A couple of years ago I promised myself that if something bugged me, I'd fix it. For example, if the screen door didn't close properly, I'd make my husband fix it. If a favorite pan in the kitchen was hard to get to, I'd rearrange the cupboards to make more sense. If it was hard to find something in the garage, we'd build some shelves and get more organized. You get the idea.

I have arrived at this point with one of my vacuum cleaners. Today, I was trying to clean our smaller rental cabin and got all sweaty wrestling around a vacuum cleaner that my father-in-law pulled out of someone's trash, made sure it worked as best he could, and gave me. The height adjustment won't stay set, and the machine itself is heavy and clunky. I'd thought I would like it because it has a feather duster type thing that has its own storage compartment, and you turn a knob, and the vacuum sucks the dust off of it. But it's some strange synthetic, like a darnell wig, that doesn't attract and hold dust, just rearranges it in place. So, mark it on my calendar: today is the last time I'm going to use that vacuum cleaner.

That particular cabin is hard to keep clean because it is rough logs inside and out. Spiders and bugs get in where there are gaps.



It's a cute little place, and we don't charge much per night for it, but it doesn't get a lot of business.

Some of this is probably due to the lack of cell phone and internet access there, and some is due to our No Pets policy. We've got two reservations for it this summer, and that's okay, it will cover some of the electricity cost, which is $16 a month even if nobody stays there. I do the laundry there because the clothes washer there has a removable lint filter that can be cleaned out, so it keeps lint from getting into my septic systems.