Disturbing on so many levels

I've been wanting a new vacuum for months now, and after I saw how much lint was building up on Jason's side of the bedroom carpet (via the Urine Gone! blacklight, remember?), I decided we might actually need one. After all, the old one is close to 15 years old, the bags are impossible to find, and, um, I really wanted a Dyson. And the red ones were on sale at Target.

Were on sale ... now gone, so I spent 10 minutes in the vacuum aisle attempting to compare vacuums that were at eye level on the display. Note to self: When lifting vacuums overhead, make sure all the attachments are firmly attached. Ended up buying a bagless HEPA double cyclonic whatever-it-is that was on sale and about half the price of the Dyson sale price.

I just finished vacuuming the whole house with it. I have heard horror stories along the line of "I had just vacuumed with my old machine, and I ran the Dyson, and my god, the stuff that came out of my 'clean' carpet!" Well, I hadn't vacuumed since last Friday, but still, I wasn't really expecting this:

Um, yeah, ewwwww ... and that's just from the 5'x7' wool throw rug in the living room. I mean, it's a cathair magnet and the place where the cats usually wrestle, but still. Eww. Want a better idea of the scope of the situation? Here's a different angle on the same canister:

The stuff I got off the sofa slipcover was a little disappointing:

I'm used to using a vacuum with a bag, which I pack so full of stuff I end up pulling a 5-pound bag of cat hair out every six months or so, so I honestly have no idea what volume of stuff I usually get with the old machine. But I can pretty much guarantee you, even with a fresh bag, it was less than this:

That's a layer about 8" deep across the entire top of my trashcan. All hyperbole aside, the clot of hair, dust, carpet fiber, dust, skin flakes, dust, and miscellaneous stuff was at least as large as either of our cats. The amount hair didn't surprise me - I know we're going to be covered in the stuff for years after the death of the cats - but the amount of dust/skin/grime/whatever that brownish grey stuff is was shocking. And I didn't even do the basement, where litter dust is about 1/4" thick on every horizontal surface. I'd like to officially apologize to all of our lungs for what we've been putting them through for the past year.

It will be interesting to see what sort of volume we get next week ... and I might turn the carpet height adjustment down a notch to make sure we don't end up with bald spots. Set this thing on "hard surface," and I think you could suck plywood splinters out from underneath the carpet padding. Whee! This makes vacuuming fun again!