Quandaries
I’m trying to organise a housewarming. At this rate, the house will already be warm by the time it happens, but what the hell. However, it presents a number of quandaries.
- Can I manage to invite the right mix of friends who are social enough that they can keep conversations rolling along through the night? – something I am pretty bad at. A conversation in a room full of clones of me wouldn’t be up to much. Well, not after the initial surprise wore off, anyway.
- Can I wangle it so that I invite a broad cross-section of friends most of whom don’t know each other, yet everybody who comes (especially the less outgoing ones) will know at least one other person (other than me, and assuming everyone comes of course) so they don’t end up sitting quietly in a corner wondering how early they can leave and not appear rude?
- Is it okay to just go through my e-mail address book picking people to invite? Do I know for a fact that nobody I want to invite isn’t on e-mail?
- Am I asking for trouble if I invite two people I am friendly with who had a relationship together but broke up in a not particularly clean way? Will one feel offended if I don’t invite both? Should I even mention this here, knowing they’ll probably both read it?
- Do I follow one friend’s suggestion and come up with a dress theme and/or party games, or can this thing float on personalities, sparkling conversation, food, drink and music alone?
- Would some kind of firey heatey thing be good for the back porch, or would that be seen (by people who were there) as too derivative of Beth & Doug’s housewarming earlier in the year? And if I do get such a thing, can I even manage to work the bugger?
- I don’t even know if any of the people I’ve considered inviting smoke. Maybe one or two, sometimes.
- Should I even bother mentioning in the invitation that the Nightrider stops nearby, or is it a fact that everyone I’m inviting will drive, ride bikes, get taxis or lifts home, and wouldn’t be seen dead on a night bus? Maybe just the PT-martyrs.
- If I plan to have it in a few weeks, is there enough time to get enough of the unpacked boxes tidied away that the place doesn’t look like a tip?
- Do I take the opportunity to buy that multi-disc CD player I’ve been thinking about, to replace my aging 1980s vintage CD player? Or is that too 1990s, and I’d be better served with some kind of MP3 server? Or do I just put up with changing the CD every hour, and no random play?
- Do I even have a selection of CDs that will not appal people who have not previously encountered my taste in music?
All things to consider.
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Hilarious
Mr Speakerphone departs tomorrow. Part of the big re-org that’s happening has meant the company no longer require his services. As you might recall, his services (at least as far as I can see) involve mostly leaving his office door open while he shouts into a speakerphone.
This has been curtailed recently. Since he’s known his days are numbered, he’s been coming in about only every second day, and when he does come in, it’s usually late in the morning and he’s gone by mid-afternoon. The time that he’s here, of course, is mostly spent on the phone. He’s been networking – chasing jobs and setting up lunches and talking about the golf he’s been playing on the days he’s not here.
It’s interesting to hear how many of his calls go to voicemail. Why is it the people who make loud speakerphone calls usually end up on voicemail? Is it because they are inherently more irritating, and the callees are more likely to divert them when they see who it is?
Some of his colleagues have already left, but he’s held on a bit longer. Already the vultures are swooping round to claim his corner office when he’s gone.
Alas, his departure will still leave the Loud Guys Across The Partitions. There’s about three of them, and they have this annoying habit of telling jokes most of the day. I don’t know if the jokes are funny or not, because can’t hear them, but the loud guffaws carry right across the office, so I assume they must be utterly smegging hilarious. So I won’t be retiring my headphones just yet.
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How to irritate car drivers
![[Clearway pole]](/images/2003/07pole2.jpg) ![[Star pole]](/images/2003/07pole1.jpg) Decorative poles, Carnegie |
On Saturday I cooked up some rather delicious chicken tikka masala, and watched the Fellowship of the Rings DVD. Now this is a movie for which it is definitely worth fiddling to get the TV and DVD player into
16:9 mode. I haven’t seen it properly since in the cinema in December ‘01 (those attempts to watch it on dodgy pirate VCDs last year don’t count), and on my big(gish) TV with the sound pumped up, it is a glorious movie. Okay, so it still reminds one of a three hour Dungeons and Dragons game, but that just goes to show how much D&D creatorGary Gygax was influenced by Tolkien.
Due to circumstances I won’t go into right now, I haven’t actually seen The Two Towers yet. It’s due out on DVD in a few weeks, and rest assured that any number of Nazgul won’t prevent me being first in the queue to grab it when it’s out.
On Sunday afternoon, taking a break from the time I should have been using to unpack boxes (I got hardly any of them done all weekend… ah well, what’s the damn hurry?) I took a walk down the street to get some shopping. I love the fact that the nearby shops have almost everything one could possibly need. So even on a Sunday, I am able to stroll down and return with my cloth bags stuffed to the brim with groceries, fresh fruit, bread, anADSL line filter and a Big M.
