Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

What's Smaller Than an Earworm? An Earmite?

Usually when a song is stuck in my head I can hear the whole tune, and most but not all of the words. They says that's why it's "stuck" -- if you look up the lyrics and sing it all the way through it becomes unstuck. That works for me. Other people recommend math problems. I would need to revisit math.

Last week I spent two days with only a fraction of a song stuck in my head - just  a singer insisting "Get OVER it," followed by a series of descending notes. Google showed me all the songs with "Get Over It" in the title, but that wasn't it, it wasn't the title. Just a part of a line.

But ahhhh, the relief when the neurons finally connected. I finally remembered the song it was from: "Politics in Space" by Kate Miller Heidke. It's 2 minutes and 17 seconds in. 

 

Calling Strangers

There are times during my job that I am expected to call strangers. It's not cold calling, which would kill me, but just "Call Jane Blahblah in Compliance and get her sign off."

I hate calling Jane Blahblah. She might be perfectly nice, but I hate calling her, because we're strangers, and it's all the unknown. For all I know she hates strangers too and this will escalate and I will be fired. 

I don't know how I survived by brief college stints as a telemarketer. Well, I do, I held those jobs no more than two weeks each.

On the other hand, if I'm writing to a stranger, not talking to a stranger, I love strangers. (Waves wildly at all of you.) 

I suppose I could investigate Live Relay, evidently they had an Alexa-like voice you could generate from an iPhone keypad. 

So here's my plan: hang in there until the text-to-voice technology becomes seamless. That way I can just type: "Hi, I'm Ellen from Enterprise Development," and a voice will come out the other person's earpiece saying what I type. It could be any voice, maybe not Alexa or Siri, maybe  that of a young girl with Vocal Fry, or perhaps a Canadian man, whatever.

Of course, I would need to be able to type accurately, and that is a lost cause. Imagine autocorrect changing not just what you type but also what you say. 

A Day Out

The slow-moving Real ID Act has finally crawled into my reality and I need a new driver's license that will conform across states, prove I am not a terrorist, and oddly change visa limits for Australians.

This means I had to go in person to the Department of Motor Vehicles. No way to duck it. So over the course of two days I drove twice a day to the DMV, double-masked, checked the line, and noped out. Not a big deal, it's only two miles from the house. 

Visit four was the charm. Start to finish was ten minutes. And, based on the blurry black and white image on the temporary license, it's even a good photo. 

Rewriting the Novel: Itching

Recently, I'll be weeding or some other mundane chore, and I'll think, "Maggie and Joe need to come to an agreement at the start of the resolution chapter."

I wouldn't call it inspiration, I'm not struck by the genius of these ideas. It's pretty mundane stuff. It's just odd that they bubble up out of nowhere. I have the itch again.

I think it might be time to revisit the novel. I glanced at the first paragraph to see if I could see it with new eyes. I did, in that I said, "What was I thinking when I wrote this garbage?" So I may be back to it next week, if not, I did take Labor Day week off.

Weekly Paint and Home Improvement Progress: 8/4

Lord God in heaven, the cement in the basement is too thick and they have to come out next week with the BIG jackhammer.

The crew did explain what was wrong - the "footer" that the basement wall sits on is increasingly deep, so it works against the downhill slope we have that you think would help with drainage.  

Here is some conceptual art for you:  a drawing I made for Gary to explain the problem.

• The black lines show the wall sitting on the footer. The footer is a wedge instead of the rectangle it should be. The water is already flowing in from the right side and puddles up because it runs into the cement footer.
• The blue is what we will have: a trench through the footer, on the basement side, that will give the water an egress. (Any previous egress we might have had is blocked up.)

(I recognize this could all be an ornate lie. How would I know?)

They only finished half, but luckily there was a downpour this week and the remaining leaks were illuminating. There are two, and they both are clearly a result of spots where I have outside dirt piled up to the top of the basement wall. Ironically, I did that to get some vertical drainage going on the outside, not the inside. Also, the team was able to drill one hole into the sump pump area to alleviate the pressure underground  (only one, all others were impeded by the concrete that reaches to Hell). 

