Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Artemis

I love that they scrubbed the Artemis launch moon launch Monday. I was excited for it, especially given that there would be three weeks of moon news, but I had two misgivings, both regarding the paint.

• They didn't paint USA in huge letters in the side. That was a thrill with the Apollo project, watching the U rise past the camera, then the S, then the A. I suppose national pride isn't needed when there's no one-on-one space race anymore.
• They should just call that shade "O-ring orange." That's the same color as the booster that exploded on the Challenger. Why make that choice?

NASA, take this opportunity to touch up the paint job.

The Weaning: Step Three

If you switch a landline, they tell you that it may take a week to get inbound phone calls again, but they don't tell you when that week starts. I thought the week started when I signed up with AT&T, but no, it starts the day you sever ties with Charter. I should have read this information from the FCC first. So, I launched a new hobby: getting that process expedited.

First, there was half an hour wait time before I spoke with Tia, who gave me lots of valuable advice on fake hair and eyelashes for forty-five minutes while her computer processed.

That was followed by a talk with Mike, for, I swear to you, an hour and a half, but Mike was not chatty. He was pleasant, but there were long periods of silence while I made dinner, ate dinner, cleaned up after dinner.

When he came off mute I asked, "Who is this?" and he had the good nature to laugh.

I don't think any of this helped, but it made me think it was helping. I'd really be curious to know what was going on. Is there an old-timey switchboard operator physically pulling lines out and lacking them into some other companies switchboard? Are they digging up buried trunk lines and putting in new ones? I don't know.

As of this date I don't have inbound service, but the three people and agencies who might need to contact us have our cell phones as a backup. it's been a lovely few days without spam calls, actually, so there's that.

The Weaning: Step Two

The first thing that needed to be fixed after the old wireless router switched to the new wireless router were the Alexas. I'd ask my bedroom Alexa to turn off the light and every Alexa in the house answered with "I'm sorry, I'm having a little trouble understanding right now." They weren't in unison, though, staggered just enough that the sounded like a crowd asking "What's going on? Is this happening to you too?"

I was only permitted to fix one Alexa, as Gary claimed he knew a special shortcut. He lied, and took all the fun of fixing it all when I was asleep. 

Then I discovered the variety of devices that had attached themselves to our old internet and were stubbornly looking for it. The light in my room. The printer, of course, but also the sous vide, and the TiVo.

The TiVo isn't aware that its days are numbered. That will be a hard plug to pull.

The Weaning: Step One

So we are in the process of switching from Cable to Fiber, from Spectrum to AT&T. 

If you remember, Gary feels we need two fireboxes and two Rokus and it looks like we'll have two internet providers as well, because we are not "cutting the cord" as people describe leaving cable, instead we are weaning ourselves off the cable teat.

Step One of the Weaning: Get the landline number switched. I know everyone else has dropped the landline in favor of their cell phones, but I like the fact that I will have a working phone if there's a month-long electrical outage, as there was during the Great Florissant Hail Storm of 2001. I'd need to find the backup non-electric phone in the basement, in the dark, but then after a few days when all the other phone batteries died I'd be the neighborhood savior. Me and the big battery phone charger in my electric car.

To get the landline switched I had to cancel the landline part of the cable bundle, and you know the cable company doesn't let go easily. Took me half an hour. Here was my strategy:

1. Tell the man I wanted to transfer only the phone.
2. The man sees what's coming and offers me deals on tv and internet.
3. I counter that with my belief that A Service should cost a Price, as it did back in the day.
4. Man offers me more deals. Eventually he got down to 65% off. (Man also uses the word "utilize" incorrectly every other sentence.)
5. I made the argument that established customers shouldn't be penalized for their loyalty with the monthly frog-boil of escalating pricing, especially when combined with unreliable internet. (I also make a feeble effort to open his eyes to the nuances of "utilize" vs a vis "use" but Man talked over me.)
6. Man thinks money will win against my principles and arguments, so I did something I have always wanted to do. I said, "Can I bribe you? My bill is due day after tomorrow, so if I promise to keep the tv and internet with you into the next billing cycle, will you switch my landline over to AT&T?" 

