So, it’s been three weeks in the new place… over a month since we took possession. So how’s it been?
…. ‘good’… in the general… non-commital… sense…
For the most part it is good; driving to work gets on my mind a bit from an environmental aspect – though I did fix my flat tire today, and will reassemble my bike tomorrow, so maybe Monday’ll be the day I finally start riding – and the place is nice enough… it’s big, it’s nice to be able to wander around any part of it with the knowledge of equal right to be there, as opposed to living in someone else’s house… no more of that living at home feeling.
And I can’t deny I have wasted many hours already in Rockband, which has been a source of great amusement, though last night I was forced to play on Hard – David has gotten so far through that you can’t progress on any lower difficulty level – and it’s ridiculous how the difficulty jumps up; it’s an order of magnitude above Medium, easily… I’m lucky if I can finish a song. So it went very quickly from amusing and mildly challenging to “okay, that’s fourteen failures in a row and my best attempt got me 36%, I think this is the part where I’m not having fun anymore”. :(
Anyway, digressions aside… yes, it’s no longer living at home, but instead now more like living at Bundoora again. Which, of course, is hard to construe as a positive thing. I thought after a full month the boxes of crap all throughout the dining room would be dealt with, and that the incessant, gross mess throughout the kitchen would eventually peter out, back into something reasonable… but alas, that hasn’t really happened. I myself had to move the boxes, I had to clean the kitchen – which was filthy again only a couple of days later – and it seems I’ll have to do all the other cleaning as well, if it’s ever going to be done.
The trickiest part is not knowing where to assign blame; I’d be happy enough to slap someone around until they actually pulled their weight, if only I knew whom. I have my suspicions, and they tell me it’s hardly an equal share of the responsibility, but…
That and the aforementioned bit of injected culture courtesy of Francisco. Granted, it’s just an unfortunate fate that his desk is set up on the opposite side of the wall to my pillow. It might be possible for him to move it to another wall, though it does seem to be in the obvious location as it is. Likewise I might be able to flip my room’s layout, but aside from being a huge pain in the arse, wouldn’t necessarily help at all. Anyway, pretty much every night, like clock-work, he cranks up some TV show or some movie or some quite bad music, shortly after midnight. I’ve asked him, with due restraint, on half a dozen nights to keep it down, which at least gets him to concede the volume a bit, though the appropriate solution would be headphones, which he refuses to use. He made the claim that he didn’t own any, evidently bluffing, and when I called him on it and gave him mine he of course didn’t use them, that I’m aware, though he did turn the volume down anyway, so, it sort of worked.
Grrr. I’ve been deliberately patient to the point of indolence, out of some unfounded belief a careful series of subtle and positive pushes will resolve things, but, it’s either not happening at all, or is going to take more patience than I have. I did notice today the kitchen counters were cleared of the larger objects, at least – though left covered in spilt drinks, food, and whatever the hell else; sponges aren’t a tool these cavemen have discovered yet, it appears – which is perhaps an evolutionary leap worthy the attention of Darwin himself, but… millions of years from now a clean kitchen will be of use to me not.
On the upside, patience is a virtue; it’s given me plenty of time to fantasise about spiteful ways to exact punishment and revenge, which while mostly fantasies are entertaining nonetheless. :)
In any case, I wouldn’t even know where to go to get scorpions, anyway. And I’m way too squeamish to handle a horse’s head.
My therapy this weekend has been Stargate, Hoodoo Gurus and shopping… I now can say I have ‘experienced’ the Palo Alto Frys… it makes absolutely no sense to stylise an electronics store in a Wild West theme, and it frankly looks sad and impractical, yet, they did it nonetheless…
I picked up a USB/firewire hub, an external hard drive (750GB @ $160… good god kids are spoilt these days… back in my day we go 30 gig for $250, and we bloody well liked it!), and somewhat randomly a book – ‘The Cult of Mac’ – which could be either disturbing, amusing, insightful, or any combination thereof. I haven’t had a chance to read any of it yet, though.
Girls buy clothes of no necessity, guys buy gadgets of at least arguable necessity… and yet if you think about it, we’re the ones vilified for our choices.
So yes, that’s that. I was hoping to be industrious this weekend, but aside from carving up most of the boxes left over from moving in – necessary and therapeutic; stab stab stab stab – I’ve done little. And fixed my bike, as noted. And fixed the curtains in the lounge room, after I broke them… when we’d inspected the place I’d expected difficulties with the main living area, given the only logical arrangement of couches and TV would be very bad from a sunlight perspective, but I hadn’t counted on the innate ability of geeks to turn any enclosed space into a dungeon. Nonetheless, despite the genetic pre-disposition to gothic interior decoration, there is apparently nothing there for carpentry. 14mm screws into plaster would not be my first choice to support a curtain rod. The now-useless extra four holes in the wall share this opinion.
People have asked after photos of the new place, but I’m disinclined to put such things online; privacy and all. I shall have to email some round, I do think, not that there’s really much to see.
