For quite a while, I’ve been think­ing about making some changes to the blog, and I think it’s finally time to start imple­ment­ing them. So over the next month or two the design and con­tent of Waking-​Dream is going to change. I’ll explain whats dri­ving that as things get a bit fur­ther along (ohh mystery).

So, in that spirit of new types of con­tent, here’s a review of a gadget that has changed Dre and my lives: the Dyson DC17 “Animal Edition” Vacuum Cleaner (aka our 2^nd wed­ding anniver­sary gift).

You see, we have a little prob­lem in our house. Or should I say three little prob­lems. Take exhibits “A” and “B” (or left-​to-​right Rita Mae and Lewis… not sure where Lilah was when Dre took this picture):

We have three pets (two gray cats and a reverse Oreo pooch) that are all shed­ders. It’s inevitable that, over the course of a week, our floors and fur­ni­ture develop a gray cov­er­ing of their own. Said cov­er­ing is, to put it mildly, “resistant” to most vacuum clean­ers. In fact, pre-​Dyson, the only sure­fire way we had to get things clean was to first use a pet brush on them (the car­pets, not the pets) to loosen as much fur as pos­si­ble and then to vacuum. Need­less to say, clean­ing was a time inten­sive production.

Then, through word-​of-​mouth, I heard about Dyson Vacuum Clean­ers. And, after a bit of research, I found that pet owners swore by them; in par­tic­u­lar, every­one rec­om­mended the DC17 (pic­tured to the left). Why? It sucks. I mean it really SUCKS and in a good way. To put that into per­spec­tive, Dyson claims that it sucks at, be pre­pared, 150,000 frickin’ times the force of grav­ity. Seri­ously! It basi­cally cre­ates a mini-​cyclone inside the cham­ber (at 150,000 frickin’ times the force of grav­ity) — how cool is that??!!

On the down­side, it costs about $500 new (more on that later). So the imme­di­ate ques­tions are: a. does it work? And, b. is it worth the price? Well, at the risk of embar­rass­ing my wife fur­ther (by doc­u­ment­ing our fur sit­u­a­tion) let me tell the tale of our runner (with pictures).

With my back and forth between Rochester and Cor­nell, vac­u­um­ing has not been our number one pri­or­ity. So, by this past Sat­ur­day, we had built up a lot of gray. Here is a pic­ture of one of our run­ners. As you might notice it looks a bit desat­u­rated due to the dust­ing of gray (those dark sec­tions of carpet are sup­posed to be a dark navy blue/black).

Well, out came the Dyson and in far less than three min­utes of back and forth over the carpet (I think it was about a minute, but I didn’t think to time it) there were notice­able results. Take a look at the illus­tra­tion below:

As you can see, it looks like a brand new carpet (or at least a well cleaned, almost new carpet). But the great­est proof of the Dyson’s pick-​up-​ability (aka 150,000 frickin’ times the force of grav­ity) is to actu­ally look at how much it picked up. And we can do this thanks to the oh-​so-​cool trans­par­ent dust cham­ber. Exhibit 1 — the cham­ber before vacuuming:

And then, Exhibit 2 — after vac­u­um­ing the runner (and only the runner):

Little bit of a dif­fer­ence, huh? All of that came out of an 8′x2′ runner!

And not only is that the obvi­ous fur, it’s also a lot of dust and other aller­gens (that as it turned out the pre­vi­ous vacuum wasn’t pick­ing up either). As far as we’re con­cerned, the DC17 per­forms to spec and then some.

Of course per­for­mance comes with a price. And beyond eco­nomic con­sid­er­a­tions, that price is felt in terms of weight and volume. No “skinny-minny”, the DC17 weighs in at over 30 pounds! It also is loud… not just “scare the pets” loud, the Dyson starts to get into “scare the neighbors” loud.

But the real stick­ing point is the price. As men­tioned ear­lier, new, the MSRP is close to $500. At that price, I’d want the vacuum to also do the vac­u­um­ing for us (I’m not sure if it’s wise to think about mash­ing a Dyson and a Roomba… you might end up with Skynet). The really good news is, with a bit of search­ing, you can find a Fac­tory Recon­di­tioned DC17’s in the $220 ball­park. Con­sid­er­ing that we payed almost that much for the pre­vi­ous “girly” vacuum, it seems a pretty obvi­ous choice: if you are frus­trated by pet hair, take the plunge and get a recon­di­tioned DC17.

Ok, so basi­cally there are two types of people in the world… those people whose pets are safe on Hal­loween, and people like us…

Look­ing at the “Wayback Machine” list­ing of pre­vi­ous year’s posts in the side­bar reminded me that I launched this site in the days that imme­di­ate fol­lowed the Florida deba­cle of 2000. It also reminded me that I had just started grad school in Chicago at the time of the last Pres­i­den­tial Election.

Anyway, get out there and exer­cise your fran­chise (unless of course you’re inten­tion­ally choos­ing not to do so as a protest). Just remem­ber, DON’T VOTE FOR THE EMPEROR: