Action!Month

That’s what we have named May. And, surprisingly, it seems to be working out. Usually we’ll say it’s Action!Month, then we’ll spend the whole month lounging around playing on the computers and drinking wine. But here it is, not even quite the middle of May, and we’ve:

Bought a car! Well, okay, I see that did not technically happen in May, but it was the endish of April. Good enough! And I do still adore it. Its great fun to drive. 

 Bought a toilet!  I know, I know, that does not sound tremendously exciting. But believe me, it IS exciting. It’s very very exciting, because in two weeks we will have lived in this house for 13 years, and for 12 years and 9 months we have been jiggling the handle on the toilet to make it stop running every single time we flushed it. For the past two months and two weeks we have been moving the decorative basket with the air freshener and the lotion and the extra roll of toilet paper off the tank, removing the lid to the tank, reaching our hand into the tank, and manually putting the flapper back into place because a piece of the part that is attached to the tank itself broke completely off and we could not rig up anything to fix it. Yeah — EWWWW. Much to my surprise, it took very little prodding to get Baker B to go to Lowes Hardware, pick out a new toilet, and arrange for someone to come install it. As of Monday, we have a shiny Kohler that doesn’t require a handle-jiggling, let alone a tank-cover-removal-and-manual-flap-adjustment. It’s quite the thrill, and was surprisingly affordable. 

 Bought approximately 24,763 bits and pieces of guttering so that Baker B can replace our rusted, full-of-holes, completely useless gutters. Sadly tomorrow we will be returning the approximately 24,763 bits and pieces of white plastic guttering and exchanging them for approximately 24,763 bits and pieces of brown steel guttering. Because Baker B has now decided that brown would look better (never mind that I told him that as we were picking out the approximately 24,763 bits and pieces of guttering — our house is grey with (EWWWW) orange trim and a brown roof.), Now he realizes that brown WOULD be better, and so would steel. 

 Bought a couple of long planks of wood to replace the rotted boards on the deck rail. That are so rotted they are currently completely gone, and we have no top rails on half our deck. Whcih is just a tad unnerving since it’s a long drop from the deck into the woods. Of course both boards are still in the Outback (which is not quite dead yet, so we were able to drive it to Lowes and buy all this stuff in one swoop). But at least they are here and not in Lowes. 

 Went to Charter and haggled until we got a deal on our cable/internet package. Well, okay- we didn’t haggle at all. We went in and said we need to find out what’s wrong with our internet, since we currently can’t even watch a YouTube video and that makes no sense at all as we used to be able to download pretty much anything we wanted and I’d watch movies on my laptop with nary a hitch. And they’ve just been making a big deal about having bumped up all their customers’ speeds.  We mentioned that we were looking into the phone company’s new broadband, and we also probably wanted to just drop the TV entirely since we never ever watch it. The customer service girl immediately gave us a six month deal for $30 less than we’re currently paying, and a number to call tech support about the internet issues since we are supposed to have 12 mega-whatever-it-ises. Baker B called them, the Indian woman he spoke to was no help at all and wanted to bump us up to a HIGHER speed. So finally he, DUH, tried bypassing the wireless router and suddenly it’s back to normal. Our router is very old. So last night we ordered a new one from our beloved Amazon (there’s nowhere here to buy something like that except Radio Shack or the detested WalMart). SO, soon our internet will hopefully be back to normal. 

 Bought a little Powershot! Well, that probably doesn’t really fall into the Action!Month category, but it does fall into "It’s nearly my BIG BIRTHDAY" category. I decided that for my BIG BIRTHDAY, I would really like a small camera that I can carry around with me. I love love LOVE the SLR but I can’t always have it with me – I just don’t have room to tote it around. So last weekend I went to Hickory, to Best Buy, and bought a SD1400 IS. I debated and debated (and oddly this was kind of spur of the moment so I did no research at all) but I knew I wanted a Canon for sure, and I loved my old Powershot – my very first digital. Also, Kim bought a Powershot right before we went to England, and I was impressed with her pictures. For a teeny camera it took great photos. Amusingly I realized when I got mine home and looked at her England pictures (which I’d gotten copies of and put on Flickr, where you can also see what kind of camera took the picture) that I bought the exact same one she has. Except mine is black and not pink. I would have gotten pink (it’s not hot pink- more of a rose-pink) but they were out and I didn’t want to wait. Anyhow, I am very pleased so far. It certainly would never replace the SLR, but it takes very good pictures for a teeny portable camera. 

It has lots and lots of manual settings — "manual" as in you can set things like "vivid" for the colors. 

I like vivid colors. This is the Greenway, where I often walk. 

You can also make blue bluer, and greens greener, separately. And do a "select one color to emphasize" thing, although I’m not sure how the selection works – apparently the camera selects for you. Here it seems to have selected red-

There’s also a Fisheye effect

And a "Miniaturizing" effect, where it blurs everything but one central point, making it look like what you have focused in on is a toy model, I assume —

These aren’t very impressive examples, but I haven’t played much with these features yet. 

I liked the blurry effect here, although the sewer thing is not quite so attractive:

I think this one is the "film camera" setting, made to look like it’s, well, film-

I was very pleased with the vivid colors of this iris –

And of course had to take lots of cat pictures –

Ummmmm—- obviously Action!Month seriously needs to extend to staining the front step. Or porch, or whatever you call that teeny  place where you enter the house. As well as the back deck which looks just like this. As well as the entire outside of the house. Action!Month is really going to have to be Action!Summer, but I think we’re both in the mood to actually get some major work done around here.