Category: Miscellaneous

Since I’ll be in Japan again soonish, it’s probably about time to open this:

Yes indeed, it’s a Rilakkuma ‘Roomba’, which is to say a ‘robotic’ floor cleaner. I won this after only a couple of attempts in a UFO catcher in Japan last year and since then went back and forth about whether to keep it or gift it! As a result it remained sealed all this time.

So what’s inside?

It’s a jolly looking device, simple and plastic but reasonably well built. As you can see there’s no vacuum device (unsurprising for something that ‘cost’ me about $2!) and instead the bottom is covered in Velcro.

It came with a stack of these static cleaning pads, obviously to attract and hold dust as it moves along the floor. Yoss – who has been known to eat dryer sheets – was quite interested!

A quick glance at the instructions…

And I finished assembly…

And put it to work:

As you can see it’s slow. But it works, and doesn’t get stuck, and even senses obstacles! While our floors aren’t particularly dirty, it probably can also be said to do a decent job picking up dust:

So… I give it thumbs up! For $2 it’s the best robot I’ve ever bought, and while it will now live in my attic never again to be seen by human eyes, I think it was a prize worth winning 🙂

For a couple of years now people have been using social media to showcase original artwork during the month of October. It started as ink drawings, but people now use various methods to create and share the art under the hashtag #inktober.

For some reason, I decided to do it myself this year on twitter.

For the last 31 days, every day, I tweeted a drawing I’d made that day on my phone using the app ‘Sketches’. There was no real theme and little forethought put into the pictures, I just made them up as I went along!

My talent – or lack thereof – often got in the way, and rarely did the final picture match the one in my mind.

Furthermore the app itself was maddeningly frustrating to use because the terrible UI overlaps the canvas. Thank god for the liberal undo function, else many of these would have been utterly ruined.

Often the influence was the news of the day, such as one of the members of Babymetal leaving, or reading an article about Kit Kat candies (guess which one that influenced?), or illustrating the protagonist of a story Adam wrote on his blog.

Looking back this made the month seem longer! I can remember the days looking at the pictures, such as KLS’s birthday, Yossie being sick and going to the vet or me myself struggling with a respiratory illness for almost two weeks. Even in the midst of this I did one every day.

Many of you encouraged me, either directly or via your likes on twitter. When I started it was a lark and I didn’t think I’d actually finish. Not that it’s a great life achievement or anything, but I’m glad I did.

There are 31 drawings in total, and I asked many of you your favorites to illustrate this post. Funnily there was very little consensus and all sorts of images were liked by different people. I posted the images that at least two people listed.

You can see them all on my twitter if you’re interested. And no, I’m not going to do ‘Inkvember’ or anything (two of you have asked)! Maybe next year I’ll revisit this, but for now I’ll limit my art to cards and postcards 🙂

That’s KLS with her avocado breakfast sandwich and enormous latte. The ‘mug’ had no handle and was drunk like a soup. She said it was very good!

So many kumas!

Yesterday it rained in the city and we went to an attraction called Gullivers Gate which showcased insanely detailed miniature dioramas. The faq claimed the display was HO scale (~1:87) but we question that since the figures were only about 10-15 mm tall. It was a tad pricey (its NYC!) but we loved it. To give you an idea, the boat about is <10 cm in length! (And that’s not real water!)

Did I mention we shopped? We did. A lot! So much so we had to buy two large shopping bags just to get everything back home 🙂

And speaking of home – where we are now – we once again booked a cabin on the train. As usual it included a meal but to our horror the full kitchen that once served cooked steak or salmon is now replaced with boxed food similar to airplane meals!! Cost-cutting I suppose, but the cabin was still cozy and the return trip relaxing.