Got home yesterday and noticed that the Roomba, which is normally parked on its Home Base charging, was parked… but not charging.

The Home Base has two lights - one light is for “power” (that is, power to the Home Base) and one is “charging” (which lights up when the Roomba is charging itself). The “power” light was flashing and the “charging” light wasn’t on.

Tried docking it a couple of times but Roomba doesn’t recognize the Home Base as a valid source of energy anymore. Tried plugging Roomba in directly, but Roomba’s own charging light sort of flickers rather than staying on strong.

I think there’s something wrong with the power adapter. That’s the only thing I can think of. I filed a help question with the iRobot support people and we’ll see how that goes. I don’t want to buy another power brick. Those damn things are like $50.

After futzing with the Roomba, I went in to see what Jenn was up to. She was watching television, but for some reason had the VCR on… huh?

Oh, I see - that’s because the digital cable box died. Great. The display on it goes black then flashes “88:88” and goes black again. No signal coming through. Unreal.

I’d blame a power surge, but the cable box was plugged into a surge protector and no other components plugged into that protector were affected (thank God - my TV’s on that one). Maybe just a bad electronic coincidence. Regardless, Jenn will take the cable box in and get it swapped for a new one, and I’ll have to wait and see what iRobot says about the power adapter.