Last night I realized I was whining too much in this blog about products that don’t work. So I decided to write today’s post about a product that exceeded my expectations. We designed our home with a residential elevator. We didn’t want to go through all the effort of building our dream home and then decades from now need to move when stairs become an issue. I was worried about having an elevator because it seems like exactly the sort of thing that will break on a regular basis. Last night I realized my negative expectations had been wrong. I need to lighten up. That elevator has worked like a charm, and we use it all the time for moving heavy objects up and down stairs.

So, as I’m walking across the living room last night, composing in my mind today’s post in praise of the elevator, Shelly tells me the elevator is broken. And so it is. I’ll have to call someone about that today. So I changed my plan and decided to write about my broken elevator instead. (Every word of that is true, by the way. I was literally composing the elevator praise post in my head when it broke.)

This morning I woke up at 6 AM and walked the dog as usual. I should mention that we designed the house with an automatic dog door, which functions as advertised, except it scares the bejeezus out of little Snickers and causes her to poop in the kids’ rooms. So I walk her instead. In the rain.

After the dog does her business, I visit our spiffy new coffee maker. It’s terrific. I push one button and it grinds the beans, mixes it with fresh water (it’s plumbed!) and produces a steaming cup of excellent java. Except lately it has only been spitting out something like brown dishwater, which I drink anyway, for the placebo effect. Today I decided to take action. So after half an hour with the manual, I corrected a setting that had somehow unraveled itself, as if by ghosts. (Yes, the coffeemaker has a setting that allows you to create brown dishwater instead of something more like coffee. I’m not clear why.)

Coffee in hand, I go to my computer to start writing. But my computer decided to reboot itself last night, against my will, for some sort of Windows update. And it locked up. So I do a hard boot. And wait. And wait. And wait, while the creative juices slowly drain from my body. Once rebooted, I try to start Firefox. And I wait, and I wait. I like to check the comments on my daily strip before I do anything else. Great, I see that my Canadian stalker is back in full force, leaving crazy comments, driving out the normals. She’s been cyberstalking me for about seven years now, off and on, whenever she goes off meds. She likes to call anyone I do business with and tell them I’ve been sexually harassing her, sending goons to search her home, bugging her phone, and my favorite: using my comic strip as a way to send secret messages to her. The police can’t help me because she’s Canadian. We block her IP address on a regular basis, but she keeps changing machines.

Anyway, seven years is enough. I’m in a bad mood. So as of today, I’m declaring her my mascot. Yes, stalker, this time I am talking directly to you. For the first time, it’s not the voices in your head. Leave some good crazy comments that we can all enjoy.

My strategy is to get you so wound up that your husband, if you still have one, puts you back on your meds. Nothing else has worked. Let’s try this.