When I come inside, I take the clothes out of the dryer and replace them with what I'm wearing and run the dryer for 10 minutes. The web and I think that's enough dry heat to kill a tick.

This works great unless I've found something interesting to shove in a pocket while I'm walking Caz and then forget about it when I hit the START button.

Which led me to searching the dryer's lint trap, and not finding as much stuff in the lint trap as I'd had in my pocket.

It turns out that a lint trap does not catch everything that flows through a dryer. When I pulled out the trap and peered into the innards, I found an entire new world. Complete ecologies and a lost civilization.

It was a primitive civilization. They hadn't discovered the wheel, but they were getting to close to discovering fire.

Enter the shop vac. This hit the nascent civilization like the great meteor hit the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

And, like that meteor, it did not consume everything.

The shop vac nozzle won't fit down the narrow crevice where the lint trap goes. Even the narrow wand was too thick.

If I'd ever bought a 3D printer, and had a spare half-a-day to waste designing and printing, this would have been an ideal project for it.

Alas, try as I might I haven't been able to justify a 3D printer, though I keep trying.

So, in uffish thought I stood, and finally descended into the depths of my basement in search of inspiration.

And what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a pair of 1/8 inch thick cardboard angle brackets that had been the corner protectors on the jointer-planer I bought a year or so ago.

I remember that when I unpacked the planer, these spoke to me. "Spare our lives," they said, "Do not toss us into the recycling bin, and we will surely repay you in your hour of need."

Today was that day. A couple quick passes through the table saw to shorten one side on each, and some packing tape to fasten them together, and I had a brand new narrow vacuum cleaner wand.

With no way to attach it to the vacuum cleaner hose. The wand is rectangular, and the hose is circular.

But I had a plastic cup from a fast-food joint. A couple minutes with a fine-tooth saw, and there was a slot in the cup that just fit the wand. A little more packing tape (because it's thinner and more flexible than Gorilla tape) and presto, the wand had a circular mount.

What's more (and perhaps even surprising), this McGyver contraption worked.

If you think I was pleased with this, you don't know me well enough.

The accurate description is "insufferably smug."

The moral of this story is that folks might want to do more than just empty their dryer's lint trap. A vacuum cleaner and a 12 inch ruler, or a nice narrow rectangular wand can do a lot.