This is sort of live, and if any of you can see me, that would be amazing. So I can see some of you. The trick here is if you all pretend you're all in my living room. This is Shelly Adams for those of you who have not yet met her. And now I know how early I have to get up. There does seem to be no way that I can figure out how to get all the right people up here. So let's see how many people we can get. This will be an adventure.

How shall they say something so we know they can hear you?

Can you hear me?

Looks like it might work. The problem will be getting extra people up here. So that would be the problem. Let's see. How about we make it loud and clear? Well, if you can hear me loud and clear, you can probably hear her because we're on the same microphone and same camera.

So I would like to start out with happy birthday, Mike. We're trying to get everything together. It's a birthday for a regular, Mike Burrell, fifty years old today. We could not say goodbye.

In case you didn't know the importance of Shelly, she will be the head of the estate and the boss of everything. And I think she had a few words to give you about what role we'll be going forward. Ready for that? Let's do that.

Good morning, everybody. Yes, I'm Shelly. I don't know if Scott wants to introduce me as such, but I am his ex.

First ex.

First ex. I just want to tell you a little bit about myself. And I'm going to start by first of all saying this is not my world. Social media is not my world.

All right. So I want to first of all thank Nicole yesterday, the shy one with the glasses that Scott kept pointing out because that's probably me times two. So thank you, Nicole, for giving me the courage to get on here this morning.

Just a little bit about myself. Before Scott, I worked in the corporate office in Foster City as a retirement specialist before having kids. I started working for Scott in 2003. My main job, I would say, would be to gather all his Dilbert subscribers' email ideas of their crazy workplace stories. They would send in all these great stories to give him inspiration for the comic strip. I kind of pulled them all together, tried to weed out the really good ones, put them together for him so that he could quickly just look at them and get his idea for the day. So that was my main job among a lot of other jobs.

I did get my real estate license after we split up, and I pursued that real estate and property management and that was very successful. But I continued to be in Scott's life the entire time. We were best friends. So that continued.

I have a beautiful daughter, Savannah, who when Scott and I met, she was only five years old. He helped raise her and she just got married last year. She got married to Jacob and they are perfect together. I now have a son-in-law and I'm hoping someday to have grandchildren.

I'm married, remarried, and I've been with my husband for going on twelve years. We waited until our ten-year anniversary and we decided to have a big backyard wedding. So it was beautiful. He came with two bonus sons. So I have two more sons. And I just want to give a shout out to my husband Pat for understanding and being so supportive of my relationship with Scott through all the years and through going through this with him.

But I have the biggest job ahead of me, which is now to keep Scott's legacy alive. And I'm going to need the help of all of you guys to do that. And I know you've supported him all these years. And he loves you guys. And I know you're going to support me to keep his legacy going. And I think that's all I wanted to say.

The short version of that is that she had the job that Owen has, making sure that things run smoothly on this end, only in the sense that she was picking out good stories for me, and now Owen is the picker. So Shel is the boss of all bosses. So I'm having increasing trouble talking and obviously I have no mobility. So without Shelly this operation would come to a halt and she is the person I trust the most in the entire world.

Now one of the things I like about Shelly is that no matter how scary something is she is undaunted. So that's one of the most impressive things about her. We don't know what we're doing right now, but that never stops her. So we'll work through this one way or another.

Now what I was hoping to do, as most of you know, is convert from Coffee with Scott Adams to more of a we'll-figure-it-out-as-we-go, but we're moving toward a situation where... Wow. I have to tell you, I've never been on this many drugs before in my life. I had a tough time with the cough last night and so I'm just absolutely loaded up with meds. All legal. Every bit of it is legal.

So the hardest thing I was trying to do is get other people invited up. So I'm going to see if I can do that. But as soon as people can talk, you can just go ahead and talk. So if there's something to ask, something to add, and you could talk about the news or you could talk about this.

I think we just accept them. We could accept all, right? We'll just accept a few for now. Well, I should make sure we're accepting Owen and Erica. Okay. And maybe Marcela. So if we get a few friendlies up here, it'll be a different experience.

Is that Owen up there? No, we're looking through a list of known people. All right, here we go. We've got invitations. So far nobody's accepted. That's why. Well, I think we have to accept them, don't we? Yeah, but how do we know which ones to accept? You just look at their names. Oh, except right here. Which one? We know. And then it didn't work. Didn't work. You did not accept. All right. So Joshua. Hold on. Joshua. So right now I'm accepting known people. We got two. And who else is that? Marcela. No, that's Malcolm. Okay. All right. Eric Burch, we got Mike Burrell. Here we go. All right. Now that Owen or I haven't seen Owen yet, so we'll go with this. Let's see. I have you all. What do I want of you all when I've accepted only some? Oh, so difficult to figure out.

Do we have to turn that on? I think that's why she turns on. All right. We're in auto in theory. All right, there's Marcela. There's Joshua. So any of you, Joshua, Marcela, if you turn on your microphones, we should be able to hear you.

Can any of you talk right now?

Good morning, Scott. Hey, by the way, why am I so pathetic at turning on microphones? You're the one who had to turn it on, right? Yeah, we have to manually turn on our own microphones here. We got company. Hey, Summer, you want to say hi to Scott? You want to say hi? Say Scott and Shelly. Hey, this is Summer.

Hey, Summer.

Did you happen to check the news this morning? Did you happen to check the news this morning, honey? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, kid getting a hold of the phone. She wants to do some reading. Yes. Little cameo from Summer.