Yeah, whatever did happen to my personal robot?

The idea for this post has been shamelessly stolen from the BBC.  I'm sure Tomorrow's World was predicting we'd all have our own personal house robot slaves by now.

Personally I can't imagine a robot like this being developed for the domestic market. It'd just cost way too much money for something that's probably cheaper to employ a human to do anyway. If we do ever get useful human robots I can't see it coming out of anything other than military research or from the development of a Japanese sex robot. 

A friend of mine (yes, I know you won't believe it's not me) wants a Cameron (from Sarah Connor Chronicles). I'm not sure for which purpose he wants it. Probably to do the hoovering.

I should probably get a robot to do my blog posting for me.

It doesn't seem very lazy but...

Having read this article about homebrewing I'm thinking that it could be about time I actually did it. It's something I've thought about doing for ages, ever since we were at school and one of our friends made a load in his loft. It ranged from a very pleasant light ale to the virtually undrinkable but lethally strong concoction, and that was just from the same barrel at different times. 

The article makes it sound spectacularly easy, and actually pretty cheap to get started. 

Plus the home brew shop he mentions is only about half an hour down the road. Hmm... 

Cheap beer with virtually no effort? What could possibly go wrong?

OMG Nerds!

My girlfriend just scheduled for us to go out for dinner by putting it in our Google Calendar. Of course, she talked to me about it before, I'm sure, and I remember very clearly that we'd arranged this so it's not a surprise. Definitely not. Very clear recollections I have. So it's fine she didn't say where we were going or anything in the calendar entry. Erm.

On the other hand according to the settings for the event I am allowed to invite others! Woo!

Productive Laziness - by Lurker (our first submission!)

About two years ago I cut down and dug out the roots of a row of bushes that lined the street in front of our house. They were about 12 to 15 feet tall, so it was quite a job. I managed to get rid of the branches, trunks and roots by cutting them into roughly four foot lengths and putting them into garbage cans. The garbage guys come twice a week, and I could generally get rid of two or three cans with every pickup. It worked quite nicely up until the very last root section, which was huge. The garbage guys wouldn't take it because it was too heavy, so I decided to leave it in my yard next to the street until I could figure out what to do with it.

Like I said, that was two years ago and it sat there until yesterday. It seems I was being lazy about getting out of the house and going to work, so I hadn't taken the garbage out when my wife heard the garbage truck coming up the street. As I was conveniently in the shower, she took the cans out just as the truck pulled up. The guy waits for her to get the cans to the street, and once she gets there he asks "Lady, what are you gonna do with that stump?" She replies, "I don't know. I've been waiting for my husband to get rid of it." He says "I'm sick of looking at it" and lugs it into the garbage truck.

Problem solved, once again proving the highly productive benefits of laziness. Also note how laziness managed to get the garbage cans to the street that day as well.

A Cunning Plan

Apparently the house needs cleaning. I know this because it's been mentioned a couple of times at home, and even online. I think it's fine, but I am not the person designated with updating the official house cleanliness status*.

Anyway, I've got a cunning plan. My girlfriend has wanted a Wii for ages, so if we buy a Wii this week we're bound to spend the whole weekend playing that, and none of the weekend doing cleaning. It's brilliant! No downsides at all that I can think of.

*The house is kept to a very high standard of cleanliness, apparently when I say the house needs cleaning and talk about my ways to get out of it on here it makes it sound like we live in a cess pit and I get in trouble. But me getting into trouble is what the readers demand!

New Deal for Washing Up

So, the new house has no dishwasher and my laziness when it comes to washing dishes is a well acknowledged fact between myself and my girlfriend. In order to prevent her getting so annoyed with having to do all the washing up that she actually explodes I susggested we should work out an arrangement in advance. Otherwise I'd just weedle out of doing the washing up all the time.

A short debate later we decided that she hates drying up, but doesn't mind washing, I'm the other way round so every night after dinner we'd do all the washing up and she'd wash up and I'd dry. Fine. We're just about a week into the new house, new deal and it's apparent that this system is even more brilliant than I could have anticpated. The first thing I hadn't thought of is that I only need to dry stuff that won't fit in the drying rack. Once we get the washing up down to a level where the rest will fit in, I can stop, it gets better though. I've also discovered that on quite a lot of days, there's not even enough stuff that needs washing to fill the drying rack. So I don't have to do anything! The down side is that I suspect that the division of labour is so unfair that the New Deal will come under review fairly shortly. Probably as soon as she reads this blog. D'oh!

Actually, considering all the non dishwasher safe stuff we have and the general crapness of our old dishwasher we're not missing it at all and we're saving the world by using less energy. On the downside, even if we had one we could no longer theoretically poach a large whole salmon in a dishwasher, anyone got a large fish kettle?

10 things I learnt moving house...

