Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
A follow-up on the bees we found in the kitchen last Monday. Management brought in exterminators on Tuesday, and aside from a half-dozen dead bees on the floor, they were all gone by Wednesday morning. Well, except for the ones alenxa found when she opened up the cabinet above the stove today:
Great, so there were several dozen bees in the cabinet by Tuesday. It’s a good thing we didn’t open it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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*
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.
With our move-out date (May 17) rapidly approaching, it became clear that we weren’t going to have a condo in time to move straight from our current apartment. We asked about moving to another unit in the same place and staying month-to-month, but they wanted a minimum 3-month occupancy, and $200/month on top of the market value for the privilege of not signing a lease. With the post-renovation price hikes, the result was that it would have cost us more to rent a studio than we’ve been paying for our 2-bedroom apartment. Not an option.
alenxa found a place just a few blocks away that does everything month-to-month, was reasonably priced, and isn’t in a scary part of town. We toured the property and filled out an application on Monday, and signed the paperwork this morning.
So we have a place to live!
Pros:
Cons:
A month or two ago I dug out a bunch of CDs I hadn’t listened to in years, including some musical-related stuff, and started importing songs into iTunes. My plan was to play the albums first, then pick out which songs I wanted, but it didn’t quite work out, so I put a lot of stuff on just from memory, or in some cases just imported the whole album with the idea that I’d remove anything I found myself skipping. Some worked out well. Others… well the Man of La Mancha suite from Quantum Leap just wasn’t as good as I remembered.
So today, as alenxa and I were driving around to look at condos, Bernadette Peters came on, singing “Cupid.” It was a bit more easy listening-sounding than I remembered, but not cringe-inducingly-so… and then my brain stepped in to “enhance” it.
You see, we’re also working our way through the third volume of Animaniacs on DVD. I found myself picturing Rita (as in Rita and Runt) singing the song.
“Brain, stop it!” I said.
Katie: “Is yours doing the same thing mine is?”
“I think so…”
“On a fence post?”
“Yep.”
In house hunting news, we found a couple of good possibilities. Well, one good possibility, and one that was really nice, but the rooms were way too small. Fantastic view, though.
And then there was the place that had been trashed so badly that when I dropped my sunglasses, I refused to pick them up. Ugh.
After Wayzgoose on Saturday afternoon (where we caught up with various fellow UCI alumni including wayens ), alenxa and I went to see My Fair Lady that evening at the Ahmanson. It was a very enjoyable performance, though there were times when I couldn’t quite catch what people were singing — especially Higgins, in his sort of speak-singing numbers, and almost anything involving Eliza’s father. (Surprise casting: Marni Nixon as Mrs. Higgins.)
We finally decided to try having dinner in downtown LA instead of eating early or in the car. It turns out that a lot of downtown restaurants offer free shuttle service to the Music Center. The restaurant we picked was Cuidad, and was very good, though a bit pricey.
Things I’m looking forward to in the next few months:
Things I’m not looking forward to in the same time period:
Saturday at Wizard World LA was fun, and much more interesting than last year. Write-up and photos at K²R as usual.
Sunday got together with wayens, andrea_wot, zehntaur and gasean at Olive Garden for Wayne’s birthday. Lots of catching up. Discovered alenxa and I are going to see Phantom of the Opera the same night as zehntaur.
Forgot to set my alarm last night, so I overslept by about 25 minutes. Though I probably would’ve hit snooze 2 or 3 times anyway, so it evened out. Decided to finish breakfast before leaving, though, instead of eating at my desk, so I got in later than I intended.
Stepped out of the elevator and the VP was just stepping out the door, saw me, and said, “You’re here!”
“Um… I was here yesterday afternoon too…”
“Now you can fix the network!”
Yep — the internal network had gone down this morning, right about the time I walked out the door. They’d been trying to call me at home (which didn’t work, since, well, I wasn’t there). So I spent the next 20 minutes looking at blinkenlights and trying to figure out which boxes needed to be reset and so on.
In retrospect, I’m glad I finished breakfast first.
I went into work Monday morning, but after a few hours realized I’d be better off at home. So I left at lunch. Ended up staying home today, too, spending most of my time lying on the couch with a blanket, reading. Went out with alenxa at lunchtime to vote, run over to CVS, and grab some hot&sour soup.
Yesterday I finished a DVD set I borrowed from my dad, with 5 of the classic Universal Frankenstein movies. Watched House of Frankenstein, which was a rather disjointed tale of revenge with two main segments: one with Dracula, the other with the Wolfman. The Frankenstein Monster was in there too, mostly being thawed out during the second half, and finally broke free of his straps at the very end, when he strangled one person and wandered outside and fell in some quicksand. Yes, that was all he did.
Whatever I have, the rest of the symptoms aren’t that severe — except for the general out-of-it feeling that has me aware that I really shouldn’t be doing to much, say, driving. (As it was, I ran over a traffic cone trying to back out of the parking at the polling place, then dragged it about 15 feet before realizing it was still under the car.) And I’m not sure how effective I’d actually be at the desk right now, given how much trouble I was having concentrating yesterday. Not to mention I think the constant snuffling would get on everyone’s nerves.
*sigh* Comic-Con Hotel tomorrow morning. They say their travel agent has added server capacity, so with luck it won’t be quite such a chore to get into. Last year it took me an hour to get through. With more luck I’ll feel healthy enough to go into work and catch up.