The return home from SxSW can mean only one thing (besides a severe lack of sleep and the need to stop drinking): cat fur everywhere! Mounds of cat fur. Huge cat fur tumbleweeds blowing through the living room like the house has just been the location of some kind of weird feline Gunsmoke reenactment.
I’ve read that catnip use can lead to excessive shedding. If that’s true then it means our cats were nipped-out the whole time we were in Texas.
And of course, it’s finally spring. So all of this cat fur is coinciding with a pollen level that will soon have me sneezing my brains out.
Worst of all, I’m due to write this week’s “That’s What I Like” column. Oh, and now that I look at the kitchen floor I can see that Washu is adapting to her new cat food by dumping it on the floor and batting it around before eating it. It’s some sort of strange calico food-bonding ritual that I was apparently unaware of.
It goes without saying the litter box needs scooping. I know, that was more than you needed to know, but that’s the risk you take when you read Medialoper on a Friday.
Have I mentioned that I’ve been through three time changes in the past week?
In the past I might have just given up and taken a nap (a coping mechanism I’ve learned from the cats – it works surprisingly well). Fortunately, I’ve assembled a small army of robots to deal with all of my problems.
My Roomba is busily scooting around the living room, sucking up cat hair like it’s some kind of robot delicacy. I’ll be setting the Scooba loose on the kitchen shortly. And the LitterMaid self-scooping litter box is just moments away from restoring the box to a perfectly raked bed of clean sand. The fact that Washu has declared war on the robotic rake is another issue entirely.
It’s great to be a technologically empowered man of the oughts. I can clean the house AND blog, and still have time to prepare for my upcoming fantasy baseball draft.
I realize that the field of household robotics is still in its infancy, but I’m already benefiting from the admittedly somewhat primitive technology that’s already available today. Sure, the iRobot products aren’t up to the standard of the Jetson’s Rosie — yet. It’s just a matter of time before we’ll all have robots that unload the dishwasher and clean the bathroom. A self-cleaning refrigerator can’t be that far away. Can it?
Now if only I had a robot that could write this week’s “That’s What I Like”…