Things

Day to day life is a reminder that some things that would be almighty useful haven't been invented yet.

Self-cleaning laundry hampers - think how nice that would be for those of us responsible for the 'magical cleaning' of the clothing, towels and assorted baskets of things that are washed, folded and repeated until you are either sick of the item or it wears out, whichever comes first.

Self-replenishing pantry - buying groceries is an instructional manual on the definition of insanity. We take a can of vegetables from the shelf, put it in the buggy and give it a loving ride through the store as if it was a preserved toddler. Then, we scan the funky little striped label that lets the store know what we got and then we put the can into a bag (paper, plastic or cloth - don't go all P.C. on me!) for a restful ride home in our vehicle where that same can which previously lived on a shelf at a store comes to our house to live on one of our shelves until we decide to open and consume it. Can't we cut out the middle steps?? This is where both beaming technology and replicator technology would be most useful. We would have the choice of beaming in the fresh goods based on our "Star Trek" order or we could simply rearrange the molecules of stuff we threw away to make something new from them. Need asparagus? Turn your old running shoes into spears of green with a tasty hollandaise sauce atop them. Want an ice cream sundae that has been especially prepared to taste decent but which has taken into consideration your mandated by the doc calorie count? Let the replicator make one from those broken crayons and the used birthday candles that otherwise would fill the landfill of the overfull planet Earth.

Self-cleaning bathroom - this isn't a new concept for me but I lack the technical expertise to make this one work. By now, we should have had a team of engineers create a bathroom with a special panel that allowed you to select from "light clean-up" to "grandma clean". With the touch of a button, the tub/shower would be cleaned and santized and any furballs from washing off the dog would be stowed in the aformentioned replicator for reassignment into something useful later on. The automatic setting would be programmable to clean once a week at some odd hour so that no hapless person was showering or on the toilet when the cleaning cycle kicked in.

Self-organizing closet - this one would make people happy the world over. A closet would scan your body and create your look for each day from the contents held within. No more mismatched colors or garish designs paired together for eye-popping contrast. You could leave the house each day confident in your appearance. A secondary feature would be a scanner that could be employed to actually create new clothing when you either gained or lost a few pounds, thus avoiding that dreaded ill fitting look.

I know all of that is based on sci-fi fantasy of the most exciting kind, but don't you wish there was some kind of reality in the scene?

Personally, I wouldn't mind having a self landscaping lawn either. You could plug in the dimensions and existing plants and rearrange the lawn and new planting beds seasonally. It would even put out holiday and party decorations and take them up again in a timely manner. No shame in having those Christmas lights out in June... I just have to ask, are they out early or did you just forget to take them down?

Since most of the dinner cooking is in my basket and I enjoy cooking, I would enjoy having the ability to dial up selections that we don't normally have the ingredients to prepare. I still want to cook the food for the most part, but having the flexibility of a unit like the Jetson's had would just be cool. Frankly, I wouldn't mind having Rosie the Robot in our home either!

Oh well, the laundry is buzzing and it isn't folding itself, dang it!