Jägermeister shots...

This next entry is hopefully part one of several. Let's play catch-up, shall we?

So I moved. Huzzah! I am completely crazy, so I moved in the middle of the damn week without taking any time off from work. My father came up the weekend before the move and helped transport maybe 50% of my total stuff into the new apartment, including all major furniture items. Wednesday night I packed everything that was left (aside from the suit I intended to wear the next day) into my car. Thursday I got home from work, acquired keys to my new place, took the train out to my old place where my car was parked, drove it down and unloaded. And thus was my move accomplished.

Things I have discovered about my new place:

• The bathroom door doesn't close. The wood is just too swollen to fit in the door jamb, so it doesn't close. I live alone in a studio, so I don't really care, but I imagine it could be a source of discomfort if I ever have guests. Particularly given that the door to the bathroom is fairly central, and faces the front door of the apartment. Oh well.
  
  
• There is a window in my shower. Huh. How did I not notice that before moving in? A goddamn window in the shower. At least it has a shade. One of my five (count them, five) bedroom windows doesn't have a working shade. Currently I'm covering it with a folded cardboard box at night.
  
  
• I need storage space. I'm actually not completely unpacked yet, because there's nowhere for a chunk of my clothes to go. I have a nice big closet in which to hang my hanging clothes. My mother helpfully gave me a little three-drawer unit from the basement of the house on the Cape, in which I intended to put a chunk of my folding clothes (underwear, socks and t-shirts.) Then she promptly told me that the drawers all smelled musty on the inside, so I shouldn't put clothes in it. Gee thanks. I think I'm going to end up buying Yaffa blocks again, because, well, I only live here for six(ish) months so there's no point in buying anything nice (says the guy who just bought a 20" television) when I'll just have to move it or dispose of it later.
  
  
• There are only two outlets in the entire place. Yeah, you read that right. One in the kitchen, one in the bedroom. And the one in the kitchen isn't grounded, and one of the plugs is being used by the refrigerator. So hooray for power strips and extension cords, by which I am currently able to live. Is it wrong to plug a power strip into a power strip? Something in me tells me this is a bad idea, but as I am without science I just can't be certain.

Life in my new apartment is good, really. Its nice to prowl around space that is completely mine and know that I can set it up however I like. A couple more items of furniture (Yaffa blocks, a television stand I'm bogarting from my aunt & uncle) and the place will be in pretty good shape.

paradise birds sang, and my life was never ever ever ever the same

Catch-up, part two of a number to be determined.

On Saturday a workman from RCN showed up to bestow upon me the treble blessings of phone, cable internet and cable television. Hooray for a service provider for these things that isn't Comcast. The cable internet is hell of fast, and the phone... is a phone. I haven't been able to get my features to work yet (caller ID and voicemail, most notably) but I'll call and pester them about that if they don't start working in a couple of days. The cable TV, on the other hand, presents a problem. Well, two problems.

The first problem is that it doesn't work correctly. The converter box crapped out maybe two hours after it was installed. I called the help line earlier this week and after minimal holding and not too much runaround they confirmed that it just wasn't working, and volunteered to send a replacement on Saturday at no charge. The second, and slightly more difficult problem, is that now I have cable television where I live. Like good cable, with Scifi channel and Bravo and Spike and things. I had forgotten what a siren call sitting passively in front of a television could exert on me. I must endeavor to not turn into a completely brain dead couch-potato zombie. Potato-zombie? Zombato.

Labor day weekend was good. A three-day weekend was almost exactly what I needed. Work is going well and all, but I needed a reminder that it wasn't always going to be every week day, even if those instances when its not come only rarely. I didn't actually do very much. I drove out to the Cape Saturday night so that I could spend one final day on the beach on Sunday, and also steal a small cache of disused furniture from the basement. I accomplished both of these goals, and as an unexpected bonus totally freaked out my mother at the beach.

