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May 6, 2007

All Moved In

I'm pleased to report that Megaproject #1 of 2007 (aka, "the move") is now complete: Elaine and I are kickin' it in our new place, and for the first time in 5 years, I'm no longer living in Capitol Hill.

(Megaproject #2, aka "The Wedding" is now on-deck.)

Last weekend was the big move, with the week before being Gavin n' Elaine's Pack-A-Thon and this last week being, naturally, the Great Unpacking. We've still got the odd box hanging around the living room or the spare bedroom, but, generally, the kitchen's set up, our office is set up, we've got Internet, and we're able to cook.

A few notes from our recent adventure:

• We used professional movers. This was a first for me - Elaine's done it before, which is why she was so adamant that we do it this time. The experience was awesome. The firm we used, Mountain Movers, showed up on time and managed to get all our stuff out of the old place, into the truck, over to the new place, and unpacked in about five hours ... including lunch. As one who has spent many, many an end-of-the-month weekends packing and moving for friends (hey, Richard, I'm talking to you), this was jaw-droppingly effficient. No breakage, no fuss, no mess. We're totally doing it this way again next time. (And if you need a recommendation, call Mountain - they were super).
• I am forever astonished at the amount of crap I seem to accumulate without even trying. Even as a guy who hates stuff - I'm a committed minimalist - I seem to have grown an inordinate amount of books, pans, files, clothes and miscellaneous electronic knicknacks over the last two years. Pulling all this stuff out of the closet/drawer/cupboard/bookshelf, blowing off the dust, and packing it in a box is very eye-opening. We've got quite the set of boxes going for "Goodwill", "eBay" and "Craigslist", respectively.
• Did I mention the dust? Dust is everywhere. Holy cow, there's a lot of it. Dust on monitors, on jacket shoulders, on books, on furniture. I think I blew through an entire bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels in two hours, flat.
• One great thing about moving - at least, the first few days, when all your stuff is still boxed up - is that you've got a fantastic excuse to eat out and try some new restaurants. Elaine and I have been on a bit of a burger kick of late (we've been spotted at Dick's more often than I care to admit), so we thought we'd try Red Mill and see what all the hep kids were raving about. Wow. Fantastic, fantastic burgers and crazy, crazy lines to order them. If you come to Seattle, don't miss this.
• (And check out Dick's, too. It's a Seattle institution -- heck, my mom worked there when she was in high school.)
• We're now customers of ClearWire Internet service. I've been a happy, happy customer of Comcast's cable Internet service, and had arranged to have the service moved to our new place. "No problem," they said, "The installer will arrive between 10 and 12 on Monday." So I take the day off, deal with the work that needs doin' at the house (washing, un-boxing, eating leftover Red Mill, yadda yadda), and when the guy shows up - late - he does a once-around of the perimeter of the property, furrows his brow, and then proceeds to explain, gently, that there is no cable running to the house. At all. Like, there's no actual wire going from the street pole to the house, which means they're going to need to string it from A to B, and then put in a demarc on the house, drill in to the siding, run wire along the eaves, and ... suddenly I'm tuned out. The house is a rental. I'm not about to spend the necessary political capital with my landlord to have the Comcast guys come in and do surgery on his house. Yikes.
  
  So rather than do business with Qwest (shudder), I thought I'd take a spin with ClearWire. I zipped down to Westlake Center and got hooked up with their starter pack.
  
  It's good, good stuff. Setup couldn't be simpler - plug their "modem" in to the wall, run an Ethernet connection to your PC/Mac (or, in my case, an Airport Extreme base station), and ... you're up. The speed is good, the latency is low, and, even manged to clear up some experiences with dog-slow speeds at night by moving the modem around a bit. It's good stuff.
• Our new place is near Highway 99, which was the original north/south conduit in Washington State before I-5 got built in the 1960s. I've never really used 99 very much -- I was always closer to the 5, and most of my travel takes me east/west. However, it's been pretty cool this last week to get used to having a whole other freeway at our front door - getting to Queen Anne, the Seattle Center, and downtown are all really easy.
• Moving is one of those things that teaches me what a creature of habit I am. I keep finding myself going for, say, a Ziploc bag, only to find that it's not where I thought it would be. I can feel my brain building new neural pathways for where things ought to be - my routines have been interrupted, and suddenly I'm scrambling to find my knives, or locate the box we're using for outbound recycling, or whatever. It's really teaching me how reliant I am on certain "invisible systems" to get through the day.
• I really, really like the new digs.
• (And I really, really like living with Elaine.)

Now we just have a wedding to plan...

Posted by Gavin Shearer at May 6, 2007 11:36 AM. Posted to Misc.

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Posted by: Allie at May 7, 2007 9:41 AM

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