Are you still tinkering with that thing? Holy shit, I thought you were a scientist. What kind of scientist spends a week screwing the legs into a mail-order ottoman? Whoa, Mitch …. put the hammer down. HEY!

Greetings, Big Green die-hards. This is what I sound like a moment after someone tries to brain me with a flying hammer. Our friend and mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee is not all that pleased with me right now. I shouldn’t have asked how his latest experiment is progressing. Don’t know what he’s working on, but I can tell you that it came out of an Ikea box. Maybe it’s an ottoman, or perhaps a chesterfield. Kind of hard to tell from ten paces.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Mitch is a mad scientist in the traditional sense, right? His stock in trade is formulating theorems to crack the earth in half or poison the atmosphere (not that we aren’t already doing that without his help), BIG stuff … not build-it-yourself furnishings or other petty household trifles. Well, all I can say is, never underestimate the inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He is truly ahead of the curve on domestic mad science, and that’s largely because of some YouTube clips he’s been watching on the Internet of Things (IOT).

Right, so … Mitch spent a few weeks YouTubing, and the next thing we knew he was tinkering with our aging refrigerator. The following day, Matt opened the fridge door and the little light went on. Hey … he’s finally making himself useful, we all thought. But then the thing started talking to me. One afternoon I reached in for a cold drink and I heard a mechanical voice say, “Are you going to have another one of those?” Then it locked the door on me. That was bad enough, but just this past week we started getting random shipments from the neighborhood grocer – eggs, milk, cottage cheese, lettuce. I thought it was Anti Lincoln planning one of his famous cotillions, but no … Mitch had hooked the fridge up to the internet, and the bloody thing has been shopping online and spending a freaking fortune.

So, hell … if Mitch takes a little heat on his home improvement projects, he has it coming. Not sure why an ottoman needs a gun mount, though …