Poked a Fat Hog
Do not know where the phrase “you sure poked a fat hog in the butt” came from. I do know that the inference of that phrase meant a situation had been caused that was not going to be dealt with easily.
Of course, that is just the type of situation that I caused today. Me! No surprises there. Dennis has a great shop vac that is lightweight with a ton of suction. The vac can sit in one spot as the hose is fourteen feet long. Today Dennis brought it into the house and I was determined to vacuum all the upholstered furniture. When the dust on flat surfaces can be used as a writing tablet . . . you get the rest of the story.
We had cleaned the cold air returns on the furnace a while back. Why we didn’t do the heat runs at the same time is a mystery. The registers with their metal fins needed a good cleaning with hot sudsy water. I made sure to take the attachment off of the vacuum hose, so as to not loose it, and poked the hose down as far as it would go into the heat run to take in whatever loose dust could be had. Sweet!
It was so sweet, I couldn’t get the hose back out of the heat run. Quite a length of it had gone down quite easily. Dennis came to do a quick rescue. Not so quick. It would not budge. The hose was blessed, I got a bit of blessing and the situation got a bit heated. Twisting the hose at bit this way and that way did give hope that we could get it all the way out. Finally, Dennis had his arm into the heat run far enough to feel the end of hose. The hose came out . . . it didn’t come out alone. A screw driver had been the hold up. The twisting of the hose had gotten the screwdriver so it was being sucked into the hose in the correct way rather than being wedged.
Our heat runs are round, prior to the nice rectangle lengths that are in most homes today. This screwdriver had been waiting to be rescued for a long time. That heat run was the first I had tackled and I did not misunderstand Dennis in the warning I got when doing the remaining ones.
We got through the rest of the day without further complications. The shop vac is back where it belongs and I have had a very good day closing down the last of the fall housecleaning. I got’er done Mom. Lena would not have been dealing with heat runs. In her early days, it would have been the remains of burning wood for heat.