(Actually I didn’t buy an ADSL line filter, though I could have.)
Many of the street poles in the area are decorated with pictures, and as I walked back I encountered one of the artists touching up a pole. He said he didn’t do them all – about half of them (which explains the two distinctive styles), and I congratulated him on his efforts. Some of them rather cleverly reflect the adjacent shops, or indicate in a rather more decorative way than usual where you shouldn’t park. It’s a small touch, but they do help to brighten up the place.
At some point on the way home I have to cross the main road. There’s a set of lights mid-block, and they are programmed to change as soon as you press the button. This is in stark contrast to the ones near where I used to live, where you could reach old age waiting for them to change. In fact the road might be clear of traffic for ages, with the green man steadfastly refusing to reveal himself. Then the lights would change just as a stream of cars arrived, thus delaying the maximum number of people. Yes, one could jaywalk, but this is something I make it a point not to do when I’m with my kids, since they need to learn how to cross roads safely.
So for me these traffic lights are a change for the better. You could do some serious traffic calming here if you sat there all day pressing the button, though you might well incite a road rage incident or two. Traffic calming/driver enraging. As the lights only get used occasionally, it probably doesn’t bother most car drivers (including me, when I drive past). But on this occasion, after crossing as I walked away down the street, before the lights changed back to green, I saw the middle-aged bloke in the car at the front of the queue make a hand gesture of the vaguely "oh this is terrific… why do they have traffic lights here… I should be exempt from stopping for them" variety. Heh. Tough luck fella.
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Wet
This morning was cold, wet and windy. The perfect day to stay indoors, preferably in bed, but if not in bed then by a roaring warm heater, reading the paper, and listening to the rain outside. But alas, it was not to be. Work was calling, and more temptingly, after-work drinks were calling. So I trudged to the station in the rain, wondering how drenched I would get with only a coat and an umbrella for protection, regretting that I didn’t have a wetsuit, and thinking I should really do something about that hole in the bottom of my right shoe. Well, something other than occasionally pointlessly putting superglue on it.
Gotta give Mother Nature credit though – a good drenching as a kind of last ditch effort to stave off theStage 2 Water Restrictions which just got announced. A little too late, but hey, if us city-dwellers get some regular rain, we won’t feel so bad about not being able to water our lawns.
11pm. And a lesson from the rain: don’t leave your paper recycling bin full of papers out in the rain. You may discover when you get home after a few beers with friends how much hassle it is to lift a plastic container full of waterlogged paper to the kerb for the next morning’s collection.
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Little boxes
As of this morning the Not Unpacked Boxes Count (NUBC for short – the number of boxes still full of stuff that are sitting around the house) was 20. And that doesn’t count a couple still in the boot of the car. This is expected to drop over the weekend, when an unpacking and/or purging-the-junk-I-don’t-need frenzy will take place.
One box that did get unpacked pretty damn sharpish when it arrived yesterday was my shiny new ADSL modem. Unfortunately once unpacked, plugged in and powered up, I discovered that although the third green light along showed it had happily found its ADSL connection, I had no idea what my password was. A phone call to the ISP ensued, and after negotiating my way through the endearingly amateur-sounding prompts and waiting ten minutes to talk to a human, I discovered that the password had been in a (paper) letter sent to my new home address some 6 days before I moved into it. Where that letter is now, I have no idea, but I don’t have it. On the friendly helpdesk person’s recommendation I called the sales people and they were able to tell me what my password was.
So now I’m out of dial-up purgatory and back in broadband heaven.
Late. Don’t you hate it when you’re making a sandwich late at night, and the avocado is the consistency of rubber (because it was hard when you bought it and you failed to put it in a brown paper bag with a banana as advised), so you’ve got out a sharp knife to slice it up, and you’re tired, and you’re half watching the late news while you do it, and pondering if the conspiracy theorists are having a field day over theDavid Kelly thing, and you end up cutting a small but painful nick in your finger?
Yeah, I hate that.
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Cold
I have discovered that the coldest place in the universe is not Ballarat as I once thought, but is in fact my new place on a winter’s morning. Heating is something you never quite appreciate when it’s good… until it’s gone.
At my old place, due to a design fault, the downstairs neighbours had central heating in their ceiling, which meant for much of the time, my place was nicely heated for free. When the neighbours moved out, suddenly the non-carpeted bits of the floor were cold, and stuff hung on the clothes horses took twice as long to dry.
And so to the new place… and a switch from brick to weatherboard. And ooh, does it get cold in the winter? Damn yes. Sometimes I can see my own breath in the bathroom. Last night I put two hot water bottles in the bed before I went to sleep – one to warm the spot for my feet, another to warm up the pillow. This morning the incentive to just stay in bed was strong enough that I was at risk of not going to work. And when I did eventually get out of bed, the kitchen was so cold that reaching into the fridge to get the milk, it didn’t feel cold.
