Bunny Killer

I think I've mentioned before that my house is almost 100 years old.  As charming and romantic as that sounds (and sometimes can be), it has its nastier issues.  Creaky floors, shoddy wiring, and questionable plumbing come to mind. None of these things beat the day to day annoyance of the dust bunnies.

The house has no filters.  It has a lot of windows, but nothing for active ventilation.  So, between just general house dust, four cats, my hair, and a carpet that is probably rotting underneath the carpet in my room, the house has a very large population of dust bunnies.

Dust bunnies . . . I realize they have a very complex culture and have cured several known diseases and created stunning works of art . . . I still hate the little fuckers and destroy them every chance I get.  I find deep satisfaction in taking down one of their dust bunny cities and wiping it away as if it never existed.

In our house, one of the main hosts for dust bunny colonies are the fans.  The bunnies love fans . . . mostly because they love the sensation of flying and then landing in a place where they can slowly clog up the gears and remove all purity from the system.  Fans are a perfect venue for this.

There is a fan in my room that came with the house. I have no idea how many years Gran has had this fan. My best and most logical guess is somewhere around 340 years.  More or less.  Anyway, the fan has to be completely disassembled before you can clean it.  Needless to say, Gran never cleaned it. Ever.

Given the difficult nature of getting into the thing, I tried as best I could to ignore the city of bunnies building inside the fan. Today though, I happened to glance over there when I turned it off and fell into a shock coma. When I woke from this, my roommate took the fan apart and I began to destroy dustbunnymetropolis.

By the way, my weapon of choice for destroying all dust related things is a mascara wand.  Mascara wands can be bought in bulk for next to nothing and you can clean so many things with them.  They can get into almost any knock or cranny and the bristles catch everything.  They also last quite a while.  They're my favorite cleaning tool next to old toothbrushes, which are just awesome.

In this case, I'm shocked I didn't kill the mascara brush.  The dirt layers were coming off in thick sheets from the far parts. The blades looked furry. Everything was so nasty.  It took me almost half an hour to clean that damned fan. Sadly, I even had to have help on part of it.  My roommate ended up just blasting the grills in the sink.

Eventually, the fan returned to it's original 1970s putty and brown elegance. It was sprayed so things would move faster, and now actually produces something close to reasonably cool air. I'm quite satisfied with the results.

And over in my trash can, I can hear the last notes of the broken dirge, as the remaining survivors from Dustbunnymetropolis mourn the loss of their city.