Yearly Archives: 2009

Years and years of tobacco smoke residue

Smoke residue on a rag

I could smell the old, stale, cigarette smoke when I first walked in. I was getting my first look at the house I decided to purchase. The yellowed curtain rods told me that smokers lived there for a long time. It turned out that the fifty-year-old home was owned by only one family, and from what my neighbors tell me, they were heavy smokers. But the price was right, and I figured I’d be able to deal with the stale smell and make it livable again.

Thankfully, all of the walls and ceilings were painted before the house went on the market. After I moved in, I got to work on cleaning the woodwork. I started with the hardwood floors. Once over with Murphy’s Oil Soap, then rinse. I could not believe that it took five, sometimes six rinses until the water would not be brown when I dumped it out.

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Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone

I’ve often said that music is one of those things that helps me get through life, and makes it worth living. About a month ago, Neko Case released the excellent Middle Cyclone, a record that I’ve been listening to a lot, and has played a part in getting me through the stresses of moving and buying a house.

Back in January, Neko and her record label released a free MP3 of “People Got A Lot Of Nerve”, a song which has a deceptively bright sound, but with lyrics that are a bit on the dark side. I was intrigued and couldn’t wait for the album to come out.

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I has internet

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Monday I was FINALLY hooked up with phone service at my house, and yesterday my DSL modem arrived!

i'm in ur internets cloggin ur tubes

That was 19 days I went without having internet access at home. I don’t think I’ve gone more than a week without some kind of online access since my days of connecting to computer bulletin board systems on my Atari 800XL computer. And talk about broadband, that was with a state-of-the-art, 300 baud modem. Yes, I am old.

Being without home internet access for so long made me realize how much it’s a part of my everyday activities: reading the online news in the morning with a cup of coffee, using it to find phone numbers, getting a quick map, listening to new music streams, and just keeping up with friends and family. I almost felt like I had lost one of my senses.

New home update

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I’ve been living in my new home for five days now. There is a lot of work to be done, but I’m slowly getting settled in.

In the past four days I’ve made seven trips to a home improvement / hardware store, with still more things on my shopping list to pick up. I’m expecting the clerks to start greeting me by name soon. I already have people working on my kitchen remodel, which is something I want to get done fairly soon. The house is definitely a fixer-upper, but it’s going to be real nice once the fixing up is done.

Probably the most frustrating part of this move is the fact that I still don’t have internet access at the house yet. Since the phone company is having some problems (and I’ll be getting DSL through the the phone line), I’ve been suffering from serious internet withdrawal. Hopefully I’ll be plugged back into the matrix soon.

Packing up and shoveling out

stack of boxesIn a little over two weeks, I’ll be moving to my new house. My condo is starting to resemble a warehouse with all the boxes around.

Moving is always a major pain. You’ve got to find good boxes, pack, change addresses, coordinate movers, have painful conversations with utilities, etc. One of the good things about it though is it forces you to go through your stuff and do some “shoveling out” as my father likes to call it. In the process of looking at things I’ve accumulated over the years, I’ve discovered there is a lot of unnecessary junk at my place. Some of it was still in boxes from the last time I moved. I seem to be especially fond of things that probably belong in an electronics museum. In one box (unopened since my last move), I found:

  • Sony walkman (yes, that’s for cassette tapes)
  • A plethora of 3.5 inch floppy disks
  • A zip drive and a dozen 100mb zip disks
  • Several computer mice
  • Two computer joysticks
  • Computer trackball
  • Backups for Windows 98 and Windows 95
  • Enough coaxial cable, telephone cable and speaker wire to span the City of Madison.

On the bright side, I found a small pocket am/fm radio which I thought I’d lost years ago. Maybe I should unpack the boxes a little sooner when I get to the new place?