So, home construction takes precedence over art for another week, but next Thursday they should be done. I have art plans:

1. Return to old bad things and fix them. For example, I left a detailed Buffalo hovering over some abstract grass: I could add some trees or something to fix that. 
2. Download the Masterclass oil painting class when it arrives on 8/22. That should be interesting.

Divergent Thinking

I had an interesting divergent thinking challenge last week.

The power went out while I was working from home, as it has too many times recently, and the cable and phone went out too.

I assumed the cable was out because the power was out, but the cable company sent a message that they were working on the problem, and the power company didn't. It was particularly annoying because I was messaging my team at the time. 

I looked around and assessed my resources. I had a cell phone at 20%. After about 20 minutes I remembered that I also have an electric car. 

I thought these thoughts:

"Hey, I could use the Mini to charge up my cellular phone." I momentarily paused when I realized I'd have to struggle to get the garage door open without the power, then I realized no, no deadly exhaust with the electric car.

And then, "Well, if my phone is charging I could use my cell phone as a wifi hotspot and get the internet on my iPad." (The mini is a hotspot too, somehow. I see it sometimes on my list, but sometimes I don't. It didn't matter; I could link my iPad to my phone and get the internet, anyway.)

When the iPad connected to the internet, I started typing. Then I had my next genius idea: instead of sitting in the driver's seat and reaching over to type on the iPad  passenger's seat, I could join my iPad on the passenger's side.

That blew things wide open, and I took my work laptop and hooked up to the phone wifi hotspot, and that actually worked, and I joined a zoom call from the garage of my house with no cable broadband or power.

Sadly, I didn't get the audio synced in the Zoom call before the power came back on in the house, and then twenty minutes after the Zoom call ended the cable came back.

I kind of want to test out the whole thing while the power is on.

Rain

I loved rain until these past two weeks. First we had the foot of rain overnight. The basement water wasn't so bad, but Gary tried to navigate though the blocked off streets, and that was frightening. 

Saint Louis did an excellent job preparing for the flooded streets, and only one person died. The rain moved to Tennessee, where I think three people died, then to Kentucky where at least 26 people died.

The most violent advective for rain is "pouring". So odd to think that sweet, gentle rain could kill people.

Birthday Month

I automatically win all arguments during August, my birthday month. I plan to cash in the next thirty days. CASH IN. 

• The bathroom fan does not work and the ceiling is sagging. Gary wants to fix the fan himself, and I think I could fix the ceiling myself, but what I really am going to do is have someone else do the work. Because it's my birthday month.
• I am switching to fiber optic gigabyte internet sometime this month, because the cable is out again this morning, because it's my birthday. You commercials are cute, Spectrum, but you are the ones who are evil. 
• I am moving on to the next big home improvement project: replacing the worn-out back door. I still think of it as the "new back door," because it was new 27 years ago. It did not stand up well against the elements. 

I will be stretching the limits of the birthday month exemption with that last one. When the negotiations begin, usually I can clap my hands in the air and announce "BIRTHDAY MONTH" and he can say nothing, but not sure if he will go along with that this time.

Then again, sometimes he argues about home improvements just because he feels that's his job as a man. As a man he thinks he should a) to do the work himself and/or b) argue at every opportunity.

New Toy 2

This is the toy that Gary bought me, the one on which I have bestowed the honor of Official Birthday Gift, which means he can sit back the entire month of August and have no gift responsibilities whatsoever.

It is ideal. Perfect gift. It is me embodied in a present.

It is an electrified tennis-racquet-bug-swatter that you swing at bugs and it zaps them to death.

ZAP-IT Bug Zapper Rechargeable Bug Zapper Racket [sic], 4,000 Volt, USB charging Cable, 2 Pack.