1. If Britain's about to have the biggest rain storms and most extensive flooding for 50 years, move at least the day before.

2. If you are moving a very short distance and choose to do a deal where you pay your removal people by the half hour, it could well end up being much cheaper (1/3 the cost of our best fixed price quote in our case) but you'll end up helping them move boxes etc. to speed things up and save money. If you are an overweight desk jockey, this could be v. tiring. Especially if the day before Britain's biggest rain storms and flooding for 50 years is a really hot sticky day.

3. Packing is really hard work. Do a little bit each day in advance (but don't tell my girlfriend she was right about that). Even though we'd done quite a lot before we had our packing day it took us a solid day of hard labour. On the plus side apparently you can pay people to pack your stuff for you.

4. Be organised.

5. Have a little bag to take with you with easy to eat food and drink for when you get hungry.

6. Have some kind of chairs (eg. comfy camping chairs) handy to sit on to eat the above / have a rest.

7. If you are going to pack the tea/coffee and kettle in a very sensibly labeled box so that you can easily make a nice cup of tea when you get to your new house, it'd really help if you put some mugs or cups in the box, it seems my girlfriend forgot that they are an essential part of hot beverage making.

8. Keep all the packing materials and tape unpacked until the end in case boxes start falling apart. "Oh, the rest of it is in one of those boxes on the truck" is not a useful thing to hear when a box starts collapsing.

9. Keep all your tools, alan keys etc. handy. This was invaluable when we had to disassemble stuff at the last minute to fit it in the truck.

10. When you own your own house you instantly gain a never ending list of DIY projects.

Conclusion:

The only lazy solution to moving house really is never to do it, ever.

Dishwashers

A dishwasher should be a wonderful tool, a magical time saving gadget that you put your dirty dishes in and, a time later, they emerge, clean and shining brightly. Gleaming like they do in the adverts for dishwasher tablets. It should be one of the greatest inventions ever to appear in our kitchens. It should be improving dozens of relationships around the world as arguments about who has to do the dishes are removed from your life.

Alas, it is not so. A gadget with such magical promise is compromised almost beyond all usefulness.

The first major lie is that you don't have to wash up by hand any more. This is the biggest lie of all! We have a dishwasher, but after almost every meal we have to wash stuff by hand. Ironically the biggest culprit here is non-stick pans. Another invention that's supposed to be a boon to the lazy but even on the rare occasions when non-stick pans say they are dishwasher safe you find that they get discoloured and damaged in dishwashers. You can't put wooden stuff in, the dishwasher will blast the logos off mugs and glasses, it'll damage any valuable china you might have. In all probably about half the stuff you regularly use can't be put in the dishwasher!

Still, you can simply put the remaining half of your dirty dishes in the dishwasher and they just come out clean, right? Oh, how wonderful that would be! No, in reality you have to piss around for ages trying to fit your perfectly normally shaped dishes into it. Have dishwasher manufacturers never seen a bowl? Maybe I am a bit of a freak because I regularly use them. I guess I should explain in case Mr Hotpoint is reading. A bowl is like a plate, but it has a deeper impression in the middle which stops liquids from slopping over the edge. I find that they are good for eating soup or breakfast cereal out of. Sometimes I even use them to keep things in in the fridge. I can't easily put them in the dishwasher though. There's no suitable space. How dare I have something wider than a plate that I want to fit in there. Don't even think about trying to put something plastic and lightweight in there. It'll get blasted around the dishwasher and block your nozzles within seconds. Even if you don't have anything inconvenientlty shaped you still can't fit your stuff in unless you have a number of cups and plates (no bowls) that corresponds exactly to what the dishwasher manufacturer designed the dishwasher for. You've had a few people round for drinks and only have 2 dirty plates but 40 dirty glasses to wash? Unlucky.

Once you've finally managed to fight your stuff into the dishwasher, having scraped it so much you could practically have washed it yourself already, you find that it doesn't even clean it. The fact that you've freakishly used a bowl to eat your breakfast out of and wanted to wash a chopping board means you've blocked one of the nozzles somewhere and half your mugs are still dirty.

And after all that, you still have do unload the damn thing, and if you can't be bothered, you get the dirty washing stacked up until someone can be bothered. It's not just dishwashers that suffer from this kind of problem. You look at these newfangled robots that hoover your floor and mow your lawn and you find they have similar flaws. Sure, they can mow your lawn, as long as it's perfectly flat and the grass isn't too long. They can hoover your house, but they can't go up and down stairs and they can't lift the sofa up to hoover under there (not that I'd do that either).

Despite all this, I still can't believe that the people who used own the house I'm buying put in a kitchen a couple of years ago and didn't put in a dishwasher! The fools! Didn't they think about all the extra washing up my girlfriend is going to have to do?