When I got home tonight, Randy announced that he was moving out effective the end of the week.
If Leonard is still going to move out—which is not 100% certain for reasons that I won’t get into, because that’s his business and not mine—that means that I’ll have this place to myself by, oh, mid-month.
Beware the ides of March indeed!
Have you ever looked at your home network and said, “Man, this is one hell of a screwed-up setup?”
Well, I have. I got things re-wired just now, and it’s pretty sad and pathetic. So sad, I won’t even detail it. What I have will work for the max two weeks that Leonard still lives here, at which point I’ll get to finally reclaim the back bedroom as mine and start this networking gig all over again. Of course, there, I’ll have the router and the cable modem together in one place, and the bulk of the networked devices will be in close proximity, and I … won’t have two switches daisy-chained together. [There, I said it.]
Now that my Knology cable modem is installed, I have to re-route my network at home. [The cable modem is about 15 feet from where the DSL modem was; I now have to figure out how to re-route the cables without it looking like spaghetti ... or maybe I just don't care.]
Well, of course, Knology got their problem solved and never called me back. Last night, I got tired of waiting, so I called them. I’ll be getting a service call on Saturday afternoon—might make me late for the game! :(—but after then, I can kill my home phone … just in time for Leonard to (maybe) move back in with us for a couple of weeks.
Crazy times.
Now that Leonard’s moved—well, some of his stuff is still here … but he’s not—I’m dropping my home phone. Of course, this also means that I have to drop my DSL connection, but in its place goes a cable modem. As I’ve bitched before, I’ve gotten really horrid service at home of late, which has been fine because, in many ways, I’ve not had time nor needed to be online after hours, but now that some things have passed, I’m kinda in the mood to be connected a little more. And, well, the have-a-connection-for-30-seconds-and-then-BLAMMO! was getting old.
Of course, it’s being nice tonight … I think it knows that it’s days are numbered.
Now, if Knology would just give me a sure-and-certain install time … I’d schedule BellSouth’s disconnection time for a few days later.
Remember when I was kvetching about poor utility performance? I got home last night to the power having gone off for well over an hour and to no phones.
No phone, no Internet.
Anger! Frustration!
I think that what’s happened is:
That reminds me of moving into my first apartment, almost six years ago now. The BellSouth folks hooked up our phone line to someone else’s apartment, disconnecting their service in the process. That was an unGodly mess to deal with back then, and if it’s happened to me again, I’m gonna be really, really angry.
If the latter’s happened, BellSouth has definitely lost me as a customer.
Gah.
Well, it seems as if Leonard will move out at the end of the month, leaving the place to Randy and me when he’s gone.
I take it that this means that Randy will quickly exit the “bitch room”.
Maybe that means I get an office back, seeing as Randy has a desk and such to use in his bedroom. Of course, we’ll have to swap the desks, seeing as Leonard has my desk in his bedroom right now. Swapping desks would return all my old bedroom furniture to one bedroom, which would be nice in a decorating manner. It would actually give me an honest-to-goodness guest bedroom as well. Mind you, I really would use it as an office, but still.
With Leonard moving, I’m very strongly considering cutting off my home phone and switching from DSL to cable. I’d hoped that the AT&T Wireless-Cingular merger was going to pay dividends in bundling and lower my cell phone bill, but it won’t—at least not what the costs of dropping my home line and DSL and gaining cable modem access would be.
The only thing that would suck is that I’m not 100% sure that home-to-mobile line portability works for folks like me, who already have established cellular service and are dropping their home lines. I get the feeling that BellSouth’s customer service representatives would send me down a gauntlet of “we don’t want to lose you!” sales pitches that would take a good hour to move through. I think my answer’s going to be, “Unless you can make my DSL service stop sucking, suck it!” Connectivity right now is still as crap as it’s been since the beginning of December, long technical support call notwithstanding.
Welcome to another season of life, one where a good friend who’s been a good friend for some time moves on, and the ripples echo all throughout life…
Between our repeated water pressure problems and repeated network connectivity issues, moving is looking like a really good option right this moment.
And for any of you who will kvetch and say, “Please move over towards us,” my response is, “Only when you’ll help me move my church, too.”
That goes doubly for the Arizona nerds.
Let me tell you … no water for my morning shower really sucked. I hate having to wear a hat at work.
I’m taking off of work for a variety of reasons—to go help Mom take care of her mother, for one—but also to go re-up my lease.
Yeah, that’s right. For the first time in four years, I won’t be moving at the end of a 12-month lease.
Call it a brief pause in my life’s itinerancy.
Where Amy didn’t say what I want to say but can’t, you can mix that with the lyrics to “Can’t Lose You”.
I think that I have a new understanding for what Derek was saying now–for once, it’s someone else doing the moving, someone else leaving. When Jessica and Heather left, well, I was still in a state of flux, the state in which I’ve spent most of my life. Now that I’m a state of semi-stasis, it hits a little harder.
You’re a call on the phone or a ride on a plane, but that just isn’t the same, yeah well … but I know I can’t lose you.
It’s just the first week in March, but already I’m thinking about where I might move.
Our lease is up at the end of July. [I thought for a while that it might be at the end of June, but I then remembered that I moved in mid-June, which means I paid a partial and started the 12-month lease on 1 July.] I know that I’m going to be without my present roommates when I move; I think Anthony will be moving in with that woman of his, and Leonard will be going off to Charlotte. [What I don't know is when Leonard finishes his degree. I know that he'll have to take some classes in the summer, but I don't know whether it'll be the full ten-week term or just one five-week term. L-Fred, you may feel free to comment when you read this if we don't cross paths today.]
