FreeCycle

I've been using FreeCycle a lot recently after finally sorting out my Yahoo groups membership. Yahoo are finally allowing me to use email addresses other than my Yahoo account. And it's only taken about 6 months for them to fix the bug. Anyway I joined FreeCycle to see what the fuss is about, and I have to say it is brilliant. We've found new homes for loads of stuff we didn't want in the flat anymore, but that was too good to just bin.

Our hoover went kaput a few weeks back and, at the back of my mind, I was thinking "you never know, a hoover might come up on FreeCycle". And I didn't want anything fancy anyway, just something that would get the job done as the flat was a complete disgrace. And sure enough one appeared after only a couple of days on the site. I responded and we had a new hoover the same day, and it's not a bad little hoover either.

However it was somewhat redundant as I also snaffled a colleagues old Roomba Discovery he no longer wanted. It needed a new battery but was otherwise in good nick, so I paid the extortionate price for a new pack (how the hell do they justify £50 for a battery?!) and the new battery pack arrived the same day we got the new hoover. And guess which I wanted to use first?

And I've been truly amazed by the Roomba, it really does work well. It doesn't get into the corners with its brushes, but it can flick bigger pieces of dirt out of edges and corners with its side brushes. This means you'll still need to hoover the corners and edges with a cylinder hoover, but only once every blue moon. The Roomba basically does a daily hoovering so you don't have to: It's not efficient, but it is good enough for a daily run.

I was also surprised to see it picks up certain types of crud off the carpet better than our old cylinder hoover did. Cylinder vacuums are hopeless when it comes to shifting hair off the carpet: The Roomba's twin brushes really do lift hair well.

Went swimming again tonight, but I've no idea how many lengths I did as the pool was rammed and I had to keep swimming around people. I can never keep track of my lengths when I have to swim around people. :-/