Free My Nest Isn't Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space: The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman by Lisa Scottoline, Francesca Serritella

and go off at nightfall, like accomplices to all burglars in the tristate area.
    Plus the garage light goes on at two in the morning, just in time to wake me and the dogs up, so we can all bark for the next hour, when we fall into an exhausted sleep.
    I would turn the lights on and off manually, but the fancy timer switches won’t let me do that. They’re the control freaks of the electrical world.
    I can’t even claw them out of the switchplate, nor do they respond to profanity and other forms of verbal abuse.
    Now the only thing building up is my blood pressure.

A Paid Political Announcement
    I’ve lived through a number of elections by now, and they get more and more negative.
    I try to stay positive about negative ads.
    Why? Because I write fiction for a living, and so do the people who write these ads. The truth can be so boring when you don’t make it up.
    I also appreciate a good laugh, and I laugh every time one of those ads comes on. And wouldn’t you rather see a good, old-fashioned smear of a political ad than yet another commercial for Cialis? Evidently, the stock market isn’t the only thing going down.
    It doesn’t matter which candidate you support, or party you belong to. Negative ads are always the same. My favorite negative ads are about candidates running for the state offices, whatever they are. I never heard of any of these guys, but now I know they’re liars, thieves, wastrels, killers, and closet watchers of Project Runway.
    I don’t know them, but already I hate them and am afraid of them. A scarier lot you never saw, and if they get elected, they’ll bankrupt the entire world.
    Oops, too late.
    Sometimes I like to imagine what the negative ads for other politicians would have been. Consider, for example, the original change candidates, the Founding Fathers.
    You say you want a revolution?
    Take George Washington. The negative ads would tell you he had wooden teeth. Would you really vote for a man who doesn’t floss? Plus I heard he got that tall by taking steroids. The battle of Valley Forge wasn’t bravery, it was ’roid rage.
    And how about an ad for Thomas Jefferson? Dude had a pony-tail, wore ruffled shirts, and spent way too much time in Paris. You know what I’m saying. Don’t ask, don’t tell that there were Manolos in his armoire.
    Ben Franklin. So he invented the printing press in his basement. You know what else he was making down there? Bombs, meth, and counterfeit copies of Sex and the City II.
    So you see how much fun you can have, making negative ads for heroes. Some people would call that libelous and disrespectful, but they can’t take a joke.
    Plus you have to look for the silver lining in the negative ads, and by that I mean that they create jobs for so many people.
    First, the scary voice-over people. You know who I mean. The whispery female voice threatening that the Democrat will spend us into oblivion, and the deep, rich bass of the man who warns that the Republican will send us to war, armed only with duct tape. You don’t hear those scary ads except at election time, and those voice-over people need work.
    The rest of the year, it’s the perky types who get the voice-over jobs, like the housewife voices happy about floor wax or the hubby voices happy about car wax. If it weren’t for negative ads, you would get the idea that the only difference between women and men is what they wax.
    Plus, what about bad photographers? Negative ads give them the only work they get. They’re the ones who take the terrible photos of the candidate, or catch their ugliest moments. And think of the horror music people. The other day, I heard the most terrifying music ever coming from the TV, but it wasn’t an ad for the sequel to Saw or even a rerun of Jaws. It was a candidate for state senate. Nothing like a scary drumbeat to make you think of nuclear war, serial murder, or politics.
    Scary voice-over people, bad photographers, and horror music composers would be out of a