Little Lost Robot

Okay, my new robot vacuum isn’t lost, exactly, but it’s the closest Asimov story title I could find. After a few vacuuming runs, I find myself inclined to name the robot “Wrongway,” since it can’t seem to get the hang of navigating my apartment’s layout and keeps trying to revisit areas it’s already vacuumed while neglecting others. There are also places I can’t leave it to navigate unsupervised, like under my computer desk, since the area rug under my chair keeps curling up and preventing it from climbing onto it. It doesn’t seem to have any memory of its course, just keeps moving at random and changing direction when it bumps into things — although it does seem to have enough spatial awareness of a room to switch after a while to edge-cleaning mode.

So I doubt I’ll be able to get any use out of the scheduling function in the app, setting it up to run on its own without supervision. There are points where I have to take manual control, or at least put a foot in front of it to stop it and make it turn. Trying both the remote and the app, I find that the latter allows much finer manual control for rotating the vacuum, but you have to hold the forward and reverse arrows down to keep it moving, whereas with the remote it continues moving until you press pause. I also get the impression that manual mode drains the vacuum’s battery considerably faster.

I keep finding small tufts of fluff and debris and tiny shards of broken glass on the carpet after vacuumings. I think that means the robot is powerful enough to drag up things that my old vacuum missed and that got pushed down into the pile over the years, but not quite powerful enough to suck them in, because the carpet fibers still have a grip on them, and because it’s only got so much space in its receptacle. I guess I just need to keep picking them up manually, and keep vacuuming often enough to gradually work through it all. Incidentally, this morning, while picking up some leftover fluff around the feet of one of my media shelves, I found a decades-old 3×5 notepad that had somehow ended up under it. How the heck did that happen?

It turns out that I did need to move my wi-fi router after all; it was okay when the vacuum bumped into its front, but not so much when it pushed against the side. Fortunately, I was able to move a bookend to create just enough empty space on the bottom shelf of the bookcase behind the router that I could move it up there. I’m concerned it may have slightly less ventilation there, but I left as much space around it as I could.

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In other news, my shoes were falling apart, so I bought a new pair. Oddly, the new shoes, which were the smallest size available of their design, seem looser than the previous pair, even though their soles are exactly the same size and shape. On my walk yesterday, my little toes got badly chafed from the shoes sliding around so much. I tried tightening the laces as much as I could, which helped some, but I guess I just have to hope they and my feet adjust to each other over time.

It’s weird — these shoes are loose on my feet at size 8, but some of my old shoeboxes I still have in the closet tell me that I used to wear size 9 or 9 1/2. Have the sizes been redefined, or am I shrinking?