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Things To Do

June 12, 2006 By

Bored – stuck at work with so much to do. I have to run home and do a few things then run out again for a bit of grocerying. By the time I get home at night I barely have time to relax, never mind do anything that I want to do at my house to make it a bit more put together than living amongst the half-assed unpacking I’ve done so far. My to-do list grows longer every day. If I didn’t need sleep at all, I could get some of it done, but my work schedule gets me every time. Then I spend my only day off during the week out and about doing other things I don’t have time for during the week. Such is life.

To Do:
- Go home, enter some receipts in Quicken and see how much money I have left.
- Make a quick grocery list (it includes lots of chocolate) to buy enough food to see me until payday later this week.
- Go back home, unpack groceries and collapse.

I’d finish this list now, but I can finally leave the office. My last project person just left and I’m certainly not gonna sit around here blogging all night!

Filed Under: Grrr

The New Apartment

June 10, 2006 By

So here it is, pictures of my new apartment (finally!). I know you’ve all been so eager to see it. To the left, you’ll see an approximate layout so you can get yourself situated. My apartment is slightly different, in that it is a mirror image (the kitchen is to my right when I walk in), and the door is a bit different. The coat closet is next to the kitchen, not by the door. Other than that, everything else is pretty much the same.

Here’s my desk area, which is in the alcove. I have to remember to push the chair in when I’m done, or else I’ll stub my toe on it. I already learned that from experience!
This is my “bedroom” which is on the wall opposite the door. Yes the bed is a mess, but I’m not a big fan of making the bed. Here’s my “living room.” Kermit sits in the chair and thinks he’s the king of the remote. I haven’t the heart to tell him I gave him the stereo remote. The stereo isn’t plugged in yet because, being a girl, I don’t have a clue on how to plug all my other components into it and make it work. The TV is plugged in though, on the small wall between the kitchen and alcove. I have the TV on a swivel stand so I can watch from the dining area, living room, or bedroom, but not the office since I don’t have enough mirrors set up to be able to watch tv around corners. Here’s my kitchen, with its woefully inadequate storage. The cabinets are a lot smaller than they look. It gives me a good reason not to buy lots of cool stuff for the kitchen, but I do have my zester. And yes, the dishes in the sink are clean – that’s the clean side they’re on. Here’s my bistro-style dining area. Once I start dealing with the decorations (which are in the boxes at the end of my bed) there will be a lovely picture hanging above the table so the wall isn’t so glaringly white, like my legs. The wall to the left, with the bookshelf on it, is angled at about 45 degrees and leads to the coat closet (the wall that’s on is parallel to the dining wall), which as I mentioned above is next to the kitchen.

So that’s about it for my apartment. I decided not to show you the bathroom because it’s tiny and unexciting. I do still have some unpacking to do, but with 2 jobs it’s not going to get finished anytime soon. At least the place is functional. I can use the kitchen, eat dinner, sleep and cleanse myself. I also have access to my closet, so I can make myself ready to face the world. After that it’s all fluff, and will get done as time allows.

Now, my internet saga. The tech guy came out yesterday and went through all the “you’re a stupid girl” excuses before he got to the real problem. First, it was the coax I got. Apparently the stuff they sell at Radio Shack is useless, so he re-cabled things for me. Then it was my modem, which worked perfectly fine before I moved and isn’t really that old. Then, with my tv, he had to put the coax back in the old sequence because the so-called tech support people on the phone aren’t really technicians. Then he had to replace my cable box because he couldn’t program my remote with the older one, which isn’t really that old and worked just fine before I moved. Then he went outside and fiddled with the wiring and told me he had to move my connection to a new port, and voila! it worked. Geez, he should have done that in the first place!!!!! Even I knew that it wasn’t my equipment or coax. So anyway, I am now online and blogging from home, finally. Now I can get back to my old schedule of email in the morning and sleep deprivation due to internet use at night, which is the way life should be.

In other news, my car hit 30,000 miles this week. I’ve had it for almost 3 years now, so that averages 10,000 miles per year. When I lived in New England I averaged 20-25,000 miles per year, so this car should last me awhile. But then again, living in Las Vegas, everything I could possibly need is right down the street, so I never go anywhere. Oh well. That’s it for now. It’s only 10:30pm and I have a lot more net surfing to do before church tomorrow.

Filed Under: House

It’s Almost Here, I Hope!

June 9, 2006 By

Fingers crossed – today’s the day I get internet at home. I really hope this cable guy can do something and get everything working properly. I’m so tired of not being able to get online at home and do all the things I’m used to doing. I’m leaving work early today to let the cable guy in. My appointment is between 3 and 5, so since I’ll go home and wait, it will be about 4:45 by the time anyone shows up. But that’s ok, it will give me a chance to get a bit of housecleaning done.

So that’s it for now. Hopefully my next post will be from the comfort of my own home, and will include pictures of said home. Otherwise, I’ll be blogging from work on Monday. See you all soon, I hope.

