Day One of my extended holiday vacation: I woke up with Pink Eye. Lovely. The night before, my contact lens had been bothering me, so I took it out. I woke, rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, and… Spurk! I got a knuckle full of eye goo.

“Uh oh,” I mumbled. “Please, no no no. Not Pink Eye. Not on the hardest day of the year to get in to see a doctor.” My cynical mind knew I’d get cockblocked trying to get an appointment and I’d be stuck with a contagious conjunctivitis through Christmas Eve and Christmas.

As I stumbled to the mirror, I passed a window awash in blinding sunshine. There was no doubt. That stabbing pain-in-the-brain put aside any hope that I scratched my cornea or tripped on an allergy. Sigh.

I lucked out. I called the doctor at 8 am on the 23^rd. I got the 9 am appointment of someone who had just canceled. In. Out. Prescription. Good news! If you or your kids ever had Pink Eye, you know it’s a quick fix. Two cycles of medicated eye drops and it’s gone.

Yeaaaah.

They didn’t have the eye drops at my Walgreens. Or any other Walgreens in the city. Or CVS. I had to wait until late on Christmas Eve before my cure arrived on the midday stagecoach from Dodge City.

Minecraft: I joked that I was going to spend all of my vacation on the couch in my underwear, learning and playing Minecraft. Eerie how prophetic that turned out to be. Eerie and sad.

Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em: My son’s Christmas gift to me was a little O’Cedar hardwood dusting robot.

It was pretty cool. Much to my surprise, the dog was curious, but didn’t attack it or try to play with it. This particular robot doesn’t have a lot of high tech mapping in it. It just goes until it hits something and then goes somewhere else. It did a passable job. Any dog hair or lint it encountered was picked up on the Swifter thingy.

My Beautiful Wife and I have been toying with buying a Roomba ever since she brought home the dog. The tumbleweeds of dog hair blowing across the hardwoods are disgusting. We vacuum and a day later the tumbleweeds are back. It’s never-ending. The problem with the Roomba is that it’s SO FRICKIN’ EXPENSIVE. They aren’t getting any cheaper either. Roomba keeps introducing newer, better, smarter, and more expensive models. The Roomba 880 is retailing at $700.  We could buy a new stove or a new washing machine for $700. Too much money for a product that I was skeptical would even work, much less be able to keep up with the dog exfoliating like an autumn tree. And for a house our size, we’d actually probably need two Roombas. (Roombas only clean three rooms. Tops.) $1400?  Eff that! We could buy maid service for that kind of coin.

There are some knock off brands of vacuum robots. Neato robots were always a little behind the Roomba curve. About the time that Neato would catch up technologically, Roomba would release a better (more expensive) robot.

But the very latest Neato, the Botvac 85 was reviewed even better than the Roomba 880 and it was $200 cheaper. I took a deep, skeptical breath, and made the investment plunge.  We bought the Botvac 85.

And it is A. Fricking. Mazing. It cleans the entire floor plan of our big, four bedroom ranch home. If a door is open, Rosie goes in and vacuums the room. If she gets tired, she trundles back to her charging stand and rests for a while. When she’s full-up, she drives right back to where she left off and picks back up. The mapping logic Rosie uses is amazing. The Roomba pinballs all around a room until it has covered it in its entirety. The Neato is much more systematic. She maps the edges of the room, finds the doorways, and then systematically mows a back-and-forth pattern until one room is done. Then she moves to the next room. There’s no doubt she’s getting everything. She buzzes under the couches and tables we rarely move to vacuum. She won’t fall down the steps. I was so skeptical, but that damn Neato Botvac 85 is incredible!  We kind of assumed that after three or four days of her finishing her rounds with her dust bin jam packed with crud, she’d get caught up with the inherent detritus and end the day with a half full bin. Nope. Two weeks and still full bins. I’m not sure if that speaks to the dog, the vacuum, or the general cleanliness of our home.

It wasn’t the Japanese Sex Robot I wanted for Christmas, but I love my Vacuumin’ Rosie.

I repurposed the O’Cedar robot my son gave us (Coquette) to the basement. I put it down in my workshop where there is a permanent haze of dust and sawdust on the floor.  Perfect. That little dumb robot vacuum is perfect for cleaning the gunky linoleum and concrete in the basement. I’m a happy man. The basement floor has never been so clean.

There were a million other things I made a note to blog about, but my work email is still backed up in the triple digits. I should make a dent in my To Do list.

I hope all of you had a super Merry Christmas and/or Chanukah. But let’s not do it again for a while, okay?