Like the title says, I'm back! Pretty wild stuff. It's been about six months since my blog went down, and the rest of my life picked up considerably since then, making it very difficult to find the time to set things back up.
Here's what's been going on:
- Buy a condo
- Pay for a condo
- Move
- Clean old shitass apartment
- Paint condo
- Buy Furniture
- Unpack and assemble furniture
- Buy small cat
Oh yeah, I bought a condo. Most people know about this, but it may come as news to some. This happened right at the Pac Rim tournament this year, and my motivation through this tournament was quite low as a result. Bay and I had been looking for about 6 months prior to this, and had yet to see anything that we liked, aside from one unit right at the start which sold shortly after.
Once you buy real-estate, you go insane running around to get all your money and stuff together. You get only a week usually to get your financing in order, have a building inspection conducted, read through the last two-years worth of minutes from strata meetings, shop for mortgages, etc.
You can get some of this done beforehand, to an extent, but no matter what, it seems like you're suddenly sucked into the INSANITYVORTEX!!
Moving sucks, but, when you're moving out of the place we had, and into a place that you're hoping will finally be a home, it takes some of the sting out of it. Still, loads of packing to get done on our part, as well as organizing everything. We were actually very fortunate, because a huge amount of our friends volunteered to help, which was really cool. The whole process was actually pretty fun, and it was nice getting the hell out of our old place. Man that unit sucked.
The worst part about moving is that after shiting all of your stuff, you have to go back and cleanup the old unit you've now left behind. Bay and I couldn't do any unpacking, because we still needed to paint. We still had some other stuff to bring back across as well, and on top of everything else we needed to get the carpet cleaned.
We rented a carpet cleaner hoping that we could save money doing it ourselves, which lead to this hilarious exchange between us and the property manager for our apartment:
Okay, the place looks good, did you get the carpet's cleaned?
Yup.
Who'd you get to do it?
Bay and I look furtively at each other
Errr... EZ.. clean? Something like that? We can't remember the name.
Okay, well, all I need is the receipt and we're good to go.
Ah. K. See you.. We'll mail it to you
We eventually had to own up and pay for professionals to come and do it, but I was so sick of the unit by this point that I couldn't make myself care. We were out of there, and that's all that mattered.
Painting takes a loooooong time to do, and it's pretty painful when you're living out of boxes because you need to finish painting. We were absolutely not willing to live in yet another place that had the same white walls that every other apartment we had lived in before, and besides, Bay and I had ideas.
We took out extra money on the mortgage to be able to afford some paint and furniture, and so we were set to go buy paint. Turns out, we were set to go and buy about $1000 worth of paint and supplies. Yikes.
Throw/Dropsheets suck ass - you put them down and they constantly move away from the wall right as you're about to drip paint on the wall. Bah!
It's annoying not being able to unpack as well, and Bay and I got some really incredible fighting action going on, just from the stress and annoyance of living out of boxes and wanting painting to be finished. That being said, each room finished helped steel our resolve, and by the end of it we were pretty happy with the colors we'd chosen. I'll post pictures of the rooms within the next couple of days, provided I remember to.
Bay and I lived on our own for a while before moving in together, and since that point, we've had way too much stuff, all of it mismatched, for the spaces we've lived in. We sat down and went through everything that we owned, and started throwing out huge lots of it. It's not that we didn't like our stuff, but often times we'd just outgrown it. We put together a shopping list and headed out for furniture. This part was actually kind of fun, except that most of the time the stuff we really liked ended up costing way too much. We found a nice couch and dining room table at Dodd's, and figured we'd pick up everything else we needed from Jysk or Ikea.
Head's up - Jysk sucks and is way overpriced. We were super dissapointed with the furniture that they carried, as it all cost a lot, and was built quite shittily (it might be a real word).
Ikea really came through for us though. Lots of people are rigidly opposed to Ikea, but when you're on a budget, and are willing to look through the cheaper stuff and pick out the things that are a little higher quality, I think it's pretty good. We managed to cover almost everything else we needed off our list with a little bit of creative thinking (eg, in order to get a lingerie chest for Bay, we had to buy a bookcase with a classy door - it works great, looks nice, and saved us about $200 over what we would pay normally).
And this is pretty much the final bit. Unpacking is much more fun than packing is, and even more so when for the first time in our lives (at least since moving in together) we actually have enough space for everything, and storage to eliminate clutter.
Oh yeah, almost forgot about this one. Bay and I had wanted a little catd00d for some time now, and once completing the bulk of our painting, we went out and talked to a few cat rescues. We chose the cuddliest cat we could find in order to act as the polar opposite to Maui, and picked him up two weeks later. He's sleeping in a small catball on the couch as I type this.
So that's a lot of stuff to get done! We're mostly complete now, just finishing unpacking the last couple of boxes, and now that all the furniture has been delivered and setup, we need to paint the hallway.
Here's what I needed to do get the blog back up online:
- Get my old Linux machine to boot up again
- Fork out the cash for a domain and good web hosting
- Back up my old blog and upload it to the new web host
- Figure out how to make all of the components work together
Okay, this probably wasn't as hard as I thought it might have been. Initially, my server just ran by itself, without any monitor, keyboard, or mouse attached to it. When it went down, I didn't really have any way to figure out what was going on, other than connecting to it using SSH (a pretty low level way to access another machine). For some reason, the computer wasn't accepting SSH requests, so I couldn't do that.
When you're moving it's hard to find $150 to just throw to a webhost.
Just spent most of today doing this and the next item. I've had worse days, but there's definitely quirks to figure out and get past in order to get everything working again.
So that's complete now, for the most part. As I said, I've been without a blog for six months, and a ton of stuff has happened. Part of how I learn is by writing out my thoughts and articulating them, so I've been dying to blog. I've got a lot of catching up to do, and the summer is just starting to pick up steam in a different vector. Now that getting our place all set up is winding down, wedding, squash tournaments, music festivals, and other excitement are starting to pick up speed. I'll be blogging about that all, so stay tuned, and welcome back!
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