moved to new SF house

[Kragen Sitaker]

I've been so busy, I haven't written any email since Saturday, March
30, with the exception of a three-line thing to Beatrice on Monday;
it's now Wednesday.

Beatrice and I have moved from the flat we shared with two roommates
to a new one-bedroom apartment of our own.  We're trying to figure out
how to get our two bedrooms' worth of stuff into this one-bedroom
apartment, and it's not easy.

Slink, the cat, was very stressed out for the whole moving period.
She doesn't like people running around all over the place, furniture
getting moved, and no place to hide.  She's been vomiting hairballs
every morning around 4:00 AM.

Sunday night, we were getting ready to finish cleaning out the old
flat, and we discovered our vacuum cleaner was broken.  I went next
door to the apartment whose living room window looked into our
bathroom and rang the doorbell.  A woman I'd never met called out from
the porch of the fourth floor; I explained the situation as best I
could from ground level.

She buzzed me in; I went up three flights of stairs and met her.  She
had long, sharp canine teeth.  Audrey, her little dog, got very
excited and barked persistently, circling around my feet.

I went inside and saw her apartment, which was much the same as ours.
She brought out a little canister vacuum cleaner; I took it back to
our apartment.

Beatrice discovered that the little vacuum cleaner didn't work very
well, but she had gotten a huge ball of junk off our bedroom carpet
just with a broom.  I suggested emptying the little vacuum bag, which
suddenly made the little vacuum cleaner much more effective.


We're mostly unpacked --- I think we have about 25 more boxes of stuff
to extract and put away --- and much of our furniture is set up.  We
still have a lot of organizing and rearranging to do, though.

I ate a home-cooked breakfast this morning for the first time since
the move.  I boiled some sliced mushrooms, a quarter of an onion, a
thinly-sliced carrot, an egg (egg drop soup! sort of), and a packet of
Maruchan "New! Chili Flavor" ramen.

Our new neighbors seem very nice.  

Next door is an old woman from Panama; she's 72 but looks 65, and for
14 years, she's had a transplanted heart.  Her own heart was slowly
killing her with congestive heart failure, the same thing that is
slowly killing my grandmother today.

Upstairs are two couples we've met and one single woman we haven't.

The new house was built in 1907, right after the earthquake, so it has
a number of old-house problems.  For example, there aren't many
outlets, and few of them have ground wire connections.

The new apartment, unlike the old, has transparent tap water --- you
can take a bath in it without feeling like you're swimming in mud.
The luxury.

My house in Dayton is not yet ready to sell, but Debbie tells me
things are moving along.

Still been doing contract software development work.  I'm considering
finding a full-time job instead, though.

Today I spent roughly 16 hours catching up on email.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
[around 1998-12-23], it is amazing to watch fear and loathing and greed at
play with the more speculative Internet stocks.  To call this a tulip
craze would be a vast understatement. -- Adam Rifkin, <adam@cs.caltech.edu>