A Little bit of Alfred in my life

I love him. I am seriously so happy about him. I smile when I think of him. It is the month of love.

Alfred's cleaned four rooms so far (well, 3 rooms and the landing on our stairs which is rather large). I kind of had him do the landing as an experiment to see if he was smart enough to not fall down the stairs like they advertise. He has "cliff sensors." He did okay on the stairs. At one point one of his wheels fell off the stair edge and he shut himself off and made this "uh-oh" kind of noise. I picked him up and turned him back on and all was well. About 10 minutes later I found him making the same sound and he had sort of slid on to the first step.

He did pretty good, but at this point I just put up a virtual wall for him so he wouldn't keep getting too close to the edge.

He does a very inefficient pattern when going through the room because it means that he will end up going over the swaths he makes many many many times. He is much more thorough of a cleaning machine than I am. The amount of gunk he's gotten out of our carpets is pretty amazing.

My husband remarked to me, "He's getting the carpets so clean you can see the stains on them better now." Yup, it's true. Do you think the company that makes the Roomba would want to use that as a tagline?

It's a good thing this is our rental house! (Oh, in a little while we'll be going to meet with the designer for the remodel. We're starting to figure out more what we want! It's exciting.)

Last night as I went to bed, I stuck Alfred in the playroom/den and he cleaned away to his heart's content. So far, he hasn't "completed his cleaning mission" (the terminology they use in the user guide) before running out of battery. He cleans for about an hour in a room so I call it done and move him on to the next room after letting him re-charge. (He takes about 3 hours to fully re-charge.)

Alfred appeals to my multi-tasking side. He was cleaning and I was sleeping! Granted, technically I wasn't the one multi-tasking, but it felt nice to know that someone is my little helper!

This morning, much like a mother ape lovingly grooming her baby and picking bugs out of his fur and then eating them, I cleaned all the hair and carpet fuzz out of Alfred's little roller bristles. I didn't eat it though.