Thankfully the gas heater in the livingroom pumps out a fair amount of heat, even on the lower settings – enough to make that room toasty warm within a couple of minutes of being turned on, and indeed to melt away any icicles in that half of the house. Of course it remains to be seen what affect this will have on my gas bill – but that means I’d better not stay in bed all day – at least not on work days.
I have another heater, a portable electric one, and I suspect that in the coming days I will go shopping for one or two more. And I may have to do something about the flimsy blinds and the rather pathetic level of insulation they provide.
Having conquered the cold by way of a lovely steaming hot morning shower, I eventually I made it into work. I knew it must be Monday morning when one of the servers at work asked me this:
![[Windows dialogue box]](/images/2003/07question.gif)
I thought about it for a while. Was it a cry for help? Was it the computer questioning its very existence? Or a comment on the nothingness of morality in today’s society?
Eventually I said… Yes. I must be a "cup half full" kind of person.
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Daniel’s suburban narrowband life
I am somehow surviving on dialup. Until last night I didn’t even have a phone cord long enough to reach from the phone point to the computer. In desperation on Thursday I moved the computer into the kitchen just to update my diary. (Must set things up so like checking my e-mail I can update it via the web from work).
A card arrived yesterday to say a package was waiting for me in the post office. Unfortunately it’s a real post office, not an agency, so it’s only open business hours. I’m betting in the package is my shiny new ADSL modem. Until I can get it on Tuesday, I’m stuck on dialup.
Today I hung up washing on the Hills Hoist in the back yard. I’m such a suburbanite now.
There has been one victim of the move: the goldfish. It was in a temporary bowl of water for too long because I couldn’t find the water conditioner to get its tank ready again for it. It never even got a name. So, RIP unnamed goldfish.
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Move part 3
Catch up time. With the move, the computers have been in bits for a few days, so here’s what’s been going on…
Monday
15:00. Having excused myself from work with a Sir Humphrey-esque e-mail "In order to further facilitate a successful conclusion to the aforementioned relocation venture" I go home early. Mr Fucking Arsehole Builder is in the driveway, and greets me with a smile and a "How are you?" Heh. Someone’s obviously had words with him.
Take another load of boxes over to the new place. The continually looming large piles of little stuff was getting me down, and a strong stomach ache was developing. Maybe stress-related. Take a couple of pain-killers and try to relax.
18:00. Take kids to Nandos for delicious Portuguese chicken, to avoid making any more mess in the kitchen than I already have.
19:00. Stomach pain much worse. Feel queasy. Proceed to throw up some Nandos delicious Portuguese chicken. The kids are very worried to see me in such a state, and draw a "Get well soon Dad" picture on the Magna Doodle. Awwwww…
20:15. Kids in bed. Proceed to throw up even more Nandos delicious Portuguese chicken.
20:30. Me in bed. See, this is just what I wanted, really, it is. The night before moving house, and I had planned to do a lot more packing of stuff, and I’m sick as a dog. Perfect bloody timing. Could things get any better?
21:00. Feeling very sick. Bring on more vomiting by thinking of Nandos delicious Portuguese chicken. That does the trick, and I bring up the rest of whatever had been ailing me, then have a sleep.
21:45. Wake up, feeling a whole heap better. Get up and do some packing.
23:00. Go to bed. Not nearly enough done, but stuff it, I’m not going to kill myself. Set alarm for 6:30, plan to ring removalists to cancel if I’m not feeling okay in the morning.
Tuesday
06:30. Wake up, feeling okay so I do some more packing, have breakfast, get dressed, get kids up and fed and dressed, all that usual morning stuff.
08:05. Removalists arrive and introduce themselves as Shaun and Sean. Or one of them might have been Shawn. Or maybe both Sean, Shaun or Shawn? Or some combination thereof – I have no idea, but they were phonetically identical – for convenience I will refer to them as Sean 1 and Sean 2. Sean 1 is the older, experienced mover, with a dry sense of humour, a smoking habit, probably resigned to being a removalist for most of his working life, and apparently loving it. Sean 2 is the skinny young bloke, probably doing this while he figures out what he wants to do with the rest of his life. Over the next few hours Sean 1 seems to give a lot of instructions to Sean 2, and I am reminded for some reason of how a man might address his dog when herding sheep.
They back their truck into the driveway, and start shifting stuff. The kids are excited as can be. Peter turns up to help with taking really big furniture (the kids’ bunk beds and my huge desk) apart so it can be moved.
I’m running around like a maniac. The removalists’ brief is to move the big stuff – the furniture. My idea had been to move the little stuff, but the problem with this is that all the big stuff has little stuff on it, in it, or wrapped around it. If I’d been well enough the night before, I could have dealt with all that.
