There's Dog Hair in the Bird Seeds!

Sharing your home with dogs and birds is great fun, until it's time to vacuum.  Trouble is, it becomes time to vacuum a lot. 

Surely it is a fact that there has never been a house bird of any kind that didn't fling seeds on the floor.  Anyway, birds don't wear bibs.  That's a fact.

It may or may not be a fact that a dog running from a vacuum cleaner stirs the dog hair from the carpet into the air thus reducing the amount of hair the vacuum is able to pick up.

A few weeks ago the Oreck upright that has valiantly done years of hard labor here at the Bad Dog Ranch sucked it's last.

An old Rainbow that has been on the bench awaiting just such an event was brought into active duty.  (For those who don't know about Rainbows, instead of a bag, the dirt goes into a container filled with water.  This water container is housed in a R2-D2 shaped unit on wheels.  The nozzle that you push on the floor is attached to the unit by a hose.  It works fine but is cumbersome to use.  This is why it was relegated to back-up.)

Alas, the veteran Rainbow was not up to the task.  The rolling brush thing was paralyzed by Lily the Great Pyrenees hair causing the belt to snap.  Of course the belt didn't break immediately after the roller stopped rolling.  It got there gradually while smelling like a burning tire.

The search was on for a replacement.  Clearly, vacuum technology/vacuum marketing has responded to the needs of customers seeking to remove hair and seeds from their dwellings.  There are a whole bunch of vacuums with the words PET in their names.  STRONG SUCTION is another popular selling point, as is DOG HAIR.

Such a dizzying array of options... Bissel, Kenmore, Hoover, Kirby...  After narrowing it down to three that were pretty much the same by way of desired features, the Dirt Devil Razor Pet Steerable Bagless Upright won out.  Why?  One of the reviewers remarked that this vacuum did a wonderful job on the hair of a Great Pyrenees and the seeds of a cantankerous parrot.