A Bloy and his Blog

From the website, Cohousing.org:

Cohousing is a type of collaborative housing that attempts to overcome the alienation of modern subdivisions in which no-one knows their neighbors, and there is no sense of community.

An interesting concept. In the Madison news yesterday there was a story about the beginning stages of a cohousing development, Aboretum Cohousing. In addition to all of the principles of cohousing, the people in charge of this development are also striving for affordability and to be very environmentally conscious.

Even more interesting to me is this cohousing community will be located about ten or twelve blocks from where I work.

Hmmm…

The work on getting my new home in shape continues (hence the lack of posts here). It almost amazes me all of the things that need taking care of in order to get settled into a new place. Even more amazing is how people can continually live with things that could so easily be fixed.

read the rest of: Tale of the towel bars

Well, I made it. All of my worldly possessions are now in the same city that I have been living in. Most of them are still in boxes, but at least they are here.

It’s always interesting moving into a “new” place. In all the apartments/homes I’ve lived in, I’ve usually found a few little quirks or oddities about the former residents. For example, I’ve been in living in my condo in Madison for four days now and I do believe the former owner had some kind of irrational fear of screwing in light bulbs.

read the rest of: Lumino-bulbous-phobia

I’m sorry it’s been two weeks since the last post. As you can imagine, I’ve been very busy lately. Today I finished my first full week working as the Web Services Librarian at Edgewood College. After five days, I think I’ve had enough experience to say that I’m going to enjoy working there.

In other news (if everything goes as planned) I should be permanently living in Madison by the end of next week. Speaking of which, I was browsing through some moving and packing websites the other day and found out how to pack hippos (from the US Postal Service, no less). Does anyone have a 1000 gallon tank I can borrow?

I was cleaning out the garage today and it hit me that I never posted any pictures of my condo here. It was just about a year ago that I started looking for a home to purchase. Now that I’m almost to the point where I’m only 29 years in debt, I thought it might be a good time to put up a couple of pictures.

There are four units in the building, each one occupies the four corners.

A few days ago I noticed (and eliminated) a few flies that were in my house. That’s strange, I thought, I’ve never had any flies in the house before. Yesterday morning I found a few more flying around and took care of them. Then I got home from work and caught three more! So that got me thinking, flies come from maggots and we all know where maggots get their start. I started to look in every corner of the lower level. Then I looked in the garage. Nothing. Not even a bad odor anywhere. As I stood in the garage thinking, my eyes landed on the door to the furnace. I grabbed the door knob, opened it with trepidation and got the answer. The mouse had breathed its last breath in my furnace closet, at the foot of the door.

I was glad the mouse wasn’t able to find his way out and chose to spend the last moments of life in a spot convenient for the house mortician, but how did he get there in the first place? After looking around, it’s still a mystery to me. Have a suggestion? e-mail it to me. The first person to send me the right answer will win a free mouse carcass (shipping and handling not included).

It’s now officially summer here at my house. That means warm and muggy air. But, my condo is cool! That’s right, my 16 year old central air conditioner with a rusty grill, still works! But perhaps I should start at the beginning of this story…

Before I signed the papers to become thirty years in debt, the home inspector was here and he told me the air conditioning unit was manufactured in 1987 (about the same time my condo was built). Unfortunately he was not able to test it because the weather at that time was too cool. Ever since then I was convinced as soon as temperatures got hot, I would find out Old Rusty was ready for the scrap yard and I would have to spend thousands of dollars on a new air conditioner. When I got home from work today it was pretty warm in my place. So I crossed my fingers, set the thermostat and moved the switch to cool. Cool is what I got.

Hopefully I won’t jinx Old Rusty and put him in an early grave by posting this.