Month: May 2008

This is not my idea of a good time

At this point, none of the desktop computers have made it through the move completely unscathed.

1. Katie’s desktop, when we set it up after moving, couldn’t open the CD/DVD tray. It tried, but after whirring for a few seconds, it would give up. Because of the way the case is set up, I had to open it up and pull out the drive in order to get at it with a paper-clip, manually open it, move it a couple of times, and blast the whole thing with compressed air.

2. The transmitter for the cordless mouse went on the shared Windows box. So we went down to Best Buy to get a new mouse. The next day I found the 10% off coupon I’d printed out when setting up mail forwarding with the post office.

3. My computer, after working fine for a week and a half, suddenly stopped displaying a desktop. Instead I got flickering rectangular fragments. Flaky video card, obsolete hardware, and 64-bit decisions.

Current Music: Helicopters, Barenaked Ladies

Day Off

After spending Friday night and most of the daylight hours Saturday and Sunday moving furniture and boxes around, putting stuff on shelves or in closets, hooking up electronics, sorting stuff to keep/sell/donate/take to storage, and generally trying to make the new place liveable, I decided to just relax on Monday.

That morning I finally got around to reading The Stardust Kid (which I volunteered to index at the Grand Comics Database last summer when I figured I’d pick it up any day now. Oops). Then in the afternoon, after a quick grocery run, I finished rereading Ringworld. alenxa made purple potato salad from scratch, and we watched “Once More With Feeling” with dinner. We followed is up with an episode of Bones (which is decidedly not dinner material, as far as I’m concerned).

Today: back to work, trying to remind myself that it’s not Monday, it’s Tuesday.

Starting to feel like home

It’s been slow going, but we’ve cleared out enough of the living room to set out the coffee table, making the couch usable, and set up the TV and DVD player.

One thing we’re doing, since we hope to find a place to buy within a few months, is not getting cable for the time being. Sure, we were only spending $15/month for the broadcast channels, but all our shows are going (or have gone) on hiatus for the summer. Why pay for something we aren’t going to use? When I explain this plan, people are often very confused. The AT&T tech actually started to say, “Well, you could watch…” Why? I don’t watch TV just to have the TV on. If I’m interested in a show, I turn it on. If I’m not, I turn it off. If I’m bored, I’d rather pick up something from my backlog of books or comics, or go to the internet.

After I set up the TV today, we popped in our DVD of Raiders of the Lost Ark. We’d gone out to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last night with andrea_wot, wayens and gasean, which was fun (both the hanging out with friends and the movie), and we found ourselves quoting the new film to each other at relevant points in the original.

Rainmaker

1. Wednesday morning, I took the car in to a place that would not only wash the outside (which it desperately needed), but vacccum the interior. I paid a bit more than I probably should have and had the car waxed as well.

Thursday morning, I set a 3/4-empty coffee cup on top of the car as I arrived at work. A gust of wind promptly knocked it over, spilling it all over the windshield and hood.

Thursday at lunchtime, a freak storm hit, drenching the entire region, flooding streets, causing mudslides in canyons.

Talk about timing.

2. Meanwhile, we haven’t managed to excavate the tv yet, and only half the couch, but alenxa and I watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on one of the computers last night.

3. Also, finaly let myself get talked into setting up a profile on Facebook. Trying to figure out the culture, not so much for the people I still keep in touch with, as for the people I haven’t seen since high school. Now I know why there are so few members of my graduating class on LJ — most of them must have waited until Facebook was the big site before they started getting involved in social networking.

Boxed in

Moving Boxes

This is all the living room stuff, 1/3 of the bedroom stuff, 2/3 of the kitchen stuff, most of the closet stuff, some stuff we intended to put in storage but didn’t label, some stuff we intended to sort through and toss but didn’t have time…

We’ve made a bit of a dent since then, but it’s going to take a while.

Current Music: Tori Amos, “Sleeps With Butterflies”
Current Location: home

Moved

We did it!

First, a big round of thanks to wayens and andrea_wot for their help throughout the morning and afternoon, and to alenxa’s father who pitched in by adding a trip with the van. I don’t know how we would have managed without them. I mean, it was a nightmarish process as it was!

Some problems:

  1. We vastly underestimated the amount of stuff we’d accumulated over the last 7 years in one place.
  2. Late Friday night, alenxa started feeling dizzy and unsteady. Fortunately it passed by morning.
  3. Between #1 and #2, we weren’t done packing when the movers arrived, or when Wayne or Andrea arrived to help.
  4. For the same reasons, neither of us got more than a couple of hours sleep the night before.
  5. Around the same time the movers showed up, I started feeling dizzy and had to sit on the couch hyperventilating with a glass of water, occasionally folding a box lid because that was something I could do. (We still can’t figure out what gave us both the exact same illness/reaction, several hours apart.)
  6. It was a really hot day, roughly 95°F (though at least it wasn’t humid).

The movers were here about twice as long as anticipated. By early afternoon we told them to just load the rest of the furniture and big items, and we’d come back for the rest later in the day. Even then, we ended up wrapping up just under the wire. The leasing office at the old place said they were open until 7, but they were locked up at 6:55. I knocked on the door, called & left a message, and eventually went around to the back door and knocked there before someone let me in to give them their keys.

