I have a new friend, and his name is Roomba.

He is the only person in this household who really seems to care as much as I do about keeping the house clean, and for this reason I love him.

When I notice cheerios and dog hair all over the kitchen floor, I just shove furniture out of his way, set him down, and press a button. He beeps a chipper, "I'm here to serve" tune, then sets off on his mission. When he is done, he sings a happy song and then turns himself off.

We've had him five days now, and I have used him nearly every day. Yesterday I used him in three different rooms--and in the kitchen twice. I have found that the best way to let him work is to shut him in the room in question and then leave. If I stay in the room and try to do other things while he's vacuuming, I cannot get anything done.

You see, watching the Roomba go is both completely fascinating and completely frustrating. It runs automatically, and according to the company literature it uses sensors to intelligently navigate the room and clean the whole floor. Perhaps its intelligence is just completely beyond my grasp, because watching it go around the room is almost painful.

Eric said, "It's like watching a poor retarded dog." And it is. The Roomba seems to have no clue where it's going, no discernible pattern, and just fumbles around until it bumps into something, then turns itself around and bumbles off in a straight line until it bumps into something else. If I stand there and watch it, I'll inevitably notice a specific piece of dirt that it keeps missing in its inept manueverings, until all I can see in the whole room is that piece of dirt, and the Roomba just blindly, blithely going around and around it. Beth even does it. "Look, look right there!" she shouted at it this morning, pointing at the one little Cheerio on the floor it hadn't scooped up yet. The Roomba did not listen to her, which annoyed her greatly.

But if I just walk away and let it do its thing, most of the time it does actually manage to get that errant piece of dirt in the end.

That's the other thing about it: it takes a long time. I could certainly vacuum faster than Roomba does. Except that my vacuum, the one I was so excited about when we first got it, doesn't work very well on bare floors. Our new house is 95 percent bare floors, which means I have to sweep with the old broom and dustpan and that's kind of a pain and I still never get all the dirt. Plus, with Roomba, I can go do other things while he does the floors. He takes his sweet time about it, but he gets them done while I focus on other tasks.

I had never even considered getting a robot vacuum until I saw Heather's post about hers. And as my frustration with my filthy floors kept growing and growing, I looked into it and found that the Roomba really isn't much more expensive than a regular vacuum. We got the standard Roomba Red, and it does a great job of picking up both Cheerios and dog hair--the two banes of my existence. I really feel like I've already noticed an improvement in the general level of cleanliness in our house.

He doesn't get back behind the furniture or in small spaces, and when he gets tired he has to recharge for several hours before I can use him again. And his supposedly intelligent pattern really does miss things sometimes. But he gets the majority of it and for the most part, (so far) I'm very pleased.

Welcome to the family, Roomba.