The recent flooding has drowned all the bugs in the backyard, and I didn't want to hurt the bees in the front yard, so I started swinging randomly in the side yard and soon two bugs died a freakish death. I cackled. And I am not sorry. 

New Toy 1

Lately, there have been too many nights spent watching Gary watch television, so I thought of my friends who assemble Lego models for fun. I thought that might be a fun shared experience for Gary and I. 

I looked at some Lego models, then I wondered how much money my friends make. There was one Millennium Falcon Lego model that was  $700 dollars. That might be entirely wrong, because it was so expensive I couldn't see anything after the 7. I wasn't looking for anything starting with a 7.

Instead I found this non-Lego model of an articulated Visible Man, with rubbery flesh and sturdy plastic bones that snap together in a very satisfying way. They also un-snap fairly easily, but I think I might apply some glue if I get it positioned the way I want. And if course, the position I want is draped over the edge of the tub in the medical bathroom.

If we -- well, if Gary gets frustrated I can point out that the bag of parts is labelled "BODY BAG," which makes me smile. 

This Morning

One of the nice things about having a substantial mailbox is that you know when the mailman arrives, because you hear the clunk as the door closes. It also lets you know if you can stay in bed because your husband has gone out to get the mail instead of you for once in your life.

This morning I heard:

CLUNK - Scream - "Jesus!"

Had it been Scream - "Jesus!" - CLUNK I would have assumed that a severed head was in the mailbox.

CLUNK - "Jesus!" - Scream would be the second coming coincidental with the mail retrieval.  

But it was decidedly CLUNK - Scream - "Jesus!" which Gary then explained is the sound of a "dead" cicada on top of the mailbox springing to life and flying in Gary's face when the mailbox shut. 

Weekly Home Construction Update: 7/28

Here is my art all bundled up. Half the basement is still wrapped in plastic, waiting for the dust to settle.

Today was to be the day that I would set about putting things right, because yesterday was to be the day that we cleared the basement drainage issues.

That was not to be, because Wednesday our city got twelve inches of rain overnight. The basement flooded, of course, but so did the streets and highways all through the Saint Louis area. Those of us living by a river or in a valley were just stuck. Hence the basement workers couldn't get to us, and we couldn't get out. 

The rain is supposed to continue all week. which means my basement will stay jammed in Jenga mode until next Monday, when we'll try it again.

Duolingo Advice

When telephony began, back in the day, I found that the best way to communicate with the phone application was to sound very pissed off. My words became clipped, my consonants were sharp, the phone knew I meant business. 

I have now cracked a similar code for DuoLingo Russian. I have had trouble getting points for repeating words back into the application. To my ear, my mimicry was perfect, but I couldn't get full credit.

With my new technique I can now parrot the example exactly. As you might have guessed, it is to sound as much as I can like Natasha from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Just a little "Moose and Squirrel" mixed in and I get full points.

It seems obvious now that one should use a Russian accent to make Russian words sound more convincing.

лось и белка!

TV Screen Grabs

The first screen grab is from a campaign ad directed against candidate Trudy Busch Valentine,  accusing her of being a proud Queen of the elitist, racist Veiled Prophet organization.

I am about as liberal as they come, plus I am somehow tangentially pseudo-related to the man who swung down on the VP Ball and unmasked the VP himself, but I say if your father is an important Saint Louis business executive you are going to be VP Queen of Love and Beauty. You don't get to decline. Because it's not about you. It's about your father. Naming you junior Queen Poobah is small consolation that your brother inherits the seat in the board of the public utility or whatever. 

If Auggie Busch of Anheuser-Busch were still alive there is not a politician in Saint Louis who would risk his wrath by showing this ad. Craven!

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The second screen grab was a recent CNN update: 'WHITE HOUSE EXPECTED TO NAME MONKEYPOX COORDINATOR."

They could have gone with "Monkeypox Czar" but no, they went with "Monkeypox Coordinator" as the new title for the Monkeypox Top Banana. Imagine that on your resume.