And then he spoke to his manager and they switched the landline, dropped those charges, and we kept the cable and internet. For this week. Gary wants to be sure we'll have something to fall back on if there's a problem. 

So, watch this space.

Difference

Forgive me if I've said this before, but I just can't get over different the creation process is between painting and writing.

Draft one of a painting is the best part. It's all,potential, and in some ways it's the best. Clean, broad, loose. 

Draft one of a book is shit. Fussy, overdone, useless.

I guess that's because one is additive and the other is not. You add paint bit by bit and hopefully stop before you have messy garbage, and with a book you start with too messy garbage and scrape it off bit by bit.

The inky thing they have in common is that you want to stop adding or subtracting at the right point. I always seem to stop painting too early. I suspect I'm going to stop editing this draft of the book when its down to a haiku.

Rewriting the Novel: Basic Flaw

Hand-editing is horrifying. On page one, I only left two lines alone. Here are the only two original lines remaining:

"In the month we'd been married I'd found that if I suffered, Joe felt it tenfold." 

and

"Huh. You don't have brothers and sisters --" Wait, I can combine that with the next sentence. So strike that. Gotta fix that.

On the plus side, there's only so much space on the page for revisions, so you can't get too stuck on any one sentence. 

On the down side, there's a basic problem with this book, and it's me. I'm old. My perspective is old. I sound like a biddy. And it's because I'm basing the villain on Jerry's hero, Joe, who is obviously Jerry. Jerry, drunk, bi-polar, violent, self-absorbed. Only, nowadays (trademark term of old biddies) we are sympathetic to the mentally ill and to alcoholics. I'm halfway there, depressive, you think I'd campaign for mental illness,

But the truth is, mentally ill people aren't your safe choice in  husbands. My heroine wants safety and this guy is volatile and there aren't good medications in 1931 Oklahoma. 

He'll need to have some other flaw, maybe, that makes him temperamental. Then again, I never say in the book what makes him moody. I mean, I know, but no one else does. 

Well, it's certainly evolving, if nothing else.

Weekly Paint Hiatus: 8/25

I'm slowly putting the basement back in place, even though technically it hasn't rained hard enough for the inevitable disappointment. 

However, I must be able to access the paints because my brother wants paintings of the other two dogs he's had in his life. So, two MORE dogs in shades of brown. Look for these coming soon.

Sad Morning

I had a sad start to my day: I woke from a dream in which I had to find twenty people to go with me to a soccer game and I don't even have twenty acquaintances. And it was a slow awakening too, I spent several waking minutes wondering why I had accepted these indoor soccer tickets during a pandemic. 

Sadly, my sad start was followed by a sadder mid-morning when I noticed some items that might need to be purged from the basement.

The Christmas wrap bin? Birthday wrap bin? Neither's been opened in years. Taking up too much real estate.

The narrow spare mattress? It's been years since we've had two overnight guests. That needs to go too. 

Of course, all I would need to do is throw a sleep-over birthday party for one of my friends, invite 19 other people, and then we'd all go to a soccer game the next morning and everything would work out fine. 

Cats In the Night

It was dark, and I was in the closet looking for my sweatpants, and when I realized my pink sweatpants looked just like my grey sweatpants, I thought, "At night, all pants are grey."

And then, "What is that from? Oh, 'At night, all cats are grey.' But ... what is that from?"  And then, "Oh look, the Internet."

I learned two things:

In America, the phrase is actually "All cats are grey in the dark." I can't imagine why, it's one word longer with no iambic pentameter.

