Thanks, Helen!

Indulge me while I have another Well, gooooooollllleeeeee! moment.

 I'm still in amazement that I can be here lounging on the sofa while my little Roomba vacuum cleaner is zipping around sucking up all the debris on the kitchen/family room floors.

Our son bought us our first Roomba several years ago, and we actually wore the poor little guy out. We ordered up our replacement Roomba a month ago. It doesn't clean perfectly - has a hard time getting into tight corners, and the dust bin needs to be cleaned more frequently than I would have guessed, but boy howdy! I love that thing.

I find myself perspiring and tiring out simply by tidying up in preparation to turn Roomba on. But I know that I'd be much more energy depleted if after tidying, I would still need to muscle my old vacuum cleaner around.

Initially, I assumed that the mechanics of my Roomba were similar to those of a simple bump-and-go toy car. Boy, was I wrong. You can read more about these complex little discs here. What I also didn't know before we were introduced to the Roomba culture, was that people become strangely attached to these little critters. They name them. They dress them up. They train their pets to sit on them as they rumble around on their duties. The iRobot company even encourages owners to hack into the software driving the Roomba to add additional behaviors. Who knew? I guess we're uncreative since our Roomba's programming remains intact and we just call it "Roomba".

The Roomba is a product of iRobot, a consumer robotics company, whose president and co-founder is my hero, Helen Greiner.