Roomba's commentary on my life?

I have bought a pet.

My kind of pet.

An iRobot Roomba 691 vacuum.

Boy, do you ever have to be careful when you shop at Canadian Tire.  Caveat emptor with a real vengeance.

They advertised the Roomba vacuum cleaner for a Black Friday sale.  Half price.  Great deal, right?  After I bought it, I found out that not only does iRobot not support them any more, but that a later, more advanced, model sells, at regular price, cheaper than what Canadian Tire charged me for the 691!

I have charged the Roomba, rather longer than they suggest, and finally started it up.  (I also went looking for the owner's guide that they promised, only to find that this particular model seems to have been discontinued, and I haven't been able to find anything like an owner's guide on the Roomba site.)  Anyway, almost the first thing that it did, when it started up, after having bumped back and forth, side to side, never getting out of the space that I had put it in, and refusing to go out the open side directly in front of it, for some time, was to bump into the leg of a coffee table.

(Roombas are not the sharpest pencils in the robot appliance box.  It is painful to watch them do their first exploration of a room, with a heavy emphasis on "random walk.")

Have I mentioned that I've put up the Christmas decorations?  Christmas was always a disappointment for me, so, in my adult life, I never did anything about it.  But Gloria did.  Christmas decorations were very important for Gloria.  As she got more of them, she started to specialize.  Priorities were creches, angels, and carolers.  She had different carolers, mostly in pairs.  One particular pair were brown terracotta, a male and female caroler set.

I have, this year, got out a small, representative sample of the Christmas decorations.  As much a memorial to Gloria as anything else.

This particular set was on the coffee table.

Well, when the Roomba bumped into one of the table legs, the woman caroler wobbled, fell over, fell onto the floor, and broke. Leaving the male caroler alone on the coffee table ...

(I have moved the male caroler to one of the China cabinets.)