Busted: The Blue Vacuum

I'm not sure why I took a photo of the guts of our broken vacuum. Perhaps I sensed a pattern when it tanked just hours after the Santa episode.

Plastic shrapnel and acrid burning wire.
It was like a scene from an appliance war movie. Frightened villagers running for cover and all that.


The Blue Vacuum was not fancy. Steve and I bought it with gift monies from our wedding. We bought what we could afford, which wasn't much, but it was sufficient to suck up whatever found its way to the carpet of our tiny first apartment. Then the second apartment. And then our townhouse.
Then we got a couple of cats (and the fur and dander that goes with them.) The Blue Vacuum still held its own.
We had a baby. Then we had another baby. We moved into a house and doubled the square footage required of The Blue Vacuum.
And then had another baby.

Cheerios, cat fur, mud clumps, grass clippings, dead bugs, soon-to-be-dead bugs, an accidental shoelace or two, the edges of the rug (also accidental), and sometimes even it's own cord: The Blue Vacuum sucked it all with vim and vigor.

Then one day in December, 13 years later, it met entropy in a big way.