Moving day
News ·Sunday March 26, 2006 @ 15:30 EST (link)
Many things have happened since I last wrote; not the least of which being that we have finally moved into our house, and this is the way of it.
We rented a 16' Budget truck for Saturday the 25th, and on that day I and three co-workers converged on my office and drove over to our apartment in my car, getting there around 1100. I'd picked the truck up earlier and backed it toward the apartment; we'd been packing and removing boxes every few days for the past few weeks and made sure that the way was clear to remove the larger items. It probably took us an hour to load up, then about 30 minutes to drive over to our house in Duvall, and another hour to unload, punctuated by ordering pizza for the hungry laborers. After we dropped everyone back at Microsoft, Honey and I packed the truck again.there were still plenty of smaller items, e.g. the drawers we'd removed earlier, files, kitchen and bathroom items, laundry baskets, etc..and made another trip. We were pretty knackered after unloading, so we waited until the next day to bring the truck back (we had it from 0800 Saturday to 0900 Sunday).
I am also now involved in lawn care, which, I'm told, is both an art and a science. I ordered a broadcast spreader and a lawnmower from Amazon (better price than Home Depot; until now, I hadn't known Amazon sold tools, either). The spreader had to be assembled, which was a bit of an exercise, but it seems solid; the lawnmower just needed the handle to be folded back and some screws to be tightened (and to be charged). Yesterday (the 2nd) I spread some fertilizer on the lawn and pulled up a few dozen dandelions, most of them by the roots. I'll mow in a few days when the fertilizers had a chance to, um, fertilize. Very new at this lawn stuff but the seller has given me some helpful advice. We picked up Deep Space Nine season 2 and some GRE books with the other Amazon purchases.
Last entry I was fairly happy to have been accepted as a GNM student into the University of Washington's Professional Master's Program in Computer Science and Engineering, but unfortunately the class that I wanted, and the alternate both filled up. Maybe next quarter; perhaps I'll have written the GRE by then.
At work I'm trying to check my current outstanding fixes in. Lots of build breaks to navigate around, before I can even attempt to run the remote test suite (the local "quick" test suite passed already).
We've had to transfer various utilities: we no longer have Ista (water, sewage, electricity, trash); the City of Duvall handles water, Puget Sound Energy handles electricity, and Waste Management picks up trash, recycling and yard waste. Millennium Digital Media provide cable here, instead of Comcast; we also decided to get cable Internet through MDM, since Speakeasy's contractor wasn't able to install OneLink DSL out here. We're going to try to go with Vonage VoIP for telephone service (free long distance in the US and Canada). It's all part of the process of moving, which I hope we don't have to do again soon; we're still sore from loading and unloading the truck.
