Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Worth the Hype

With varying degrees of vigilance and success, I have been pretending to keep house for nearly three years. I have also spent these 3 years ignorant of perhaps the greatest invention of mankind. Had I been aware of the freedom granted by this simple gadget, my husband may have spent 3 years in the home of the wife of Prov 31 instead of... Ok, let's be honest, I doubt my works will be praising me at the city gates anytime soon, but I do have to give praise where it is due. Let's have a big shout out for....

The duster!!! (electrostatic, feather...take your pick)

I have long loathed dusting. In terms of the rewards of housekeeping, there is not much that falls lower than pulling out the dust cloth and spray and wiping down a piano, computer, TV, etc. only to have it nearly instantly dusty again, leaving behind the lingering smell of dusting spray. yuck. And what about those little trinkets that are everywhere...the thought of tediously going over every one of those beloved knick-knacks just makes my eyeballs shudder (I'm not sure what I mean by that, but I think it conveys the idea).

I'm sure many of you are asking yourself what planet this poor sap grew up on, as most 27 year olds have probably been aware of the usefullness of this little gadget since they were old enough to swat their siblings with it, much to the horror of their Prov. 31 mothers. Well, first let me say, it was no fault of my mother's, as we did have a feather duster in our home. I actually even used it a time or two. However, at some tender age I heard some little tidbit about dusters that lodged in my head like the gospel truth. That being that dusters merely move the dust around, only to have it settle again, thereby not really accomplishing much.

While I realize there may be some truth there, it dawned on me, as I gazed around my dust-covered home, that using a duster that takes 1/52 of my time (or less) and leaves no awful smell in it's wake and solves the how-to-dust-the-Pieta problem would at least get the job done, (and leave me more willing to accomplish it with increased frequency!) which is more than can be said for the old cloth-and-spray method that was happening at the same frequency as the seasonal changes.

I write this in a dusted living room. Yes, there may be a bit more dust floating in the air tonight, and my home may not have that 3 minute post-spray gleam, but at least it doesn't smell of canned lemon, I'm not covered in a layer of sticky grime and there is no extra laundry to do. And when that dust settles, well, it has me and my duster to reckon with.

Take that, dust bunnies!

1 comment:

Jesse Ray said...

I have never read a more eloquent post about dusting and the tools of my former trade. Yes, dusting is a task that should be avoided as much as possible.

If you must dust remember that sending into the air with a duster will cause most of it to hide nicely into the carpet as it settles.