Dusting

I've just finished Swiffering my ceiling. (No, that's not a product endorsement, although if the Swiffer people would care to call, I do have a Paypal account.....). It's just that that is the brand my store happened to have, so that is what I bought. I got a box of those duster things because I thought they would be handy for getting the dust off my computer keyboard, and they are. For about a minute each day, my keyboard is dustless.

But today I used the whole box on my ceiling. What started it was the smoke alarm going off. Naturally I raced around the house (not a long run) and made sure nothing was on fire, not even the toaster oven, but then I had to get the alarm down and turn it off. As soon as I brought it down, it did stop. Hmmm. Then I put it back and a minute later, scrrrreeeeeeeeee...... Took it down, it stopped. Put it back, scccrrreeeeeeeee.

Puzzled, I remembered years ago a smoke alarm going off because a small spider had set up housekeeping in the sensor.

Looking more carefully at the alarm and it's seat on the ceiling, I noticed strings of spider-web-like dust hanging down. Sure enough, one kept wafting towards the alarm and setting it off. So that solved that problem, but now I knew my ceiling was an upside-down dust-web farm, yikes. Now, the ceilings in this house are that stipply stuff, so any time you so much as touch them, bits of white stucco fall on your head. And you can't exactly run a dustcloth over them. Aha, I thought, maybe those Swiffer fluffs will work. I got an old mop handle out (kept because I'm too cheap to throw anything potentially useful away and it was a perfectly good handle and you never know when you might need 6 or 7 handles for something), used some rubber bands to attach two of the fluff sheets, and went at it. The fluff sheets grabbed onto the dust webs as soon as they got close so I didn't have to actually touch them, or the ceiling.

It took over an hour but now I have a clean ceiling!

And the smoke alarm has shut up.