I went for a walk on a sandbar, and got farther from the shore than she was really comfortable with, so she sent my father to fetch me. I should point out that, as the tide was going out, I was in very little real danger. The water was getting shallower, you see, so its not like I was going to be trapped out there. Admittedly, the tide going out created a pretty strong current. If I had lost my footing and been unable to regain it for a minute or two, I could have been swept out into the channel. Its unlikely, but it could have happened. But I say, why go to the beach (particularly in some place as beautiful as Chatham bay) if you're not going to take advantage of it?

Now I am back at work. Yesterday all the trainees did prep work for these half-hour group presentations we had to give today as the final segment of our hazard analysis class. This morning my group got together for some last-minute discussion, then we headed out to give our presentation. It went well, I think. I brilliantly had scheduled one of my make-up exams for after lunch, giving me just a half an hour between the presentations and the exam start date in which to review and, oh yes, eat. Fortunately for me the presentations got out early, so I had ample time to eat and psyche myself up (read: stress myself out) for the test.

I am hopeful but not completely confident about the test. My lack of confidence comes from the fact that I won't get the scores back for a week, as this is one of those independently-administered tests. My coworker Tim assures me that I passed, that everyone passed, that despite the weirdly-worded seemingly trick questions mixed in among the total gimmes and the insurance-for-dummies questions the test really and truly was easy. But it was only 50 questions, multiple choice. I need 35 to pass, and would prefer to do better than pass, obviously. So I wait and I hope.

The upshot of the "presentations this morning, test after lunch" schedule is that my brain has completely and utterly shut down this afternoon. No matter that I have reading and prep work that I ought to be doing. Heck, I've struggled just to compose these livejournal entries. My brain really wants to do something mindless, or possibly nothing at all. It is very important that I not fall asleep at my desk...

and these are the words you wish you wrote down

Catch-up part three. Warning: I got some existential ennui on your friends page.

I'm distressed about the state of the blog.

It seems as though I've allowed myself to fall into a certain format, wherein about once a week I summarize whichever details of my life I feel are somehow pertinent. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that; its genuinely useful to me, what with my lack of a functional long-term memory about the events of my own life. And there are people out there on the internets reading this journal who pretty much use it to keep track of me, so that stuff is presumably pretty worthwhile to them. (Yes, that is a big shout out to my sisters. How y'doing, girls?)

But the thing is, I worry that its not genuinely interesting to most of the people on my friend's list. I worry that I have become one of those people who's entries tend to get skimmed or skipped entirely because they hold no interest for you lot. Once upon a time I posted random links and things, now I don't even do that. More to the point I don't generally break up the "slice of life" updates with random thoughts and short, amusing entries. I haven't even done the whole "interactive interrogative" shtick that much, mostly because I just can't be arsed to get my act together about it (and also because I tend to think of questions on the train or in the shower, and then forget about them when I'm actually sitting in front of a computer.)

I want to write more interesting entries. I want to be a good livejournal citizen. More to the point, I want to be a good writer in general. And most of the entries I've been making lately have been wholly unsatisfying on that front. I'm really wary of becoming one of those LJ people I hate. One of those people who make a post detailing their every little thought, and more specifically every tiny woe and tribulation in their tragi-gothic lives. But I think maybe that's a risk I'll have to take, if I'm going to keep being interested in my own journal.

The thing is, I read rollick and theferrett, and Eric Burns (and Wednesday White) and Francesco Marciuliano and Jeffrey Rowland, and... I dunno, I don't think I could ever be quite like those people, but I hero-worship them just enough that I want to be. I don't just want to recount, to chronicle, I want to entertain and engage.

I finished a short story about a week ago. Well, it started out a short story, and then it sort of turned into something else. Whatever, its a couple pages of prose. If I've got the stones, I'll send it along to Jon Horowitz sometime in the near future. He's the one who solicited it in the first place, you see, and if he's still working on the project it might end up published, by him, in a little booklet he's going to sell. Which leads to a whole new set of anxieties.

But it felt good to be creative, to create. So we'll see.

And that pretty much brings us up to date.