Bump On A Log

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I've been feeling very unmotivated, and not really in the mood to talk about everything that's been going on, even though most of it isn't bad. I hold myself to a very high creative standard, and I haven't felt up to the challenge. I'd rather not post at all than just give a dry account of my life.

But I've got people urging my blog telepathically to update, so now I feel obliged to say something. Maybe I'll get on a roll once I've started.

The house is coming along well. M has estimated that half of the boxes have been unpacked. The kitchen is pretty much box-free (a notable exception being the junk drawer box, which apparently became the odd man out when all the drawers got filled), which is nice, though I have yet to take advantage of that and start actually cooking in there. Oven-baked frozen pizza is the closest to cooking that kitchen has seen thus far.

The screaming neighbors have been quiet since that one noisy night, which is good. I haven't seen the daughter around lately, which may explain the quiet.

The basement has been a bit of a diaster, albeit a mostly corrected one now. First, I discovered that all of the electrical outlets in the finished part (the non-laundry room part) are controlled by both master light switches - the switch at the bottom of the stairs and the switch at the top of the stairs. Each of the three ceiling lights have their own switch, and the outlets have a common switch, and there's a switch at both ends of the stairs that rules them all. So, if I want to leave the outlets powered up (and I do, since my computer, the TV, the VCR, the DVD player, and the CD player will all be plugged in down there), I have to turn the lights on and off individually at the bottom of the stairs, and ascend to (or descend from) the kitchen bathed in the glow of a couple of small night lights.

The obvious question that comes to mind is: what sort of deranged person would set up their basement to be like that? Did the original owner only plug in lamps down there? A resonable assumption, actually, except that there's a gorram desk built into one of the walls!!! Maybe I'm so technominded that I fail to see why someone would have a desk and not put a computer or a fax machine (there are phone jacks very conveniently placed at desk level for such a device) on it. But one of the outlets is placed up at desk level, fer crying out loud! Was it just for a desk lamp? Would someone want to always control their desk lamp from a switch at the top of the stairs?

Our landlady is looking into getting that fixed. In the meantime, I've taped the master switches and the outlet switch into place in the On position to avoid any accidental power outages on my electronic stuff.

Then, I decided, one fateful afternoon, to hook up the computer to the dial-up connection I was supposed to be getting from Verizon while I waited for the DSL to kick in. It became fairly readily apparent, from looking at what I was given, that the lady who took my order was sorely mistaken about the whole temporary dial-up thing. Luckily (and I use that word somewhat loosely), I had an AOL disc. The AOL that came with my computer was uninstalled long ago, so I had to re-install it.

[You're probably wondering at this point if I was actually going to start up an AOL account just to get a few extra days of internet access. The truth of the matter is, I've had a $5 a month account with them since the late 90's. It's been mostly due to laziness and AOL's labyrinthian methods of cancelling accounts that I still have that account, but it does come in handy at times like this.]

So I got to the part of the installation wherein the modem dials up AOL and tests the connection. I could tell from the lack of dial tone coming from the modem that hard times were ahead for me. I unplugged the modem line from the wall and plugged in a phone. No dial tone, though I was getting some kind of feedback. I went up to the kitchen and checked that phone. Humming along just fine. I went back downstairs and tried the other phone jack (there were two jacks on a single plate). That one was dead as a doornail. I looked around for another phone jack, but all I could find was a plate that seemed to have had a jack for a phone at one time, but had since been closed off.

So I called Verizon and, without ever once speaking to a live human being, determined that the equipment was fine, concluded the jack was the problem, and got an appointment set up for Tuesday.

About a half-hour later, I got a recorded message from none other than James Earl Jones, informing me that my DSL service was activated and ready to go. And me without a working phone jack to plug the DSL line into. Fate was looking kinda cruel.

A couple days later, on Monday, M got a recorded message from Verizon (I had already left for work), asking her to see if the problem had been solved (Verizon was under the impression that they had been able to fix it remotely and they might not need to send someone out after all). She checked the dual-jack plate, and got the same results I did. Then, she went over to the other plate, opened the little sliding door blocking off the jack, and got dial tone off of that.

A frickin' sliding door. Why didn't I think of that? Arg.

So that night, I hooked up the DSL modem and got everything up and running.

I also hooked up a wireless network, so M could have internet access at her desk upstairs. It went refreshingly well. I even got it all encrypted up without anything other than a minor problem that just required a re-boot (though, given that her computer is the Slowest Computer On Earth, I could have done without having to do that.)

We've also gotten our Christmas tree. M knows someone whose family has a Christmas tree lot (and has the mayor and state attorney general as customers), so we were able to get a good deal on a 7-foot or so Frazier Fir. We got it home and in the stand (albeit off-center in the stand). Then we pulled out the lights we had gotten at Target last week and discovered that the wire was white (more suited for being on a wall than on a tree), so we had to go back to Target to exchange them for dark green wired lights.

First of all, the exchange process went surprisingly well, given that we lost the receipt during the move. All they needed was my card, and everything went bing-bang-boom-thanksfershoppin'.

Sadly, the lights we had gotten were no longer available in dark green. They were blinking lights with all kinds of settings that I'm sure had been, at one time, available in that color, but The Day After Thanksgiving had occurred since our previous visit, so there wasn't much in the way of lights available anymore. We did finally find some blinking lights with the dark green wire, but with tiny bulbs. We figured the small lights would be nice, so we went with those.

They are nice, but I would have preferred the larger bulbs. Also, they don't remember the setting after you switch them off for the night, so, due to a lack of desire to go crawling behind the tree every evening, we've been settling for the default setting, which involves every blink setting being done in a row. Some settings are more Christmassy than others. The slow fade in-and-out = Christmassy. The disco strobe blinking = Not So Christmassy.

Still have to find an entertainment center. I'm leaning towards the low to the ground one. We can add shelves later when the babies start rollin' in.