![[The truck]](/images/2003/07truck.jpg) Unloading the truck |
08:40. Take the kids to school, then get back to it. The guys make my day by saying (and contradicting the lady I spoke to on the phone in the process) they can move the filing cabinet without all the files being removed from it. That’s a big buncha hassle avoided.
10:30. Somehow, we’re done – all the big stuff is in the truck, a few boxes of small stuff is in my car, and a shitload of other small stuff is still in the flat, to be done later in the day. We drive to the new house and start unloading.
11:50. Everything’s unloaded. I pay the movers, and off they go. They were great, seriously. According to the side of the truck, Gronow’s have been in business since 1909, and if they keep this up, they’ll be going for a while yet. I’ll hire them again.
I spend the rest of the day shuttling between the old and new places (thank goodness it’s less than ten minutes in the car). There is a phenomenal bunch of little stuff left. Later on I pick the kids up from school and we do another couple of runs, then have dinner at my mum’s place, another Godsend as all the kitchen stuff is in boxes. We get home and somehow get the beds made and get a good night’s sleep.
Wednesday
I somehow scrounge up some breakfast, get the kids to school, then back to the old flat to continue moving stuff. I ring my boss to say I’ll be in later, when everything is moved. WHY DO I HAVE SO MUCH STUFF? A major cull will follow all of this.
Mr formerly-Arsehole-Builder drives up in his ute. He very politely asks if his car is in my way, which it isn’t. heh.
11:00. The final load of stuff is moved. Okay, so there’s a some junk left behind, but since the builders are going to trash the place, who cares? They can deal with it. I drive over to the old landlady’s house to drop in the remaining rent, get her to sign the bond form. "Don’t do nothing!" she had told me, referring to cleaning. I hadn’t.
Then I go to work. The new commute is about the same length as the old one, except the trains don’t run express in the off-peak, but more do in peak hour. More about the new neighbourhood later. Work, in comparison to the chaos at home, is a tranquil oasis.
19:00. Had hoped to go to the birthday.blog.meetup, but circumstances beyond my control see me back home with the kids for the evening, and facing some house teething problems. The hot water heater pilot light has gone out, and won’t re-light. The sparker thing is barely sparking, and even poking a match in doesn’t seem to do any good. Have to ring the agent in the morning about that one.
The hot tap in the laundry is leaking, and there’s a big puddle all over the floor of the (fortunately separate) laundry. This I solve by tightening the hose pipe fitting thingy with a spanner, and all is well. Apart from the secondary puddle caused by my moving the washing machine to look at the leak, and the outlet pipe jumping out of the basin while doing a load, but it’ll all be dry and hunkydory in a day or two, I’m sure.
I spend the evening starting to unpack some of the boxes (about 10% unpacked, a heap to go) and putting the TV/stereo back together so I can at least play music and watch TV as I unpack.
So, lessons out of all of this?
- I have way too much stuff. A colleague at work suggested date-stamping everything when you use it! Not a bad idea – anything not touched in two years could get thrown in the bin. Books and magazines in particular: I have kept a stupid number of old computer mags. They were interesting to read at the time, but ultimately, anything I could possibly want to know in the future about computers (or indeed almost any topic) is on the web somewhere anyway. So apart from the really nostalgic ones (like the copies of APC where they review the original IBM PC and the Vic20) they’ll be getting chucked.
- I hate moving. I had hoped to make this move into a house that I owned, so I’d never have to move again. Well, one more time – in a wooden box, but when that happens, someone will be moving me. Alas, home ownership and a wacking great mortgage is not to be just yet. Next time, however…
- Next time, I will endeavour to pack everything up in boxes beforehand, then the movers can shift it. That’s definitely what I’ll do next time. Most of the stress this time round was caused by continual shuttle trips (probably around 15 all up) to move stuff in the car.
- Boxes are the anti-TARDIS: they are smaller on the inside. You will always need more than you have.
- I have a small excess of plates and glasses and other breakables. Despite taking the minimum of care wrapping them, I have so far not found a single one broken or chipped. I therefore conclude that elaborate wrapping of glassware is a waste of time, at least if you’re moving it yourself.
- One man’s junk is another’s treasure. Among the ten or so bag loads of stuff I threw away was a 1987 edition Guinness Book Of Records. 1987. That’s 16 years ago. It was in a bag I threw in a bin over the weekend. By Monday I noticed the builders had chucked the bag into a skip. Midway through loading the moving van I noticed one of the Seans had put it in the truck for some light reading later. Fair enough.
- My hands are a mess. I’ve got strange cuts on the ends of my fingers, like all the skin has dried and cracked or something. Oh, poor delicate flower, you’re thinking. Yeah. Well. Frankly, I don’t think shifting this many boxes is what I’m used too.
Yikes. That’s all for now.
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