Cleaning Hack #3: Abuse your Nu Nu

No I’m not talking about your nethers! Pervies.

I’m talking about the Very Most Excellent Nu Nu from Teletubbies. This guy:

Gotta love Nu Nu, right? Because as the Teletubbies bumble happily through life, throwing Tubby Toast and whatnot all over their weird little spaceship thingy, who saves the day? Why, it’s Nu Nu, come to magically schlurp up all the mess!

And where does Nu Nu put all the Tubby Toast frisbees and bunny poo and dead flowers and whatever else litters up the Tubby Scape? Who knows? And better yet, who cares! That’s the very best thing about Nu Nu: all that mess just goes… away!

Don’t you wish you had a Nu Nu at your house?

(Psst! Guess what? You do!)

I’m not kidding anyone that your vacuum cleaner is an actual-factual Nu Nu — the real Nu Nu is, of course, an independent and intelligent entity who can not only sense when messes are made, but can open and close the Tubby Utility Closet on its own. Nu Nu doesn’t have a cord or a power switch, and doesn’t need any direction at all.

Your Nu Nu is definitely lazier and waaay dumber, but it does do that very best thing that Nu Nu does: it sucks up messes and takes them… away.

My personal Nu Nu is a Kenmore upright, very straightforward. It has a Hepa filter (which I have never changed cuz I’m like that) and a replaceable bag. That’s actually a good thing, the bag, because vacuums with bags have better suction than the ones with cups you empty. Also, you don’t have to look at the Tubby Toast and bunny poo, it just disappears into the bag. Awesome!

I bought this awesome vacuum at the local Sears, AKA, The Sears At Which One Buys All Major Appliances, apparently, because when I need a major appliance, I just find myself there.

And here’s the coolest thing about this particular Sears: it has a vacuum cleaner department which, in turn, has not one but TWO real live vaccum cleaner salesmen. I don’t mean that there are two guys who work in the department, I mean that these guys sell vacuum cleaners, they are old-school Salesmen, and they are hysterical. One is a cranky old guy in jacket and tie, he’s obviously been doing this forever. The other is… really, I don’t know what his deal is. He’s fifty-ish, wears sort of pagan-y necklaces and black nailpolish, is clearly gay (“not that there’s anything wrong with that”) and seems in every way completely wrong for vacuum cleaner sales. Except that he’s got the whole thing DOWN — this guy is as good as it gets.

You will not be ready for this, when you go to get a Nu Nu, because nobody sellsanything at department stores anymore… they all just wander around with price guns, and if you ask them a question they start gazing into the half-distance for another employee. You can tell them that there aren’t any other employees because it took you a half hour just to find them, but you realize the utter futility of this and decide to figure it out yourself.

So you find the vacuum cleaner department, and the Salesmen suck you in and show you everything and lean heavily toward the Kenmores (duh, Sears brand) which you will buy and love because if you go to Consumer Reports, you’ll see that they’re pretty damn good.

Here’s the thing though. The vacuum cleaner Salesmen will tell you, as your purchase is going through, that you must NOT allow your vacuum cleaner to inhale anything larger than a speck of dust or it will immediately seize up. Also you must bring your Nu Nu in once a year for service and cleaning and tuning and Reiki and acupuncture and whatever else they do to them in there. You will leave thinking that your Nu Nu is a delicate flower in need of your protection.

Au contraire, mon cher!

Notice, if you will, the fancy beater-brushes and height adjusters and everything at the front of your Nu Nu, yes, these are probably deserving of your respect. But notice also that you can bypass all this delicacy and get right to the heart of the matter. Look on the side, where the hose leads to all the fancy-schmantsy stuff up front. See that? OK, now grab the hose and yank it out.

Looky! it’s Nu Nu!

That’s the key to the kingdom my friend, the sucky hose! You have to be kind of touchy with the other stuff, but this is, what? Just a hose, leading straight to the bag. How can you possibly cause any damage here? The answer is that you can’t. You — especially YOU who wouldn’t be looking for hacks if you weren’t just exactly as lame as I am — YOU are free to treat your Nu Nu with complete disdain, and suck up all manner of scrud, basically anything that will fit. Don’t tell the Salesmen, but I was vacuuming last night and decided to attack one of those corners where all sorts of junk ends up, and Nu Nu ate all kinds of ill-advised things. Here is a list of the things I sucked up:

• One ponytail holder
• One register receipt
• One Battleship game piece
• LOTS of dust and sand
• Several rogue kibbles (actually, I tossed these to the dogs)
• One unexplained hunk of wood (this might have been the remains of a Jenga block. Milo thinks they’re tasty.)
• Any number of hot pink boa feathers

And probably a bunch of other stuff. What did I NOT allow my Nu Nu to make disappear? I don’t suck up food (hence the kibbles went to the dogs) and I didn’t suck up the bendy straw. Anything long and skinny like that can’t make it all the way through the tube, you’ll have to open everything up and fish it out again, and how is THAT helpful? It isn’t.

