One week with Alexa

My morning routine is simple: I wake up when my phone's alarm goes off, I go back to sleep, wake up again, contemplate more sleep, get dressed, make coffee and listen to one of Alexa's "flash briefings" before I start slinging words on the internet. Getting that first news blast of the day used to be a job for my trusty clock radio, but no longer: Alexa's invasion has begun. More precisely, it began this past summer, when I was dragged through a Home Depot, saw a spider-wrapped Echo, and said, "Eh, what the hell?" For a while there, in the early days, Alexa's responsibilities boiled down to reading my Audible audiobooks and telling me what the weather was like so that I didn't need to look out the window. Since then, though, she's become so enmeshed in the fabric of my household that I don't consciously remember all the times I talk to her.