First Snow

Three posts today, I had a few things I hadn’t caught up on.

Yesterday the high was 70 degrees, and today it snowed. At least it’s finally down to near the average temperatures for this time of year here, but I guess I’ll have to get used to driving with my windshield trying to fog up again (so long as it’s not frozen my little squeegee is wonderful).

Not the best of pictures, but it was cold and windy and I wasn’t dressed all that warmly. By the time I got home (probably around 6:45) the snow was starting to stick on the pavement at my apartment complex, though it was all slush.

Filthy Roomba

The roomba managed to make a bit of a mess on Sunday.

Apparently I had a bit of ice fall out of the freezer before I left for church and by the time the roomba ran the ice had turned into a puddle. The roomba ran over that spot multiple times and seems to have cleaned the dust off it’s brushes. That wouldn’t be so bad, but it has no way to pick up the water so it was smearing the now dusty water all over the kitchen floor. It now really needs to be mopped, but I don’t have one so I’ll get to it later.

The bigger problem is that I get scoopable litter for Talore, which is the stuff that clumps together when it gets wet. Since one of the primary benefits of the roomba is that it cleans up the litter Talore scoops out of the box it wasn’t surprising that it got to the litter, but the result of that was pretty bad: the damp litter stuck to the plastic around the brushes, then everything else that the brushes got stuck to the litter. I’ve made one pass at scraping all the dried stuff out of the brush area of the roomba, but it needs more work before that part will be ready to go again. The vacuum section also was picking up a little water and making mud, hopefully the filter will still work now that it’s dried out, but I need to clean that too. The bin that it sweeps stuff into is actually worse than the brush area for things stuck to it, but it’s harder to get into so I’ll probably be trying to take it apart soon.

Since the roomba has been out of action since Sunday I’ve been leaving Talore’s toys and tissue paper out. Talore has further perforated the tissue paper, but the funniest thing is that she’s managed to build up enough static charge for it to stick to her several times. Watching her walk around with half a sheet of tissue paper stuck to her side was pretty funny, as was watching her try to prowl over the corner of one and having it bend up and stick to her face. The one that got her face got smacked back to the floor pretty quickly, but the other one was tolerated.