But in France the phrase is "La nuit, tous les chats sont gris." Translated, that is the phrase I know, only:

•     Equally overly long
•     No meter of any kind
•     Dirty

(Dirty, because of pussycats. And yet why? I don't know what kind of fancy vulvas they have in France, or if they've got a French cat version of a wire-haired terrier, but I don't see the cat-crotch connection.)

Of course I couldn't remember the last time I said "At night all cats are grey," but I imagine I was talking to all the department managers when I said the equivalent of, "Who cares, pussy is pussy."

Gary Stocks Up

As part of the switch to fiber optic internet, all our TV will now be a little less live, because it will all be streamed, and as such we need a streaming device like a Firebox, or a Roku.

There's a Firebox on Gary's TV already, in preparation for this transition.

I said to Gary, "So I guess I'll need a Firebox for my TV."

In response, he bought himself a Roku.

I said, "So I guess we'll move the Firebox into my room, then."

Because Gary's love language is Utterly Unsolicited Gifts,  he bought me a Roku. 

I said, "I thought I was getting the Firebox," and perhaps because he saw me frown because we now had one superfluous streaming device, he misinterpreted that frown and bought me a Firebox.

I complained about this embarrassment of streaming devices, and he responded with some nonsense about how the Firebox was half off, and did we not stock up when toilet paper is on sale, and how he would just put the extras in the basement, and a lot of people have two streaming devices and a switch so they can bounce between them. 

At this point he is going to do that for his TV so he can experiment and switch back and forth to see which has better color and clarity. Like a lab experiment with a control but if white mice cost 70 to 80 dollars. 

So now I guess we just have one streaming device in the larder, and for all the people asking why I don't just return the extras, I laugh at you, because Gary never, ever returns things. I plan to take that one unopened device, whatever it is, and use it for a hostess gift when I start going back to parties.

Space Logo

I was watching something about the  "Gateway Project" to build a space station orbiting the moon.

I did a little double-take when I saw the logo.

At first it looked like every logo you see here in Saint Louis, there's the arch, gotta have the arch, and then I remembered NASA isn't like a Saint Louis used car dealer. What are they doing with our Arch?

"Well, 'Gateway,'" I thought, "It's the Gateway Arch," and then I wondered, "Does the rest of the world immediately associate the words 'Gateway' and 'Arch'? Our arch isn't the only one arch out there."

So I looked it up, and the first article I found said:

"The new logo represents the Gateway's near rectilinear halo orbit above the grey horizon of the moon with a white arch similar in appearance to the iconic Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri."

Perhaps it's a nod to the Gemini modules being built in Saint Louis, too, but I suppose it's possible the world has adopted the Gateway Arch as the universal symbol for all gateways, harbors, thresholds, and oppression of natives. Soon the world will all look like local air conditioner repair shops. 

I feel quite the center of the universe.

Hat Box Therapy

The big hats have room to stretch out in the Rubbermaid Hat Bin, because each of my smaller hats now has its own hat box labelled with its photo.

Well, to be honest, I tucked all the costume hats in the box on the upper left. I just couldn't stand my tiara rattling around in box that could hold five of them. Now it's nestled among the fez, the toque, and the Santa hat.

And, really, was this not the most insufferable sentence you have ever read? My tiara is too small to merit its own hat box. Pity me.

I wonder what is lacking in my life that I felt the need to organize my hats? I suppose it's the chaos in the basement. Plus the repair-resistant basement makes me feel shabby. 

Someday I need to finish that Grey Gardens documentary. I can see myself wearing a fancy hat and sighing that the raccoons crept through a hole in the siding to steal my tiara. 

Not Finishing Any Basements

Weeks ago, when I fully believed the drainage company would easily resolve our basement issue, I let myself imagine what a finished basement might look like.

I had cunning bookcases concealing our support and sewage pipes. The air conditioning duct became an architectural feature. I decided on painted black beams, not a drop ceiling. And a barn door sliding over the bumped-out storage area.

