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robotech_masterOr it would be if I were actually physically home at the moment.
As you saw in my twitters if you bothered clicking past the LJ cut, I arrived back home yesterday, with my cats. It certainly was different than I left it. If you can believe it, my aunt and uncle spent two days cleaning up my living room, bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. And then they replaced a lot of stuff. I really need to thank them more for it. I should send them a nice card or something. My poor uncle, after all of that he had to go and accidentally saw his thumb half off, severing the tendon and the nerve though not the bone. He's not been very happy these last couple of weeks.
The bathroom shows the most dramatic changes: new heat register, shower curtain, window curtain (for some inexplicable reason, there is a window to the outside world in my bathroom in my shower—not frosted glass or anything, an honest-to-gawd plain-glass window. Though even without a curtain, it only looks out into the alley between my apartment building and a huge lumber yard warehouse next door, so it's not as if there could be peeping toms), over-toilet shelves with little baskets to contain all the stuff that should go in my medicine cabinet except that it doesn't have shelves in it. And they cleaned out the bathtub. They even scoured all the mold off of the suction-cup pad (either that or they bought a new one, but it seems like the same one).
In the kitchen and living room, things are generally tidied up. Likewise in the bedroom—but to my surprise, there are now rather nice blinds over the windows. Somehow, they work better than my previous attempt to block out the morning sunlight from my eastern exposure by putting aluminum foil on the windows ("I'm putting tinfoil up on the windows / lying down in the dark to dream"). Well, at least they work well together with the foil, though I'm now considering removing the foil so I can let the sunlight into my room when I'm not sleeping.
My cats are happy to be back, too, and I'm happy to have them. Having been largely separated from them for the last three months, I'd forgotten how playful they are when put together in a smaller space, and their little habits. Benji is kind of stand-offish; he likes to spend his time looking out the window. Diva is friendlier, and will often make a semi-lap cat of herself when I'm watching a movie, or will steal my warm seat if I get up for some reason.
Apart from not being able to find one or two things that I'd like to find after the clean-up, there's just one really annoying thing about my apartment right now: it doesn't have Internet service. I had noticed shortly after Thanksgiving that I couldn't log into my apartment Linux box that I keep hooked up to a DynDns address as a server. I had assumed at the time that I'd been shut down for nonpayment of bills, but then I got a threat to shut down my service so it supposedly hadn't been turned off yet.
Last week when I was up here for the doctor appointment, I called tech support and found out that they needed to send someone out to examine the physical setup at my premises, and the earliest they could do it is Tuesday afternoon. So I'll have to take half the day off of work to be here when they come out to visit so I can open the apartment for them. And I have to go elsewhere for Internet service until then. At least I'll be getting a refund for the time it's been out.
So, being without Internet last night, I had to find other entertainments. After setting my computer back up with its 5.1 speaker system, I watched Loreena McKennitt: Nights from the Alhambra in 5.1 for the first time, then about half of Jackie Chan's movie Project A II. Finished it up this morning before setting out for Internet-land. At about 10 a.m. I took a taxi to the nearby Panera and spent an hour or so noodling on the Internet there. Then my friend Sandy called and came down to hang out with me for a while.
Shortly after he arrived, to my great annoyance Panera's "half hour Internet limit during peak hours" limitation kicked in and I wasn't able to continue surfing. So after we ate, I headed over to the Brown Derby next door to remedy a shortage of martini-making materials. Sandy helped me carry it all back to his SUV, and then we headed over to my place. I showed off how clean it was (though of course I can't take the credit), then showed him two episodes of Read or Die and gave him the Christmas presents I'd picked up for Emma. He also picked up the Oriental rug I'd gotten him for Christmas; to my very great surprise, he was able to carry it out to his SUV all by himself, whereas my Dad had needed me to help him carry it in. But then, Sandy is a pretty big guy.
After he left, I did a little soul-searching and finally decided that, no, I didn't want to spend the next six hours sitting in my room staring at the walls. I decided to shell out more cab fare to take me downtown to the Mudhouse, a great little coffeehouse with dim lighting, plentiful plugins, very tasty warm beverages, and an 11 p.m. closing time. And here I am, jamming to tunes on my iPod through ear-covering noise-cancelling 'phones and typing into my Ubuntu laptop. As nice as it is to be in my apartment again, it's also nice to be out of it. Especially when there's Internet out of it that there isn't in it.
Pretty soon I suppose I should go ahead and call the cab for another $8-9 trip back to my apartment, so as to have plenty of time to get ready for bed and get a good night's sleep for work tomorrow. At least I know the Internet won't be keeping me awake late! And on the bright side, at least I'm getting refunded for all the time I've been without Internet, which should more than cover cab costs.
And that's how the last couple of days have been for me. Going to sign off now and call the cab.
