Category ►►► Disorder In the House

April 12, 2010

Anals of Relocation 003: Back Online

Administrative Annunciamentos , Disorder In the House
Hatched by Dafydd

A quick note to declare we survived translocation relatively intact. I have restored (some) online connection; haven't rebuilt the entire LAN here, but at least I connected a laptop... I'll just pretend I'm on holiday in a foreign land, where I must use portable means of internet communications.

I will make a real post later today; for right now, this is it. But keep watching the skies...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 12, 2010, at the time of 10:58 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 10, 2010

Anals of Relocation 002

Disorder In the House
Hatched by Dafydd

My word, but one never realizes just how many barnacles one has collected until one attempts to move.

We have already carted out about forty banker's boxes, mostly filled with books; yet we still haven't completely cleared the decks for moving the bookcases, let alone the bed, couch, and other furniture. Which we're doing tomorrow... yikes!

One of our (now empty) bookcases is so tall and wide that the only way the delivery guys could get it inside in the first place (several years ago) was to haul it up and over the balcony; and that looks to be the only way to get it out now, or rather the reverse. I toyed with the madcap idea of doing it ourselves; but by the time I'd investigated the high tensile-strength rope we would need and mulled how I could anchor myself to the sliding glass door, I realized just buying the materials to lower the 150 lb bookcase would be a significant fraction of the cost of simply hiring professional movers to come up, spend an hour or so, and just move the dad-burned thing themselves.

Mercifully, logic dictates that we move everything else ourselves, but allow the movers -- who are insured, mind -- to schlep the fershlugginer bookcase down a flight of air.

I see that the aptly-named Stupak has opted out of standing for reelection; evidently, it would have demanded too much "exertion." Gad, if that's the criterion, Sachi and I would have resigned in the middle of the move days ago!

The tough part tomorrow -- later today, actually -- is that we have to disconnect all the computers, the cable modem, the TV, cable box, DVRs, VCRs, and such here... then reassemble them all in the new venue; yet we must await the pleasure of the cable guy before we can do so. They're supposed to come between one and three p.m. -- but anybody who saw the Jim Carrey novie knows how secure that prediction is.

Everything may or may not work; if not, then we're offline until it does.

And while we're on the subject, our local phone company is taking its sweet, own time scheduling the big switch, when the phone lines stop working here and start working (with the same phone number) over there. In fact, it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas -- before we'll have phone service restored. For the first time in my living memory, I may actually be glad I have a cell phone...

Busy, busy day upcoming; if you see a post late on Saturday, then you will know that something, at least, went right. As an eternal optimist, I'm under a lot of pressure to be optimistic; but it's awfully tough right now. I desperately need an internet connection and a DVR/TV connection; if I get those, I can live without much of the rest for a few days. If the videotape, the CD/DVD player, and the other computers survive the transit -- well, that's just gravy on the cake.

Keep watching this spot to see if we ever emerge from our dark offline of the soul.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 10, 2010, at the time of 2:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 6, 2010

Anals of Relocation 001

Disorder In the House
Hatched by Dafydd

Note the new category of this post; we'll be using it frequently as we keep you in the loop (thus making us all loopy).

~

For the first time since the inception of the Big Lizards blogsite in 1931, we are resiting the physical facilities, buildings, and sordid premises of the corporate presence; by which I mean we're moving from the condo we live in at this moment to a real house, about 1.5 miles away. Still in the same city -- heck, still in the same zip code -- but definitely a condescension to upward mobility.

Our deadline for being out of here and into there is April 15th. I have a recurrent nagging feeling that this is also some other important deadline, but it escapes me at the moment. No matter; I'll remember what it was sometime in May.

We still have a list of things 2 do a mile high; but it used to be eight miles high, so we're making progress. Aside from running back and forth between Lamps Plus, Home Despot, and the new Lizard Central, I spent most of the day removing the stump of a hedge whose branches we had already excised.

Did you all know that it's very difficult and time consuming to remove a stump by digging and hacking at it? We pondered dynamite; but since the hedge stump is approximately 5 inches from our bedroom wall, we tabled the suggestion indefinitely.

Three hours of chopping with pick and spade, undermining the roots, savagely attacking the living thing with a powerful set of clippers, and periodically drenching the ground with water to sling mud at the grass roots not only rid us of the noisome and unwanted presence, it also qualified us for high-level employment at Organizing for America.

Nota bene: Seeing the mene mene tekel upharsin on the wall, Sachi cleverly managed to be selected for several back to back to back business trips; so whenever I use the first-person plural, be advised it's more the "royal we" than indicator of actual collaboration.

We were stuck at the house for some time, as first a glazier, then a pair of locksmiths paraded through our property, plying their trades. The glazier had to replace three panes. It was originally two panes when we bought the place; but last week, while attempting to budge a stuck front window (several successive paint jobs whose performance artists thickly coated all the window runners, aspiring to make the cover of House Paintiful), we -- that is, I -- put our elbow through the window glass.

I actually don't mind glass cuts too much: They're clean and sharp, they don't leave a ragged edge or an ugly scar, and I usually don't even feel them. But I did feel this one, as it meant one more pane in the wallet.

We paid to paint the outside, but we're planning to paint all the interiors ourselves. We have some other grandiose (Sachi's worried term) schemes:

  • Plant vegetable garden in backyard.
  • Plant flowers and such, and create a Japanese garden in one out of the way spot back there.
  • Kill the front lawn with Round Up, till it under, and landscape ourselves a Southwestern motif... spineless cacti -- I call them "prickly pro-life Democrats" -- sagebrush, wild desert flowers, and such. Maybe a dry riverbed runs through it, depending on how much patience we possess.
  • Put up a picket fence along the western boundary of the property and another, more decorative fence from the garage to the house, thus fencing in the backyard completely and allowing us to get a canine companion. (The garage-house fence posts must be driven into concrete, so maybe we'll be renting a hammer drill. Or even hiring some illegal aliens to drill through the concrete for us.) We've never done anything like this before, but it's a good time to learn.
  • We want to drywall the garage, walls and ceiling; and we can really only afford to buy the materials -- not pay for the labor. Unless we use more illegales. So we'll be doing most of it ourselves. Needless to say, we're as unexperienced at putting up drywall as we are at putting up fences. Necessity is the great teacher.

Sure, it seems like a lot; but our other motto has always been "the world is not enough." (Our other other motto is "nothing succeeds like excess;" and of course, as we have mentioned more than a hundred times on this blog, our original motto is "no pussyfooting.")

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 6, 2010, at the time of 8:15 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

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