I just tried to shoot the paper sleeve off my straw at Bevin and it flopped flaccidly onto the table instead.
She laughed at me.
I am hurt.
Author Archives: Josh
I’m Dr. Zoidberg! Homeowner!
We made it! We’re here! The locks only work with our keys now! Our very own house!
I’m amused that UPS got my package here before I even arrived! So… I have a house, AND 53Lbs of ammo. What more could a person want?
Maybe some furniture I suppose. This floor is great, but there’s enough room in this room that it feels a bit weird to just by lying here.
Whew! It’s done! Sort of. The next adventure is buying a washer/dryer and refrigerator. 4th of July sales here we come! Crowds of people and salespeople trying to make commissions as fast as possible, sounds like my own special hell, I may just lie here.
Also, if the title confused you: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ijJVVP-Ycjk
Awkwardly sized…
Image
Everything IS bigger in Texas! Except my pockets. So this will be hard.
Hobo lunch.
As homeless Hobos are want to do, we are having chicken and waffles and mac’n’cheese for lunch.
Closing on the house is in 45 minutes, so if all goes well we won’t be homeless anymore in about 3 hours. I’m undecided if I’ll miss the hobo lifestyle or not. It’s a bit hot for riding in a boxcar though, so I guess…
My poor tired brain…
From across the room these symbols looked like tiny Stormtrooper helmets. (you know, from Star Wars?) My brain spent a full 15 seconds trying to process that.
Clearly I need a nap.
Once more unto the sky dear friends, once more. Boarding group C coming up next!
Hashtag Hobos?
We are technically homeless. All we own is here:
All else is in the clutches of either Alaska airlines, or one of several possible moving companies. A bit of an odd feeling actually. I don’t have keys to any house or apartment, and everything is in these bags. It’s actually sort of liberating in a weird way. Not that I’m not hoping that everything goes smoothly and all our stuff arrives safely. 😂The move yesterday went well.
Our moving crew was great, they packed up all our stuff with great care, even though it turned out to be more stuff than they were told to expect, and their company gives them some really shitty equipment to work with. (seriously, I went to safeway and bought packing tape that actually worked.) Real troopers though. We filled a whole truck. Whaaat?
Also, the car got picked up Tuesday. Byeeee filbert!
So, here we are, 4.5 hours of sleep later, ready to get on our plane.
No nap for me though, can’t afford to risk missing this flight. Coffee time! Will report in several time zones from now.
Less annoying than usual.
Apparently one of their security lines here at the E gates at DFW is still a metal detector. Their x-ray machine is more irritating than usual, so since I wasn’t going to get to have any fun with getting patted down I tried to irritate the lady managing the x-ray line.
She clearly already hated her job, everyone around her, and life in general, so there was really no further work to be done in trying to discourage her from coming to work. Boring.
I always feel pretty good in the airport when I realize how little we’re actually carrying. It feels like a lot when tossing it into the rental car, but when you see how much everyone at the airport has one feels quite tidy by comparison!
4:30 am in the airport rental car garage, with a good stiff breeze blowing, and Bev says “ah, the first hint of chilly all trip”. For reference I thought it was pleasantly warm, edging on warm enough that I wouldn’t want to do too much work outdoors.
It’s gonna be a hot summer down here. But for now, off to Seattle! I’ll miss our little 2019 Jetta rental car.
This will inevitably end badly…
Aside
Imagine a Sears, a Best Buy, and an Ikea got together and adopted the baby of two Boeing 747 assembly plants.
Welcome to Nebraska Furniture Mart.
Bevin is so excited by EVERYTHING. She may have a stroke.
The Texas Commandments, 1-4
It’s been a busy week, haven’t had a lot of time to comment on it, nor really any interesting things to comment on. Unless you want to hear about a lot of emails and signatures. Which you don’t.
However, in the middle of my second week here, I’m starting to figure out the important differences and such. So I thought it’d be fun to start writing them down.
I. Thou shalt carry thy sunglasses at all times
There is no shelter from the unforgiving nuclear fireball overhead. Forgetting to put on your sunglasses in the short walk from the door to the car may cause lasting retinal damage. Absolutely do not leave your sunglasses in the hotel room accidentally. (In fact, it may be prudent to buy 3 or 4 more sunglasses and pre-cache them in strategic locations to prevent this problem!)
II. Thou should change thine understanding of the word “onramp”.
Freeways are a bit of a different beast here. The distinction between “frontage road” and “freeway” is… fungible. And in several cases the “onramp” between them is actually just staying in the lane you’re in. This confuses the Google.
I do like the dedicated freeway u-turn lanes though, that’s helpful. Confusing sometimes, but helpful.
III. Thou shalt not re-use your cup at Starbucks
I’m used to getting a tea/iced-coffee refill by taking the lid off of my cup and handing the cup to the barista. Apparently that is not how it’s done here, you get a whole new thing. For a while they politely ignored me by grabbing a new cup and writing on it, giving me the subtle “throw that away yourself” signal, but today I got low-key yelled at by a barista about it. Message received.
IV. Thou shalt buy an umbrella and keep it handy
In stark disregard for Portland’s disdain for umbrellas they are quite useful here. The term “downpour” also seems to mean something rather different than I’m used to. I’ve never seen the streets fill up with water almost to the top of the curb within 5 minutes before. Getting from your car to the front door of anywhere will be a much better experience with an umbrella. No raincoat can save you.
Welcome to Texas, hope you didn’t need your laptop…
Subtitled: “Windows 10, please go eat shit and die.”
So here’s a new one to add to the immense number of minor annoyances and decently long list of consequential fuckups windows 10 has caused me. It remains to be seen which category this fits into.
I made a terrible mistake last night, and I left my laptop in Windows 10, and closed the lid, figuring it would be fine until I needed it again.
Apparently not. Sometime after I picked it up and put it in my backpack at 5:30AM PST this morning it decided a reboot was in order, probably because it had silently done some updates in the background while the lid was closed overnight. You know, as one expects a sleeping laptop with the lid closed to do.
Well, surprise there windows, but you’re not the only operating system on my laptop, and the real OS’ require passwords to decrypt before they boot. So I arrive at a Starbucks in DFW, open my backpack, and find a laptop that is absolutely BOILING as it has been running at a BIOS boot prompt without the benefit of power management, inside a sleeve, inside my backpack, for the last 7+ hours.
And now, after plugging into power, it doesn’t want to boot up. Probably a thermal issue. I’m hoping this new ThinkPad lives up to the ruggedness my previous ones have, or it’s gonna be a long week. For now though, it is literally untouchable, I nearly burned my hand grabbing onto it in my bag.
Windows. Not even once kids. (For reference, I run Arch Linux, commonly known as “Hard Mode Linux” because it has NO training wheels, and your computer doesn’t even go to sleep unless you configure it to. Even that has never done something quite this boneheaded.)
I need to figure out how to run Overwatch on Linux, I can pretty much boycott all other windows-only games and just never see that retarded pile of regressions again. But Overwatch. Damn you Blizzard. (Both for a game I really enjoy, and for not supporting Linux, you lazy lazy jerks.)