Post-Thanksgiving Report

My family left for Texas last night. As expected many things ended up in different places than where I put them, but I’ve been able to find pretty much everything I looked for so far. Despite how nice my closet and pantry look when organized I very much doubt it will last. The only thing I couldn’t find was a clean bowl last night. It turns out bowls get used much faster by four people than by one, so I loaded the dishwasher and ate my jello desert off a plate.

While my mom was here I got her to make a cushion for Talore for my desk. It covers the corner of the desk, but has a notch for Talore’s cup of water and the squirt gun I use for discipline. All yesterday afternoon/evening Talore slept on the new pillow, and a good bit of today too, so it’s clearly appreciated.

The roomba died again today. It stopped in the middle of the room Tuesday or Wednesday when I forgot to cancel the schedule and we weren’t here, but it had also picked up a large portion of Talore’s tissue paper so I hoped that was the cause. Apparently cat hair managed to build up in the gear box to the point of jamming it again (not at all surprising). I took it apart and cleaned it before supper, then some time later started putting it all back together. After I’d put together the entire brush module I realized that I had 6 extra screws from where I’d fitted the gear box back together before I ate and didn’t realize the cover wasn’t fastened down when I got back to it. It’s all back together now and seems to be in working order, but the vacuum sometimes cuts out, so I’ll probably clean the contacts on that sometime soon.

Since I didn’t want the roomba trying to eat the things that were left on the floor while my family was here it was deactivated pretty much the entire week. That meant that kitty litter got tracked into the kitchen and wasn’t cleaned up automatically, and my mom couldn’t stand that. She got Talore a fluffly bath mat to go in front of the litter box. The first time Talore stepped on it she decided she didn’t want to walk across it and just jumped (scattering litter a bit farther than usual) but now she seems used to it and it’s doing quite a good job of catching litter (meaning it has plenty of litter on it, not that it’s 100% successful in stopping it from getting tracked into the kitchen). The problem right now is that it’s too thick for the roomba to roll over really easily, and it’s not heavy/stiff enough to prevent the roomba from just smashing it against the litter boxes. Putting the roomba in the middle of it works, but I’ll probably try taping the corners down or something.