Rick jokingly said, “You know, we have those two rooms upstairs …” Not only would that likely put a strain on an eight-year friendship [stop and think about how long that is, Rick ;)], but hey … a married couple doesn’t need me around to crimp their style.
I’ve been looking this morning at townhouses and condominiums for sale in this area. Now, if you’ve been following along for awhile, you’re going, “Didn’t you say that you counted out buying something this time last year?” Why yes, I did. But as this year has progressed, I have spent more time thinking about seminary and all that, and the more I think and pray about it, the more I realize that, for the next three or four years, my place is here in Huntsville. Interest rates are still way down, and there are several options very close to work [and further west in town, meaning that I won't feel like I'm driving half a day when I want to go see all my country-living friends].
Looking at the numbers, I could afford to live entirely by myself, if I chose. Would I like a roommate? Sure. Do I know anyone? No. Yes, for the first time in four or five years, I don’t have a list of people in mind to call up and ask about a place to crash. Shoot … the only name that does come to mind is one of my old roommates, but I don’t know how far along he is in school anymore.
The biggest reason to buy? It would be the last move that I’d make before leaving Huntsville. I know that I’m going to get jacked on rent rates at my present apartment complex; I got $100/mo. knocked off by taking advantage of a special when I moved in, and since they’ve changed a few things here [notably swapping water utilities], more things are now included in the rent. I see absolutely no reason to pay twice as much in rent as I could for someplace I could live, even if it’s just for a few years.
[Yes, if you're wondering, moving furniture yesterday got me thinking about moving again. I'd been subconsciously thinking about it for the last six weeks or so, but it made me vocalize it for the first time. Oi.]
You know, about the second week of August, I realized I’d made a mistake in selecting an apartment. Don’t get me wrong–I loved living up on Monte Sano. [You've heard me babble on and on about this before.] But I made a mistake in taking the smallest bedroom in that apartment. If money had been no object, we should have rented two apartments, side by side, and that way, we might have had enough room for all of us.
However, with much help from Sarah and Todd, the moving is done and the cleaning is complete. Blake just came in from work and handed me his keys; I’ll take off at lunch and go turn them in sometime today. That apartment is cleaner than it was when we got the keys–and I’m really not kidding. Todd gets the props for that.
If you think I’m done, well, hell no! I should take a photo of the pile of boxes. I haven’t earned the nickname “wonton” [for having "wonton of stuff"] for nothing. The garage is full of boxes and such, and hey, there’s still a lot of exterior work to do [painting, board replacement] here at Club Todder III.
But man, it’s good to be out of there…
Okay, so I don’t want to fool with it, but I’m just going to pot the “whine” gain down to nothing and go on and get the rest of my stuff moved. If I could have moved around a bit more today, rather than just sit here at my desk, I’d probably not be so stiff. Oooooh, look, Advil. That should solve that problem.
My wrangling with the schedules is done for the day. The work I put in on them this weekend was very worth it–the schedule slips that are caused by our customer are now very clearly presented, and that’s a very important thing. It’s one thing for the Boeing POC and us to say that Boeing is the problem; it’s another to have it graphically on the schedule.
Of course, I still haven’t gotten to meet with the person I should have met with yesterday. The stalling and delaying is somewhat familiar, and all the more frustrating because of that. However, this is work, and we’ve got to get this done. The schedules are now being read, though, and of that, I am thankful.
How scary is it that August starts on Thursday? Pardon me, but where the heck did my summer go?
Again, m4d pr0pz to Todd, without whom I’d be wholly screwed on the moving front. Damn, I miss my truck. Of course, the Semi is so big that we got two loads’ worth of my truck in his.
I really need to repair my bed. The bottom frame’s cross-piece is starting to get stripped out. A couple wooden golf tees, some wood glue, and a drill will fix that up quite quickly. Tonight, however, it’s getting the last few bits of stuff out of the apartment and to the new place for all of us [mostly me, but Blake has a few things there] and cleaning it. Todd’s done the bulk of the cleaning already, and I’ll get the vacuuming on my end done and mop up the hall bath, and we should be good. Sure, I’m on about five hours’ sleep, but when you play Mr. Last MInute …
Todd has started calling me “wonton”, because as he says, “You have wonton of stuff.” Well, not really, but I do have a lot of stuff. And it was crammed into a very small bedroom. Here, I got lotsa lotsa room! Verra nice.
Mmmmm … I better go think about getting the laundry out over at the house and getting to work. I so want to call in sick or something like that, but that’s unethical and painful, especially considering that someone else who does Boeing Status Tuesday was out sick last week, which made it hard on the rest of us. I can’t do that to them guilt-free.
Well, the kick-ass installers for Mediacom got us hooked up today. Those two kick serious butt.
Big kudos to Todd for crawling his ass up in the attic and getting those wires laid. Dude, I owe you more than that damn pizza.
Of course, the hilarity of this message is that I’ve had a working network connection at the Outhouse since, oh, 6:00, and I haven’t been on that part of the property at all … hell, this is posted from the SGA Office. Quite sad, if you ask me.
It's all just a stream of consciousness for me, folks.