Scooba the mopping bot

It is good to live in the future. By that I mean having robots like the Roomba and the Scooba to help you with the housework. I turned the Scooba on in the kitchen this afternoon and let it trundle along while I did other things like laundry, walking to to mail box and paying bills. I stopped it one time to put some more clean water in the tank and empty the dirty water, and let it continue doing its thing. The Scooba moves slower than the Roomba, because it is doing a lot more things at once. It leaves hardly any water on the floor, which is super nice. Cleaning floors is usually an onerous task, but this makes life so much easier. For all that it requires a certain kind of cleaning fluid, I feel like it uses way less than I would and probably does a better job over all. Anything that might get missed I can just wipe up with a magic eraser sponge.

Pumpkin does not like the robots. Poor kitty. We are thinking about getting him a friend, probably from the same rescue group. That way he can have a friend to talk to, and perhaps the other kitty will take to Mike. Last night Pumpkin sat on Mike for the first time. He seems shy of very tall people. Right now he is asleep on my feet. I have waited so long for a kitty who would curl up around my feet and keep them warm.

Today is nice. I feel better than I have in weeks. That may have to do with sleeping for eleven hours and no longer subsisting on narcotics and ice cream. I don't feel completely wiped just walking across the house. Yawning still sort of hurts, which is annoying.

reporting from the consumer world

I love having a job where all my funny work stories are not bound up in strict confidentiality laws and don't usually involve something bad happening. Instead, I can present you gems like a series of reviews left on every Toshiba product on a certain site with title like "WARNING: TOSHIBA KILLS SANTA FOR MY KID" or "TOSHIBA is the GRINCH THAT STOLE XMAS FOR MY KID." Each was an exact copy, a long and fairly boring customer service complaint about the trouble with repairing televisions. When I saw the first title I was really hoping it would be a story about how a giant Toshiba logo fell out of an airplane and crushed someone in a chimney pretending to be Santa. Alas, it just wasn't that creative.

Joan Rivers has a line of jewelry for sale on QVC. It includes these perfectly innocuous snowflake pieces, which are shiny and sparkly and look like snowflakes you might cut out of paper if you have steady hands. One reviewer evoked the ghost of Mommie Dearest though, writing: The earrings and necklace are lovely, but SNOWFLAKES ALWAYS HAVE SIX SIDES. NOT EIGHT. EVER!

I was totally unaware. Hah!