Filed Under: On the Internet

Internet Withdrawal

June 6, 2006 By

All I can say is thank goodness I have internet access at work. I’d be dying a slow and painful death otherwise. After yet another lengthy call to tech support at the cable company, it is apparent that the signal coming into my apartment is not strong enough to support broadband. It’s barely strong enough to support digital cable – the digital channels don’t quite have enough volume to be heard over my ancient a/c unit, and that’s with the tv volume all the way up. I also don’t get my On Demand channel, it keeps saying there’s some sort of error. Hopefully all of that will be fixed when the technician comes on Friday.

In better news, my DVD player does work. I took it to the local mega-electronics store (the red one where you can actually get some help) and played stupid saying I didn’t know if it worked because I didn’t know how to plug it in. They hooked it up and it does actually work. So now I’m thinking that the sequence for my coax plug-in is only because of the weak signal, and once the tech fixes that I should be able to go back to the old sequence which should make my cable tv and DVD player work without having to rewire everything every time I wanted to watch a movie. That would be a serious PITA. Now if I could just figure out the damn stereo system, I’ll be a happy camper.

What I miss most about being online is not just getting to be online all the time, but I don’t get to talk to Bubba. Boys his age don’t call their Aunty, and won’t email either. IM is the only way to get in touch with the kid. I’m also bored in the morning, since my routine is interrupted. Usually I get up, pee, get a glass of juice, and sit down at the computer for half an hour or so. Now I’m just oversleeping, which really sucks. Oh, and I can’t even do the slides for church because we don’t have powerpoint at work. If we did have that I know my boss (being the church council VP) wouldn’t have an issue with me taking a little time to put that together. So I feel myself being reduced in the efficiency and functionality that I used to have. This sucks. I was so looking forward to having my own space and having everything all in one room so I could watch tv and be online at the same time and really multi-task. But alas, it is not to be – at least not right now. That tech better be able to fix things for me. I don’t have the patience for dial-up and I don’t feel like getting hosed by the phone company for DSL.

I did unpack my camera cord, so once I get online at home I will be posting pictures of my place. Look for them soon (fingers crossed!)

Filed Under: Grrr, On the Internet

Audio/Video Hell

June 1, 2006 By

Just when I think I’m getting more and more settled every day, I got an unexpected surprise last night. My cable got shut off. It’s not from non-payment, I pay all my bills on time every month. The cable company screwed up. See, I had an overlap in service on all my utilities, so they all ended at my old address yesterday, but started at my new address on the day I signed the lease. So Saturday when I moved in, I got the tv hooked up just enough so I could watch tv, and yes, I had my digital cable box with the DVR with me. Plug everything in, works fine. But last night, just a bit after 8pm when I was on the computer doing some data entry, the tv went silent. I went and looked at it and it said my set-top box was not authorized for use. So I called the cable company. The tech that I talked to said it was a billing thing, and oh, they close at 8. So I quickly hooked up my dvd player, which was actually about 20 minutes because I have no aptitude when it comes to audio/video stuff like that. I can find the plug that goes into the wall, but after that I’m lost. Anyway, since I have a VCR and non-cable ready tv, I also have an RF modulator. One of my a/v geek friends told me the sequence to hook it up in, and I wrote it down way back then so I wouldn’t forget. It’s worked like a charm.

So, when I called the cable company when they opened this morning, I got billing who told me that my box hadn’t been switched to the new address. Yeah, that explains why it worked since Saturday and suddenly stopped working last night. Then they did a few things on their end to move the box to my new address and reset it, but that still didn’t work, so I got transferred to a tech again. At least this one didn’t sound like she was in India. She said my sequence was wrong. Ok, that really explains why it worked for 2 WHOLE YEARS at my old address without any problems, and why I had tv service until it got shut off before I even hooked up the other equipment. Yeah. Anyway, she walked me through the new sequence, which I wrote down, and for some odd reason it worked. Now hopefully my DVD player still works because the shelf it was on collapsed when I accidentally knocked the support out of place, and it all fell down. I’ll find out later.

Now all I have to do is hook up the receiver and CD player. Those two on their own I can handle, but I really can’t figure out how to get tv sound out of the receiver, which I would really like because my cheap tv has crappy sound and watching DVDs is frustrating sometimes. I think there’s something about testosterone that bestows a/v knowledge upon people. Being a girl, I obviously don’t have enough testosterone running through my veins to get it right. I need to recruit a guy friend of mine to get that hooked up.

I’m actually kinda glad I didn’t have my computer online yet when all that happened last night, because I was trying to balance my checkbook and pay bills, which I usually do online, so I can just imagine that I would have been in the middle of hitting “send” for my online payments when everything got shut off. Having no tv was annoying, but that really would have pissed me off. The wonderful tech girl I spoke with this morning assured me that I should have no problems when I hook up my internet, and I really hope she’s right.

In other news, I didn’t get much else done as far as unpacking goes last night because of the a/v issues. I also had some errands to do so I really didn’t feel like it. At this point I’ll most likely wait until Saturday, an actual day off, to get some more stuff done since although my place is still crowded with boxes, it is functional. And that will have to do for now.

Filed Under: Grrr