Guess what else you can clean with your Nu Nu? Just about everything; take a look at your attachments! I only have two: that little flat one you use to vacuum the couch, and that soft brushy one. If this weren’t Cleaning Hacks, I’d be embarassed to admit that I only figured out what this is, like, last year. It’s a duster! You know how when you try to dust with a feather or wool duster, everything just sort of flies around the room? And when you try to use a dust cloth on complicated surfaces you just end up spreading the dust around? Hook that baby on and hit everything in the room: lampshades, the TV screen, chotchke shelves — that’s especially satisfying: pick something up, dust underneath it, dust the chotchke itself, then put it back down. Throw away your broom right now — use the extender and the small vacuum head to get under chairs and tables, into crumby kitchen corners, etc etc. Use the dust brush to clean the window frames and venetian blinds. And on and on. And where does all this junque end up?

Well, the environmentally conscious part of me cares. But, sorry Gaia, the slob is in control right now, and the slob is content for all that scrud to just go… away.

Cleaning Hack #2: Laundry. Sorta.

So, I’m not sure this counts as an actual hack, because the sad news is that you still have to do the laundry. Which, pardon my Serbo-Croatian, sucks.

I hate laundry. Hate. With hatred. I don’t mind putting in the washes, and I don’t mind flipping them into the dryer and then into the basket. I hate folding. Not because I dislike the actual folding (you’d have to have an aful lot of time on your hands to bother hating something like folding) but because then there are these stacks of folded laundry to put away. Which I hate doing. I’m not sure why — maybe there’s a 12-step group for that — but I do know that I also hate turning around and seeing that while I’ve been wandering around bumping into this batch, more laundry has piled up behind me.

If I just had to do my own laundry, I’d be fine. I honest to God don’t have that many clothes — when I do these enormous heaps of laundry, there will be a t-shirt, a pair of jeans, and one sock for me. The rest is for these other people who live here (and why my 4 yr old cannot step up to the plate I do not know) and they have just these huge tracts of clothing.

And I long ago realized something deep and meaningful about the laundry. Ready? Here it is:

If we didn’t have so much clothing, we wouldn’t need so much clothing.

Think about it: Every day for a week, I throw a pair of undies into the laundry basket. If, at the end of the week, I wash those self-same undies, I will have clean undies for the next week, right? Right? No, I’m asking you, because I have no idea.

I have no idea because I never get to do that. At the point when I should be washing last week’s undies for this week, I am instead strip-mining Mount Laundry and running stuff that has been down there far longer than that. Probably including the undies I wore last week, because I couldn’t wash them right away either. So what do I do for next week? Well, I have to have another set of undies for next week, too.

Now, imagine that I only owned one week’s worth of undies. First of all, they’d get pretty scruddy pretty fast but, second, I’d have to do the laundry right away. And third, I’d probably have only a weeks worth of everything else (which, now that I think about it, is pretty much what I have) so doing the laundry right away would be no problem.

Contented, horizon-gazing sigh!

Never gonna happen. Because there’s no blessed way I’m going to get my handsome husband to believe that I will always in every case have his laundry done in time for Monday morning. I don’t believe it either because I won’t, I know I won’t. I’m just being practical here — I know that eventually something will come up, I won’t get everything done, we’ll all have to go out in dirty underwear, someone will get hit by a bus and end up in the emergency room… and your mother probably gave you the rest of that speech at one time or another.

So, we have more laundry than can be kept up with in one week, which means that any given garment will take at least two weeks to go through the laundry, which means we need to have two weeks worth of any given garment type, which means that we have more laundry than can be kept up with in two weeks, which means that I will never ever get rid of the tangled mess of baskets and piles of clothes in the basement.

Or so I thought!

Because when I came home the other day, my wonderful mother-in-law had sorted all the laundry. She didn’t wash any, she didn’t fold or put any away, she just sorted.

What the hell good is that? you ask. Yes you did, liar, I heard you.

I will tell you anyway — it is all the hell good.

And here’s why. I have, for years, tried to figure out exactly where the process falls apart. I know I should just put the clothes away, I know I should just keep running loads, I know I should bring the dirty laundry downstairs before my children become trapped in their rooms and we have to go on Hoarders. (Not a bad idea, anyway, ’cause they clean the house for you!)

I know I should “Just get to it!” but if “Just get to it” were going to work, it would have worked a looooong time ago (as I recently informed my Mother who, God bless her, laughed her head off.) So I’m willing to give up that dream and take a cold hard look at the situation.

I tried focusing on organization, so putting away the laundry wouldn’t be such a big deal. I tried focusing on putting away, so folding wouldn’t seem like such a big deal. I tried… well, all the rest of it. No dice.

But when my MIL sorted, she sorted into colors. Not owner, not type of garment, just by color. Here is the color breakdown:

• Blue
  jeans, shirts, towels, tons of stuff here.
• Pink
  I have two girls. ‘Nuff said.
• Purple
  See Pink.
• Green
• White
  Nothing goes in here unless you’re willing to bleach it.
• Black:
• Red/Orange/Yellow

Right, so I’ve got these baskets, each containing a different color. And how does this help me?

