The garbage company skipped us on Wednesday, which would've been our first pickup at the new house. And because of the holiday weekend, we weren't able to contact them until this AM. And Thanksgiving trash, on top of ten days of other trash, is stinky trash. Thankfully, there's a county recycling place up the road a bit, so I've been able to haul loads of empty cardboard boxes up there.
We rented a U-Haul on Saturday, to grab the last bunch of stuff out of the old house and to get everything out of our storage space. Another afternoon spent moving shit around. I am so done with carrying boxes.
The plumber initially installed the sink in the downstairs half-bath right up against the side wall. Stupid. So, we had him move it a couple of inches out. The electrician had centered the light fixture on the sink's initial spot, so that had to be moved. The electrician came out and moved the electrical box that the light attaches to, no problem. But, he doesn't do drywall repairs, so he left everythign else for whoever does do drywall stuff: the light is on the floor, wires are sticking out, and there's a big circular hole in the wall where the box used to sit. The holiday week made it impossible to get anyone to fix the wall. We have our first house guest coming tomorrow, got to get the place reasonable.
No internet/cable yet. Computers are all set up. But without internet access, they're kindof pointless. And the more I learn to do on my iPhone, the more pointless a room full of desktop stuff becomes. I may be on my last PC.
Well water. Sounds like fun? It's a lot of fun until the first shower... well water is hard water. Shampoo doesn't work very well.
There were a dozen deer in the front lawn this AM. So much for the grass! One little deer hung out right by the house, so the cats got a good look at it. All the others stayed far away.
The driveway is exactly 200 feet long. Measured by finding that the leaf blower, with two 100' extension cords attached, can just reach the mailbox at the end of the driveway. I can't even keep the driveway leaf-free for a second, though. By the time I reach the far end, leaves have already started to cover the near end. I do what I can.
The neighboring house is still in early stages of construction, so they don't have a proper driveway yet. Instead, they dropped a load of gravel on the driveway, which has migrated out into the cul de sac. So now the last 50' of the road is gravel and mud and dust. Joy.
Still trying to get the house in shape. Started drilling holes in the wall to hang things, yesterday. Very sad to wreck those nice fresh walls with ugly drywall anchors.
Hard water sucks. Every time I’m scrubbing the shower cubicle with Viakal I tell myself that we’re buying a water softener. Next year!
Weird, isn’t it? My wife is always monopolizing the laptop, so all my home browsing is on the iThing. And it’s adequate for 80% of what I want to do.
“Post-PC Era” sounds like a bit of marketing from Tim Cook or geek evangelism from Jeff Atwood, until you realize how little you really do use your computer for.
There will continue to be a need for desktops — in the workplace especially, and at home for those who tinker — but more and more, I can see a lot of homes are just not going to need a PC any more.
I would miss the keyboard. I can type infinitely faster on a keyboard than on a phone or a tablet. So this house will always have laptops even if we all have smart phones and a couple of tablets between us.
I was going to upgrade the desktop this year but I can’t figure out why at this point. I have a five year old desktop running Ubuntu that does just fine for occasional surfing and watching videos. And we have a little Acer Aspire media thing that will play video and works just fine with the externals hooked up to it like a server. So I’m going to use my money to upgrade my laptop instead (which means give my current one to my daughter and buy myself a new one).
I bought a Chromebook recently (one of those new Samsung ones) and am surprised at both how useful it is – basically a browser with a keyboard – and how little I miss Windows. It’s instant-on, has a really good keyboard, is completely silent and the battery lasts for at least 6 hours. Plus my kids can use it without me worrying about malware and viruses. Our heavy, expensive, noisy Windows 7 laptop is gathering a lot of dust and every time I do power it on there is yet another update to download. Microsoft have a real problem here. The PC market is shrinking, thanks mainly to the iPad, and MS have nothing up their sleeve. The Surface RT is a big mistake as it won’t run existing apps, so no iTunes, and by all accounts it’s a pretty crappy experience. They’re hoping for the Surface Pro to save them but I think the ship has sailed. We live in interesting times.
Blowing leaves off of your 200 ft driveway?
You’ve got some things to learn about country livin’, m. le cleek.