Luckily, I only spent an evening on Pinterest puzzling this all out, because the next day I looked up 'finished' basement codes in my city.

Yeah, no, I will never have a finished basement. Not unless I want to tear holes in the basement walls for larger egress windows and exhaust vents. And God forbid a toilet or any plumbing goes down there; that's another nightmare. And don't tell yourself you can put a bed in a basement. That's another set of laws. 

So, after a few hours of fantasy I'm back to a basement for storage and painting. At most maybe some paint, maybe some fabric to divide up the space.  That's okay by me. 

Weekly Paint Hiatus and Home Improvement Stasis: 8/18

Well, I am still steamed that the basement drain is only half done, but still holding out hope that the half that's done is sufficient.

Gary did what he considers due diligence, which for him is learning how to do the job himself before speaking with a vendor. He learned the other approaches if the leak persists, and then called the company and convinced them to keep charging us. Really. "Work up a bill; I'll pay it, " and then convinced them if the half-drain failed that THEY could implement the other ideas he has.

The sad thing is that we now have to wait for rain on already-saturated ground before we put anything back. And before we start any new projects. 

I may have to carry my painting supplies upstairs. The kitchen table's all cleaned off.

Visible Man Is Feeling Friendly

Rewriting the Novel: Back on the Horse

Okay, last weekend I almost took up the novel again. It's been four months, more than enough time to forget what I was thinking and to view it with fresh eyes. 

What I should do is print it out, double-spaced, and mark it up. I don't know if I'm there yet, though, that would make evident the pacing problems, and I'd rather fix those after I fix consistency and logic problems.

That is even more tempting now that I could lose it all when I turn my back on cable and take up with the fragile glass fiber optic network. 

======= LATER

Had to do it, if only for the chance to compare my version on the left to Jerry's version on the right.

My copy might look slight, but I say it's at fighting weight. It isn't weighed down with all the tobacco molecules. Or adverbs. 

I need to pick up a pen and get to work. 

Celebrity Hat Rides Again

One of my oldest friends called on my birthday and said, "I need to borrow a hat for a tea party."

She brought over some dresses: a blue floral and a pink floral. She tried on two blue hats at first, then she gathered the nerve to go Big.

(Rare photo of Celebrity Hat from behind.)

Of course, Celebrity Hat won her over. No other hat can compare. 

Time Capsule

Part of switching from cable to fiber is the email address transition. I understand Spectrum will cut off the email address associated with their old company name. I'm switching all contact information and logins to a gmail account.  (The time it has taken to do that almost equals the amount of time I spend deleting unfiltered spam every morning.)

Most were easy to switch, but my Flickr account was a pain. At some point Flickr was acquired by Yahoo and they changed my login out from under me. It took several business days to get it fixed, and I'm now paying a few dollars more a month.

I was thinking how dumb it was to keep my photos there, given I haven uploaded anything for years, when I got in and discovered that it has quietly auto-uploaded every photo I have  taken for the last seven years.

Over two thousand photos: many crap photos of the inside of my purse, but some valuable photos I didn't appreciate at the time. Some photos were of people I didn't recognize, and I briefly wondered if Gary was auto-uploading his secret second family, but viewed in context they are more likely new in-laws once removed and never seen again.

The renewed access gave me a chance to review photos of our trip to Paris, especially sweet given that I am still ten pounds lighter than I was then. 

Russian Update

I haven't even finished Checkpoint One of DuoLingo Russian, and let me tell you, it is getting way harder.

My plan to learn Russian as a natural Russian child would is crawling along. Well, I suppose I speak a little better than a nine month old orphan who only hears Russian 15 minutes a day.

In addition, I took the Places lesson again and the have scaled down the excitement with which they say "Ukraine." Before, it was a Judy Garland "Let's put on a show!" level of excitement, now it's considerably less animated.

New Toy 3 in Action

I used the Bug-a-Salt gun yesterday to kill a fly on the counter. It was just lounging there, so I snuck off to get the gun, struggled to pump it, stood a yard back, aimed, and shot.

