Category: Talore

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.

“Letting the cat out of the bag”

I have a new appreciation for that phrase since the cat really doesn’t want to be in the bag.

Talore was playing with a plastic grocery bag on the floor yesterday and was half-way inside it, so I attempted to scoop her into it and pick it up by the handles. Considering she’d been clawing at it the bag wasn’t in perfect condition, but as I pushed her into it she clawed her way straight out the other side without even slowing down. I managed to drop a bag over her today (just seeing if I could get it around her, not trying to pick her up) and she got out through one of the handles and took off with the handle still caught around her middle.

That’s Talore lying in the middle of a sheet of tissue paper that she was attacking. When I first noticed her lying there she was curled up at least partially asleep in the middle of it, but when I started to take the picture she noticed I was paying attention to her and rolled over so I could rub her belly.

There’s Talore in my chair. She doesn’t often lie down in my chair, and almost never when I’ve been sitting in it recently, but yesterday she took my spot while I was taking a load of clothes out of the dryer. I was kind of surprised she wasn’t trying to sneak past me into my closet while I was folding clothes.

Revived toy?

How to make a long-dead cat toy interesting again:

Let it get run over by the roomba, then spend 5+ minutes untwisting the string with the end of the string hanging down. The picture was taken after it was unwound and had been reclaimed from Talore.

I thought I’d put it out of reach of the roomba, but not quite. It was under a box which was placed such that I didn’t think it would be moved, and I had part of it under the scratching post base as an anchor anyways (I was trying to get Talore to pull on it and fight the elastic – didn’t work).

The box got moved and the side sweeper brush on the roomba caught the cord, then proceeded to wind it up. It then got dragged around the room (there are little tufts of fur in random places) till the roomba finally decided it was stuck and stopped. I nearly had to take that brush off to unwind it, but it was flexible enough I could bend the brushes to get the cord off. The fur covering for the toy was all bunched up in a tuft around its nose, but it didn’t come all the way off.

Talore watched and attacked the string while I was untangling it, then was quite happy to chase and pounce on the toy after I’d finished. She continued the work of the roomba in nearly pulling the fur loose, but eventually got distracted by the tissue paper she was walking around on (I usually put it back on the floor when the roomba is finished).