1. I have these baskets upstairs, full of yet more laundry. But I can’t bear to bring these downstairs because there are already so many down there, and I’m really not all that keen on digging deeper when I’m already standing in the hole.

But guess what! Everything is sorted. So instead of bringing these baskets down and hurling them at the heap, I can bring them down and sort them into the categories that are already set up. Which feels less pathetic.

2. I try to keep things running so I’ll have clean laundry to fold in the evening, but Ido actually have a real job so…

Guess what! With the laundry all sorted, I can tell my tween to do it! “Honey, please go flip the laundry — just put in a load of blues, please.” Fabulous! Organize the task so as to put my daughter to work for me? I am SO all over that.

3. Folding? Still a drag, but now that I’m doing laundry regularly, not so bad! Plus, you get a whole big load of pinks, guess where they’re all going? Most of our towels are blue, most of our sheets are green… you get the picture.

It’s been a couple of weeks since the surprise sorting, and no, I’m not all caught up. But I no longer think there’s such a thing and I just can’t get my act together. I don’t think anyone is all caught up, ever, with anything. Whatever you’re doing, it’s all Lucy in the Chocolate Factory all the time. Right? I mean, unless you’re fabulously wealthy, in which case you wouldn’t be reading this post… unless you just like my writing, in which case please feel free to sponsor me so I won’t have to work a day job OR do laundry!

Yahrite! Anyway, Here’s Cleaning Hack #2: Sort the Laundry. It seems like a little thing but it definitely changed my laundry life. (Sorta!)

Cleaning Hack #1: Make Your Disaster a Work in Progress

I am, hands down, the worst housekeeper I have ever met. It’s not that I am impaired in any way, or so put-upon that I can’t find the time — this very minute I am writing this post about cleaning instead of actually cleaning, so that gives you an idea. You know, stuff happens, but I’m certainly not beyond finding the time to keep things at least sanitary.

No, let’s be honest here: the real reason my housework doesn’t get done is that I hate it and I don’t want to do it. Ever. And why do I hate it so much? Because it is time-consuming, unrewarding, and ultimately pointless.

You know the old saw, “a man may work from sun to sun, but woman’s work is never done”? (Not to say that I’m the only one doing it: we all pitch in and do our share, and if my children start to complain I threaten to recite "Housework" from Free To Be You And Me. Little Possum [my 4 yr old, not her real name] is usually happy for the diversion, Willow [the 10 year old; also not her real name] either gives me a half-lidded “Mom, you are so annoying” glare, or runs away screaming. Rotten kid.)

But it is very true that housework is never done; at the end of the day, no matter how much you’ve done, there is still more to do. And the second you’ve done something, someone comes along and messes it up.

So consider these two scenarios (these are possible only when I am unemployed… as I am right now… anyone need a writer?):

1. I spend all dang day cleaning my house.
2. I spend half the morning writing a post about how much I hate housework, then do a little housework, then play with Possum, then take a nap.

And what are the outcomes of these two scenarios? They are exactly the same: at the end of the day, there is more housework to do. Except that in the first scenario I am bitter and resentful that the life of one so clearly talented and intelligent (and also modest) should be frittered away on such mindnumbing trivialities. And in the second one I have gotten my creative ya-yas out, made some gestures toward Godliness, enjoyed the company of my girlie, and had a lovely nap as well.

At the end of my life, will I wish I had done more housework? Unless at some point Child Services declares my house an unfit environment, the answer is unequivocally HECK NO!

On the other hand, the state of one’s house is a definite factor in others’ assessment of you; people tend to look askance at apple cores on the kitchen counters (Willow!) or dirty socks under the coffee table (Husband!) or heaps of laundry in the basement (uh… that would be me). And such assessments tend to affect the social lives of my children — I am either struck by CHAOS (Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome) or parents retrieving their children decide never again to darken my dusty doorstep.

So, I have developed a bunch of what I call “Cleaning Hacks” that help me maintain the illusion that I am a responsible adult, and here is number one:

Cleaning Hack Number 1: Turn your disaster into a work in progress.

Imagine you’re home slung on the couch in your comfy disaster of a living room. You are re-reading Ken Kesey’s “Sometimes a Great Notion” and snacking on Monukka raisins. The dog starts barking; you look up to see your neighbor coming up the walk. You want to invite her in for tea and crumpets, only… you look around helplessly.

What will you do? What WILL you do?

Here’s what you’ll do — pretend you are in the middle of cleaning. Haul out your vacuum cleaner and stand it in the middle of the room. Grab some cleaning supplies from under the sink and set them down, preferably where they can be seen from the front door. Spray air freshener or, better yet, something like Windex into the air. If you have an apron, put it on. Pick up a couple of random objects that need to be put away, and go answer the door.

“Oh, hi!” you say, “Come on in! Excuse the mess — I was just cleaning up."

Huh? HUH? What did I tell you? Your house looks exactly the same, but instead of lazing around you are cleaning up you decent, respectable person you!

Here endeth Cleaning Hack Number 1 — check back for more tips and tricks! (Mostly tricks.) And click the "Submit a Hack" button over there to send in your favorite shortcut -- you could be featured in an upcoming article!

Hack on, people!