I am hereby announcing to the world that high-speed internet has changed my life. (And not for the reasons you might think, those of you with dirty, little minds.) What HSI has done is that it has brought all of the shopping marketplaces on the internet to my desk. Whereas, in the past, I might not have been able to find a specific item that I was looking for, and I either gave up or settled for something that wasn't quite what I wanted. Now, I can visit websites all over the country (and the world), and with a little internet research, I can find those items that were so elusive in the past. Perfect example:

As some of my vast readership know, one of the many cool features of my old condo is the shower. It is a stall shower, but it is larger than traditional stalls, which makes it far more comfortable to use and maneuver in than those cramped stalls. I never would have bought the mortgage for my condo if the stall hadn't been bigger than normal. Anyway, despite being a large stall, the opening to the shower is small. 24.5 inches wide. Therefore, it requires a small stall shower curtain, which means that it needs to be less wide than a traditional shower curtain, but longer. The standard size for a stall shower curtain (if you can even find one anywhere other than Bed, Bath, and Beyond, dear god) is 54 inches wide and 78 inches long. But for my stall, that's both too wide and too long. So, since I moved in here, I have had to buy and use shower curtains that were simply too big for the space that needed to be curtained. And I had to put up with it.

Until HSI came to my home.

Just last week, I was able to browse all sorts of sites offering sizes of stall shower curtains other than 54 x 78. Finally, after an exhaustive and thorough session of Dave-quality research, I found my Holy Grail, my pot o' gold, my Emmanuelle Chriqui. Some random shower curtain company on the internet (http://www.shower-curtains.com/) was offering a stall shower curtain with all of the prerequisite qualities in a smaller size. 42 x 74. And it was one of those funkadelic new shower curtains that's hookless. Apparently, these things are all the rage in hotel showers. I really don't know. I haven't stayed in a hotel in a while. But I solved two problems at once. I had kind of needed new shower hooks, and my monumental discover via HSI allowed me to find the small shower curtain with hooks built right in. What could be better? So, I ordered one. It came, I installed it on Sunday, and it fits the shower opening much better than did any previous one. And I can throw away my white plastic shower hooks that had gotten kind of grungy over the years. The quality of my life has been improved. Quality of life. What else do we have?

So, thank you Al Gore for "inventing" the internet. And thank you Comcast for making it fast and bringing it to my home.