I’m not at all sorry that I have single-handedly set women back 5000 years by choosing to give birth. I like these little people of mine, and it’s my life.

We picked up a couple more odds-n-ends, since we were already there and we had some space to think of them.

Self-checkout. I couldn’t tell the employees from the people who are just wearing masks, but no one came close anyway. Didn’t bag anything, because plastic bags are yucky.

Left without a single person asking to check our receipt.

Almost makes me want to go to Walmart more often. Almost. But I’m still bitter over Shopko closing.

And I’m back to vacuuming every day. It hasn’t exploded yet, but the curse still has plenty of time to kick in.