Hit the fly dead on. At first I thought he had been vaporized, because he vanished the instant after the bang, After some searching I found him standing on the kitchen table. He still had all his parts and wings. He saw me and walked slowly away. I didn't want to salt-blast my wood table, so I got the fly-swatter and tapped him. He wandered off in a different direction, shell shocked. I put him out of his misery. 

He didn't seem to have any open wounds, so I guess maybe the gun gave him a salt overdose? Teeny-tiny heart attack? Regardless, it was very, very satisfying. 

Weekly Paint and Home Improvement Progress: 8/11

Oh, am I steamed. I have never heard of such a thing before, but the basement drainage company is "giving up" on my basement. Concrete is too thick. Nothing they can do. I asked who their biggest competitor was.

So, they have put in a French drain that leads halfway toward the sump pump and stops. Just ... stops. And based on the even shorter drain they put in four years ago, it will do nothing more than make a weak spot for water to break through. 

But, then I think: we had a storm go through last weekend with the job only half done and there was no water. One of the holes in the sump was draining happily into the pump. I could still divert water away from the house by installing a pump at the end of the drain they put in the lawn a few years back. The neighbors next door are being pressured to drain their lawn by the neighbors behind them. 

But that optimism faded as I imagined Gary would just reinforce his claim that the more repairs you do on your house the more you break it in other ways. He surprised me, though, he came home and was completely chill. If half a job worked anyway, good, if not, we still had options. I was only half as angry, then but half was still angry enough.

At least I can take this rage and channel it into putting the basement back in place.

Happy Birthday?

My 40th birthday was pretty great.

My 50th birthday was okay.

This 60th birthday is horrifying. Average life span of MS patients? 74 years. When did Mom die? 71 years. That's less than a dozen years to go. Also, the other day my brother commented, "You look just like Granceil," our grandmother, and it is true. Hollow eyes, wispy hair, only she didn't have a wattle. Mom, however, did, as evidenced by her licenses from 59 on.

The math that gets you from 40 to death is hard. The math from 60 to death is easy, and then from 70 to death? Single digits. SINGLE DIGITS. 

New Toy 3

Gary briefly turned against the new tennis racket bug zappers. They make a zap noise but don't cause any flies to drop out of the air. I don't know if the fly explodes into atoms, or is re-energized and files off stronger.

After he turned against the rackets, Gary bought some heavy artillery: a Bug-A-salt -gun. It's a little toy long gun that fires a barrage of table salt at flies, preferably from behind. The videos are all of shots in the back. Then the fly dies from a dozen painful salty wounds.

I found the gun in the trash the day it arrived. "'IT'S A GUN!" Gary explained. "I WILL NOT HAVE A GUN IN THIS HOUSE." It was clearly marked as a gun when he bought it, though, so I didn't know what caused the gun reversal. The only thing that stops a fly with a gun is a good guy with a gun, right?

I got the gun and its packaging out of the trash bin. It was clearly a toy gun. Plastic, colorful, orange tip, requiring no license or background check, and loaded with table salt ammunition.

Then I read the packaging. They leaned heavily on the gun metaphor. Also, half the packaging is a manifesto on why flies deserve to die. Then there are the cautions about not Shooting Your Eye Out, and there's a safety on the gun so it doesn't go off unexpectedly, and when Gary saw that he had to pump the thing like a pump-action shotgun, he dropped it in horror into the trash bin. 

I brought it back in and danced around the house for a while in various Charlie's Angels poses, but I was unable to get it to fire. Gary went into debug mode, showed me I wasn't returning the pump to the right position, used aluminum foil to prove salt was coming out, and now he's interested in the gun again.

I doubt we'll be able to use the sight and kill a bug from three feet away. More likely I'll take the finish off the furniture inside and salt the earth outside. 

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. Your 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.