Go Go Gadget!

My sons both loved the annoyingly incompetent Inspector Gadget and his even more irritating, but practical and useful niece Penny; for a while Go Go Gadget was a bit of a catchphrase in the household vocabulary, but those days of having to listen to cartoon inanities (and Inspector Gadget was far from being the worst offender -Thundercats anyone?) are thankfully now long behind me. 

I did fall to wondering recently if someone had been reciting this mantra in the kitchen as two of our appliances seemed to have taken the sentence literally and given up the ghost. The kettle wasn't such a big deal; we have always been heavy on kettles and they're easily replaced. Although on this occasion, the OH, being left to his own devices on this matter while I was at a committee meeting bought 'the red one', neglecting to notice, in his excitement over the colour, that the water gauge is cunningly hidden behind the handle and is therefore about as useless as a paper parasol in a thunderstorm. Since he is incapable of saying 'oops I goofed there' he has spent much time since then assuring me there is no need to see the gauge as you can judge the fullness of the kettle by weight. 

Rather more inconvenient was the death of the dishwasher. I know there are only two of us and I know we don't 'need' a dishwasher (although that is debatable especially around the concept of need) but I have deep dark reasons for finding the dishwasher my favourite household appliance, and although there is no need here to share painful childhood vagaries, believe me there are few things I'd rather do without than the dishwasher. Possibly only the fridge comes higher in my list of things you should have in  a kitchen. (For related reasons I wish someone would invent the self cleaning bathroom, but there you go , still waiting for that one ....) We tried to arrange a repair for the dishwasher because of the environment and ethics and it's just too easy to dump stuff, but a non-guaranteed repair was going to cost only £50 less than a new machine. Given the non-guaranteed nature of the repair ('well it's a blown motherboard, we can fit you a new one, but we don't know that what caused the old one to blow won't do the same thing to the new one'), and the fact that a new machine is likely to be more environmentally friendly than the old one, we opted for a new one and I stopped feeling guilty after about two days. It has not yet arrived so I am doing penance for not being as friendly to the earth as I should be by hand washing dishes. I do not do this with enthusiasm, or good grace, but with a rather pettish resignation and all in all the sooner the new machine arrives the happier I shall be. 

On a more upbeat note, gadget wise, behold,  I give you this! 

Yes that is indeed a robot vacuum cleaner. I have often rather wistfully wished for one of these, but it was in the same league as those central systems that you switch on to suck all the dust out of your house in the twinkling of an eye or ceiling dryers in bathrooms that you stand under after a shower so that you don't have to faff about with towels i.e. desirable but destined to be forever out of reach because really you couldn't justify the expense. However the OH found the above on e-bay recently (no he isn't very busy with work just at present, how did you guess?). It was very very cheap because it was thought to be broken beyond repair and was being sold for parts, but the OH reckoned he knew how to repair it so bought it. I will freely admit that I was doubtful that he could get it working, but oh me of little faith! It took him less than  half an hour and Robbie the Robot now switches himself on, trundles round  the house cleaning the floors and carpets and then takes himself back to his little nest and plugs himself in to recharge. Magic. 

This is not to say that here haven't been teething pproblems with timing ( do you know how disconcerting it is to be woken at 6.30 by a machine suddenly deciding to vacuum your bedroom floor? if not, the answer is, very. Also, no human would vacuum a long narrow hall widthways rather then lengthways, since you then  have to turn round  every 40 seconds. But hey! I'm not doing it which is a plus, he goes under the furniture every time which is a plus, and he doesn't expect brownie points which is a plus. A bit like our cats, while I would never have gone specifically looking for him, I'm awfully glad he's here.