My Grandma’s birthday is coming up, and, apparently like all Grandmas, mine’s notoriously hard to purchase buy a gift for. But I saw an ad for something called a Scooba: it’s a robot that washes your floors. Hmmmmm…. a bit pricey. But it’s older brother*, the Roomba, has been out for a while, and surely Grandma would even more appreciate a vacuuming robot. [Sorry, Grandma, still out of my price range.]

Like lots of consumers, I did my price-checking on Amazon. A search for ‘iRobot’ included these gems: Roor the Tiger, and Mooba the Cow. They’re costumes for your Roomba, both put out by a company called myRoombud. There’re also frog, pig, zebra, and leopard costumes available.

From the features description of Mooba:

If you own a Roomba, you know what I am talking about. Have you ever:
1) named your Roomba? 2) talked to your Roomba?
3) spent more time watching your Roomba than it would take you to vacuum the room(ba)?
4) bought a second Roomba so your first would not be lonely?
If you answered yes to any of the above, you are a prime candidate for an original RoomBud Roomba costume!

If you answered yes to any of the above, you’re a prime candidate for your own room with padded walls. Note that your Roomba will successfully navigate said room, and keep you company while keeping your floors clean.

I’m in that geographical range that the Weather Channel has been warning about a nor’easter for. We woke up this morning to what looks to be 6-9 inches of snow. The weatherman says our area got, on average, a foot. Doesn’t look quite that tall to me, but haven’t been out as yet.

Lest you tag me as lazy, the reason I haven’t been out is I’ve been dealing with a system issue for my client, interacting with the network admin team down in Texas, testing the deployed patch, and then waiting around for the go-ahead to deploy into Production. Now I have the go-ahead, and am waiting for the admin team to call back so that we can actually get this done. Grrrrrrr…. up since 6:30 am (and I’m not an early bird) and still not done with dealing it at 12:30. And still don’t have my walk shoveled.