As you saw in my twitters if you bothered clicking past the LJ cut, I arrived back home yesterday, with my cats. It certainly was different than I left it. If you can believe it, my aunt and uncle spent two days cleaning up my living room, bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. And then they replaced a lot of stuff. I really need to thank them more for it. I should send them a nice card or something. My poor uncle, after all of that he had to go and accidentally saw his thumb half off, severing the tendon and the nerve though not the bone. He's not been very happy these last couple of weeks.
The bathroom shows the most dramatic changes: new heat register, shower curtain, window curtain (for some inexplicable reason, there is a window to the outside world in my bathroom in my shower—not frosted glass or anything, an honest-to-gawd plain-glass window. Though even without a curtain, it only looks out into the alley between my apartment building and a huge lumber yard warehouse next door, so it's not as if there could be peeping toms), over-toilet shelves with little baskets to contain all the stuff that should go in my medicine cabinet except that it doesn't have shelves in it. And they cleaned out the bathtub. They even scoured all the mold off of the suction-cup pad (either that or they bought a new one, but it seems like the same one).
In the kitchen and living room, things are generally tidied up. Likewise in the bedroom—but to my surprise, there are now rather nice blinds over the windows. Somehow, they work better than my previous attempt to block out the morning sunlight from my eastern exposure by putting aluminum foil on the windows ("I'm putting tinfoil up on the windows / lying down in the dark to dream"). Well, at least they work well together with the foil, though I'm now considering removing the foil so I can let the sunlight into my room when I'm not sleeping.
My cats are happy to be back, too, and I'm happy to have them. Having been largely separated from them for the last three months, I'd forgotten how playful they are when put together in a smaller space, and their little habits. Benji is kind of stand-offish; he likes to spend his time looking out the window. Diva is friendlier, and will often make a semi-lap cat of herself when I'm watching a movie, or will steal my warm seat if I get up for some reason.
Apart from not being able to find one or two things that I'd like to find after the clean-up, there's just one really annoying thing about my apartment right now: it doesn't have Internet service. I had noticed shortly after Thanksgiving that I couldn't log into my apartment Linux box that I keep hooked up to a DynDns address as a server. I had assumed at the time that I'd been shut down for nonpayment of bills, but then I got a threat to shut down my service so it supposedly hadn't been turned off yet.
Last week when I was up here for the doctor appointment, I called tech support and found out that they needed to send someone out to examine the physical setup at my premises, and the earliest they could do it is Tuesday afternoon. So I'll have to take half the day off of work to be here when they come out to visit so I can open the apartment for them. And I have to go elsewhere for Internet service until then. At least I'll be getting a refund for the time it's been out.
So, being without Internet last night, I had to find other entertainments. After setting my computer back up with its 5.1 speaker system, I watched Loreena McKennitt: Nights from the Alhambra in 5.1 for the first time, then about half of Jackie Chan's movie Project A II. Finished it up this morning before setting out for Internet-land. At about 10 a.m. I took a taxi to the nearby Panera and spent an hour or so noodling on the Internet there. Then my friend Sandy called and came down to hang out with me for a while.
Shortly after he arrived, to my great annoyance Panera's "half hour Internet limit during peak hours" limitation kicked in and I wasn't able to continue surfing. So after we ate, I headed over to the Brown Derby next door to remedy a shortage of martini-making materials. Sandy helped me carry it all back to his SUV, and then we headed over to my place. I showed off how clean it was (though of course I can't take the credit), then showed him two episodes of Read or Die and gave him the Christmas presents I'd picked up for Emma. He also picked up the Oriental rug I'd gotten him for Christmas; to my very great surprise, he was able to carry it out to his SUV all by himself, whereas my Dad had needed me to help him carry it in. But then, Sandy is a pretty big guy.
After he left, I did a little soul-searching and finally decided that, no, I didn't want to spend the next six hours sitting in my room staring at the walls. I decided to shell out more cab fare to take me downtown to the Mudhouse, a great little coffeehouse with dim lighting, plentiful plugins, very tasty warm beverages, and an 11 p.m. closing time. And here I am, jamming to tunes on my iPod through ear-covering noise-cancelling 'phones and typing into my Ubuntu laptop. As nice as it is to be in my apartment again, it's also nice to be out of it. Especially when there's Internet out of it that there isn't in it.
Pretty soon I suppose I should go ahead and call the cab for another $8-9 trip back to my apartment, so as to have plenty of time to get ready for bed and get a good night's sleep for work tomorrow. At least I know the Internet won't be keeping me awake late! And on the bright side, at least I'm getting refunded for all the time I've been without Internet, which should more than cover cab costs.
And that's how the last couple of days have been for me. Going to sign off now and call the cab.
