Playing with toys of all kinds

You readers sure are fickle... 21 page views yesterday. Jeez, just because I don't write every day, you wander away and read something else.

I have tons of stuff to do on my house... rugs to be sent out to clean, floors to do, priming and painting in the bedroom, stuff to be put up in the attic or down in the basement, furniture to vacuum, cats to be lectured. Suzanne is coming down to visit next weekend, and it'd be nice if she wasn't completely appalled by the place. The cats have actually been pretty good lately, though because it's spring, the great tumbleweeds of cat-hair will soon be rolling down the hallway as they shed the winter under-fur.

What I need is a small robotic Shop-Vac. My Roomba, which Melody gave me for my birthday a couple of years ago, just gets overwhelmed. One big clump of Anya-fur can clog it fatally. It sits there and boops at me, flashing a red light.

I did get very curious about this cordless Westinghouse vacuum. I saw one sitting around work unattended the other day, and was curious about it. It's a little loud, and comparatively expensive, but since outlets in my house are at something of a premium (there's one outlet in the living room that all told has 11 things plugged into it) I prefer not to have to plug the vacuum in to use it, and this one is bagless, a recent sticking point with me about my Panasonic. The vacuum I use most often actually used to be Nancy's, but she for some reason left it behind... one of the few really useful items she left. There's another vacuum out in the garage that I actually found on the shoulder of the road, perfectly usable. I can't remember if it's bagless.

I find all sorts of odd things along the road sometimes.

Suzanne and I have settled into a routine of Skyping each other in the morning. The sound quality is excellent, and it's a no-hands conversation tool, in that the MacBook Pro is right next to my pillow, and after I answer, it's just like talking to her. It's as if she's right next to me, though without the nice aspect of physical contact.

It also helps to roust my ass out of bed, which hasn't become much easier lately. Still feeling intermittently tired and wired, which is quite off-putting.

One other mention of a neat piece of technology: it's called iFill. It's from Griffin, the people who make various iPod gagdets, and basically, its job is to record songs off of streaming internet radio sites directly to your iPod without taking up space on your hard disk or involving iTunes. You point it at a station, tell it to record, and come back in a few hours, and the thing will have recorded everything it heard on the stream into discrete MP3 files in a special playlist. Unplug and walk away. The neat thing is, if you have suitable bandwidth, you can ask it to record multiple streams at once, so in theory, in an hour you could record four or five hours' worth of music from various internet radio streams. Neat idea, it's dirt cheap ($20) and you can get a week-long free trial by downloading the software, which is both Mac and Windows.

In some ways, I think the fact that Suzanne is at a distance makes it easier to get to know her. If she were around every day right now, I think it'd be way too easy to let small things about each other balloon into things we suddenly can't stand at all. In reality, everyone has little things about them that are strange or a little annoying, but when you only get to spend a day or two per week with them those get put where they belong, the back burner, in favor of more important issues. There's a certain strength in that.