There is an old saying: The wise man does not paint his dog and pretend it's a fire truck.

Part of this makes my mind wander to the amount of concrete work that I need to do around the house. Pretty much all of the sidewalk needs to be fixed, and I'm considering a retaining wall in the front of the house to make the yard easier to mow and landscape. And if the refi goes through, I'm going to want to build a garage in the back, which pretty much means tearing out the concrete that's back there and redoing everything.

And that's actually all of the concrete on the outside of the house. Ye gods, that's a lot of concrete.

Not gonna happen this year, of course. Unless a miracle happens, and I'm pretty much all out of miracles these days.