Canisters and Stupidity

Run: 3.9/37:30

I have always gotten up at 5:30 to run. On the weekdays (shorter runs) I don't eat anything before I head out. However, I have to take these pills at 5:30, so I wake up and reach over to grab something to eat. Yes, I'm too lazy to go downstairs, so I prepare something the night before. I eat, take the pills, then get ready to go running.

It's making me nauseous. I don't think it's the eating, because I've eaten before long runs before and been fine. I supposed downing those pills isn't conducive to running. It's not fun to be a mile from home and feel like you want to throw up. I actually stopped after a while and decided to walk, then changed my mind and realized that I'd get home faster if I ran. Luckily, I don't have too many more days of this.

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I would like to share a story with you. This story will highlight my own ability to be an airhead, and maybe I'll make some new blogging friends by demonstrating that I, too, can be an idiot.

There isn't much carpet around here. All the flooring is usually cement, tile, or linoleum. In my house the bottom floor is shiny white tile (the most loathsome kind), and the second floor is linoleum. The stairs, for some reason, are a very low pile carpet. It's frayed, it's coming up in some places. Whatever. I don't know the last time it was vacuumed. I've tried to sweep it, but of course that doesn't help much. I tried to vacuum it with my tiny hand vac, and that was a useless endeavor.

My mom has a small vacuum, the stand-up stick handle kind that runs on a battery that you plug into the wall. The lightbulb finally went off last week when I thought "hey, I've got some really gnarly stairs that need vacuuming", so off I went to borrow that vacuum. Five minutes later I was choking on dust that was blowing up in my face and not seeing much improvement on the stairs. I told my mom and we agreed that those stairs were just too bad for any help.

Fast forward to this morning. My mom was cleaning her bathroom (where all her cleaning supplies are kept), and she yelled out to me "Thanks for cleaning out the canister from the vacuum!" I replied that I didn't clean it out. See, when I do something really awesome (read: something I'm supposed to do) like clean out vacuum canisters or fill up the pure water container or pick up my hair out the sink, I take a mental note and congratulate myself. So I knew that I had never cleaned out that canister.

My mom walked out of her bathroom with the vacuum. I looked at it. There was a very large empty space on its front where the canister was supposed to be, and I began racking my brain and trying to picture what that vacuum looked like last week when I used it on my stairs. Canister? What canister? Is it possible that I...? No. I'm not that dumb. Should I say it? Should I even admit to that?

Mom carried that clean canister out of the bathroom and I spoke up, "Wait, that canister wasn't always on the vacuum? Uh, maybe that's why the dust was flying everywhere..."

And then my mom and I laughed really, really hard.

You can't catch the dust and dirt if there's no canister.

And that, my friends, is a humbling moment.