Attack of the Vacuum

I started to Vacuum the living room tonight, and the sweet scent of pine filled the room. "This is great!" I thought - we haven't had the room smelling like a Christmas Tree since we, in fact, had a Christmas tree in the house. So, I kept vacumming and all was well.

Or so I thought.

After a few pleasant minutes of cleaning, the vacuum decided to absolutely shut down. Didn't work on one setting, and the other (stronger) setting sounded just awful. With that, the investigation began.

Step 1) Clean out the floor brush. 3 Girls' worth of hair is not a good thing for a small vacuum. Poor suffocating roll brush...

Step 2) Clean out the cup and filter. No problems there. In fact, there weren't any pine needles in it at all, which after the Christmas clean up it should have been absolutely FILLED with needles.

*Lightbulb*

Step 3) Spend the next 40 minutes alternately digging into the back of the vacuum with a spoon and tipping it over, delivering piles and piles of pine needles.

It was slow going, but eventually our little Eureka sucker guy was able to breathe again, and Christmas clean up is officially behind us!