We got the bedroom & computers mostly set up Saturday night (bed = critical, and we had AT&T coming out on Sunday morning to set up the Internet), and we’re starting on the kitchen. The living room, at the moment, is mainly a box storage facility with a path from the front door to the back of the place, but that will change as we go through and start putting things where they belong, or moving them out to storage, or getting rid of them entirely (since we ran out of time to seriously sort things beforehand).

Unfortunately this destroys my nefarious Indy-a-night plan for the week, since we don’t have room to sit on the couch or see the TV.

Current Mood: 🙁exhausted

Last Call

This is most likely my last blog post from this apartment. We’re not done packing, and we’ll probably be at it until ski o’clock (tomorrow will be time for coffee & adrenaline). But I’m turning off the computers and packing up all the cables, power strips, etc. except for the DSL modem and the wireless access point, just in case we need to check something in the morning.

We went over to pick up our keys for the new apartment today. Much less paperwork than the place we’re at right now. Took a few items over — bags of stuff, boxes w/o lids, things that we didn’t want to risk falling over in the moving truck.

It turns out they just put in a new wireless network, but I couldn’t get the laptop to connect. It doesn’t really matter — we’d have to put wireless cards in the desktops as well, and lose the ability to safely share files among the computers. And I doubt they’d be happy about me grabbing the latest Fedora Linux via BitTorrent. So, no Internet access until AT&T shows up on Sunday morning.

Finished off as much of the stuff in the refrigerator & freezer as we could, & put the rest in a pair of coolers, while the freezer defrosts.

Current Mood: determined
Current Music: We Still Have Time (in head)

Hot News!

This past weekend would have been great weather for moving. Not too warm, not too cold. Monday was nice and cool, but too drizzly. I’ve noticed they expect it to get hotter each day this week…

And now the updated forecast is out and they’re anticipating 90 degrees for Saturday. Gee, isn’t that just perfect moving weather?

Could be worse — they’re predicting 97 for Friday, when we’ll be frantically trying to put the rest of our life into boxes in a place with crappy air conditioning. I liked the earlier prediction of 84 better.

Of course, Sunday, the day after we move everything, drops down to 76.

*sigh*

Current Mood: 😡annoyed
Current Music: “It Won’t Be Easy” (in head)

Stuff

You never realize just how much stuff you have until you have to put it all in boxes. It’s getting down to the wire now, coming up on Saturday, and the go-through-everything-and-triage plan is about to give way to the just-shove-it-in-a-box plan.

Last Thursday, alenxa went out to look at condos with our realtor, and found one that looked promising. She arranged to go back that evening when I could take a look at it. Unfortunately we basically need to put an offer in now, and jump through a bunch of hoops. We jumped through the first one, but with all the moving prep, neither of us is in the mood for jumping through any more.

Cleaned out the refrigerator the other day. Katie looked through the fridge, and I took on the task of opening and cleaning the containers.

Sunday was mostly spent cleaning, since we’ve got an inspection scheduled with the apartment complex tomorrow. We want to make sure they don’t try to charge us for any of the remodeling that they’re going to do anyway.

I’ve taken 2 days off later this week, and I’m not sure it’s going to be enough. The place is full of boxes, even after taking stuff to storage.

Current Mood: 😯anxious

Movies, Moving and More

  1. Saw Iron Man on Saturday. Very good, possibly the best superhero movie since the first Spider-Man. Perfect balance of action and humor — it knew when to take itself seriously, and (more importantly), when not to.
  2. Tried “curry chips” at an Irish pub near the movie theater. French fries, only lightly salted, and a bowl of curry to dip them in. Surprisingly good.
  3. Also watched Never Been Kissed via Netflix. Funny, but in a painful way, since the movie is all about public humiliation.
  4. Boxed up most of the books on our main 2 bookshelves. The plan is to put most of our books (and the shelves) in storage until we get a more permanent place, except for one to-read box. 10 boxes later, we still have the non-fiction shelf, the manga shelf, the humor+coffee table shelf… We’re going to need more boxes.
  5. Speaking of which, we’re down to less than 2 weeks to the move. Once we landed an interim apartment, I was relieved, but now I’m starting to worry about whether we’ll have time to pack everything up. Which reminds, me, I never got a response on my request for a quote for movers. More calls to make…
  6. Finally replaced the last of my large plain T-shirts with mediums after almost a year of holding at 150-155 lbs. Printed shirts are a bit trickier.
  7. Sleepy+hungry. Finally got around to reading Superman: Birthright last night, which was considerably better than the online consensus would suggest. But it meant I was up past midnight, and I got up early so that we could go to the DMV before work this morning. (alenxa and I both had stuff we needed to do there…this week. The funny thing is, we ended up at windows right next to each other, despite being in different queues.) So I got too little sleep and had breakfast 2 hours earlier than usual, and now I’m ready for lunch at 11:00.
Current Music: Jet Black Sunrise (Gin Blossoms)