Indiana, Week Two

[rax]

Woke up this morning after having a dream that I had only brought phantom objects with me to Indiana and I had to fly back to Boston today as soon as possible, rent a new truck, load it up with my real possessions, and drive it to Indiana, since the lease at the old place expires today. I woke up ready to buy a last-minute flight, thought for thirty seconds, and realized that was astoundingly stupid. :) We had a couple of delays (as Eredien accidentally injured herself working on a bookshelf yesterday and we lost a few hours to urgent care and no longer have two people who can lift things) but my goal was "everything more or less in the place we will want it by June 1st and everything unpacked and mostly set up by June 15th," and I think we can still meet that. laura47  gets here tonight and can help me with the rest of the shelves, and Wednesday most of the new furniture shows up and we can build it and unpack board games, video game stuff, and kitchen dry goods into it. That will mostly leave us with books [0], art, and the occasional "oh god why do we even own this object." So that's pretty exciting.

I've pretty much settled into a rhythm with regard to work for my job, which is good; working from home all the time is a little weird, but I was already used to doing it in multiple-day stretches and I just need to be less nervous about randomly calling coworkers the way I would otherwise have randomly walked up to them at the office. This is especially true after the Nokia acquisition as for a variety of reasons that are both boring and probably secret it's much harder to catch people on the company messaging system than it used to be. But luckily everyone has this shiny new phone that I can call them on! So work is working, and I'm not sure how much of it I will keep doing once school starts, but definitely some, and I think I'll actually have fun with that most of the time. Having two major things to play off of each other, like jobwork/schoolwork, is a very good mechanism for getting more stuff done if you are me. Lucky for me, I am!

The presence of an actual yard continues to be amazing. Right now I can see a squirrel having a conniption, a rabbit eating my weeds, a blue jay who wants to be where the squirrel is having the conniption, a mourning dove, and there was a yellow-bellied woodpecker until just a minute ago. Selene is largely disinterested, but Oolong will sit by the window with me and just watch for an extended period of time, occasionally making "I want that!" noises. Oddly, she has no interest in the woodchuck, which I finally got a half-decent picture of with my cameraphone. Maybe it's too big? It may actually be bigger than her. It is probably unwilling to have me sit around and measure it, though, so I will have to content myself with the guess. [1]

We've made a couple of friends and a couple of acquaintances through themthose friends --- it was awesome to know one of them pretty well before we even got here --- and that's really cool. Once we're a little more set up, I think we're going to start branching out, meeting up with some of the other people we've talked to briefly or heard we should interact with, see the city a little bit more. It's a great 45-minute walk to the other edge of campus, maybe an hour if you walk slow, and I finally found the boxes of bike stuff, so I have a helmet and bike shoes again, so basically I have mega-mobility. Things are pretty quiet here in the summer, but that's OK, there seems to still be critical mass around.

We've been cooking pretty much all our meals which I am very excited about. Lots of rice cooker and bread machine usage --- yesterday I used some dough Eredien made to make a delicious vegan pizza,  which was quite fun. A bit of Craigslist searching may just have solved a couple of our remaining furniture problems --- I'll find out when Eredien's out of the shower and we can talk about them. Moving into a completely empty house and turning it into the house you want to be living in is expensive and time-consuming. I can't tell if I feel weirder about spending this much money or about having this much money to spend. I'm currently figuring that once I'm not full-time, I won't be buying much except food and airfare, so I should spend the money now.

[0] We have approximately 50 cubic feet of books. They still look small in the room where they're stacked. This is because that room is like 22x16 or something utterly ridiculous like that.

[1] We're probably going to have to remove it, because it's digging its home right up against our foundation and most of the research I've done suggests that's potentially very bad sauce. One of the things on the tasklist for the next two weeks is to find a removal person who will do a harmless trap and release; we could probably drive it out of our yard with things like chili pepper and mothballs but it would then go to a neighbor's yard and potentially meet a worse fate there. :\

Comments

[damerell]

That giant book box pile looks suspiciously familiar. Except mine were all labelled BOOKS in case you picked one up and didn't notice it was full of very heavy objects.

[laura47.livejournal.com]

We've made a couple of friends and a couple of acquaintances through them --- it was awesome to know one of them pretty well before we even got here --- and that's really cool.

them == the woodchuck?

[rax.livejournal.com]

Yes, the woodchuck introduced us to a couple of people over AIM in March. They're pretty rocktacular.

(Fixed.)

[seth99rb.livejournal.com]

it looks like a gopher, we saw one at mums apt yesterday

[rax.livejournal.com]

They're fairly close relatvies, I think? This one is as big as a cat.

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you're settling in okay. Changing cities is a huge deal, I suspect I'll have some variation on the "you left everything in Boston" dream myself. Hope Bloomington continues to be good to you.

Also, that small greyish mammal thing, whatever it is, looks tasty. :p~~

[rax.livejournal.com]

I did leave a couple of things --- olive oil, couches (though that was reluctantly on purpose), maybe a phone charger. But I did not take only my "phantom belongings." :)

No eating the wildlife! (Bgure guna zr.)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

That dream is like the quintessential moving nightmare. In distilled form.

Sorry to hear of E. hurting herself.

I am at Wiscon, which makes me temporarily like jillions of miles closer to you guys, and yet somehow this means nothing in practice.

[rax.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Wiscon is... only an eight hour drive! :P Maybe even only six or seven. Still far. Things are big out here, especially with Rhode Island as a baseline.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear that y'all are settling in! Feh of E's injury, and hope it gets better soon! But it is inspirational to hear about. I'm glad that the "moving halfway across the country WAH!" thing can work well!

<3
--R

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

(The injury is not inspirational. The rest of the entry is.)

(Also, I totally disbelieve illusion on that being all your books. I swear I packed more books than that!)

(Grin.)

[rax.livejournal.com]

I'm almost certain that's all of them! It's around 45, 50 boxes?

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear you're all settling in; sorry to hear E got hurt.

[bookofjude.livejournal.com]

I was going to make a stupid joke about woodchucks but I remembered that they're stupid. Instead, I'll make high-pitched "eee" noises about boxes full of books. There's nothing better than going through a box of books and finding something you'd bought but forgotten about and going "Ooh, I need to read this!".

(And then not reading it.)

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to hear that the settling-in continues apace.

Did I tell you about the sympathetic injury with Eredien?

[baniszew.livejournal.com]

But if you keep the woodchuck around, you can have a party every February 1st where you stay up all night and see if it sees its shadow the next morning.