The dream of middle-aged American males, anyway.
    Robomow was its name, and it could be mine for a mere $695.
    It's a squat creepy-crawly contraption -- something like an oversized vacuum cleaner. And I Just had to have a test drive.
    Back at the office, I called Robomow distributor -- Friendly Robotics of Abilene. And the next thing you know, a Robomow was waiting on the back dock.
    I thought about taking it home to test on my lawn. But the truth is, my yard is probably better suited to goats.
    My friend John Hicks, on the other hand, keeps a lawn like Tiffany's keeps rocks. RoboMow's real challenge would be pleasing him.
    Besides, having a robot lawn mower is kind of like dating Ella MacPherson, What's the use if your buddies don't know?
    Well, naturally there's more to robot mowing than just saying "Go, boy" A low-voltage electrical wire had to be staked down around the edges of the lawn. It's kind of a pain, but you do it only once and leave it.
    By the time we had done that, a bit of a crowd had gathered in John's back yard. I pressed a button and we watched in amazement as Robomow oriented itself, turning tight circles like a dog circling its bed.
    Then it sniffed out that perimeter wire and took off mowing. "Oooh." we said,

Verbena at 12 o'clock
    John, however, was fidgeting nervously. Robomow was tooling alongside his precious flowerbeds. When it started bearing down on his newly planted vetbans, he couldn't stand it any longer.
    He leaped in front of Robomow and started twisting and turning, trying to stear it like a bowler does a bad ball,
    Robomow expertly turned away from the flowers -- through its own intelligence, I'm sure, not the work of swivelhips Hicks.
    Once Robe had mowed the edges of the lawn, it began the back-and-forth pattern 'that covers the center. It's a random path that at first leaves unsightly patches.
    "That thing mows Like my boys do," John groused. "But at least it doesn't argue with me."
    As we watched, pass after pass, Robomow eventually got to all the ugly spots.

Keep it on a short leash
    It's a little creepy to think about having a robot around the house. The instruction manual warned: "Enrage that Robomow will not be able to leave the defined lawn area …. "
    I got this image of driving through neighborhoods one day and seeing signs on telephone poles: "Lost Robot."
    John Bunton of Friendly Robotics said sales of Robomow have been very good, though he didn't have numbers. It's made in Israel and has been available in Europe for a couple of years, he said. Sales began here in December -- mostly to techies, so far.
    Get this- a robot vacuum cleaner will be on the market within a year, he said. And then a robot golf caddy. "It will follow you around the course just like Mary's little lamb," he said.
    After Robomow finished the back yard, we moved it around to the front yard. It was almost a traffic hazard. You should have seen the double takes as people passed by.
    At one point, as Robomow was finishing its work, I was standing in the front yard by myself. A fellow in a red Suburban drove slowly by, closely inspecting Robomow,
   Then he looked up at me and gave a very admiring thumbs up I casually waved back.
    Robomow -- it's almost like dating Ella.