I pretty much skipped the Virgo Month of Leisure last year and decided to get my lifeguard certificate instead. Two years ago Ola hadn’t yet left for the Peace Corps and I was preparing to caretake her house and greet my new roommate. I also made a list of what I’ve been doing about this time every year since 1998.
In 1998 I celebrated my 30th birthday in Guatemala and was pretty pleased with how it all went down. This year I’ll be celebrating my 40th, from my new apartment here in Vermont, and I’m also feeling pretty pleased. I’ll save the list-making for a few weeks from now, but this is just a peek at whether I’ll pull off any leisure time in the next thirty days.
As I’ve mentioned, I haven’t been working at the tech center this Summer which has been pretty good. It’s enabled me to unpack slowly and get settled here. I don’t start any real travelling-for-work for a few weeks, though I was in Maine last weekend and I’m doing a flyby to New York City at the end of next week. September will see me in Potsdam New York, Sacramento California and Marquette Michigan but then I’m not going anyplace far until I go to Kansas in October. I’m a little better equipped for travelling now also. I have a lightweight laptop and I just got an EVDO card from “work” [MetaFilter: the job that doesn’t seem like a job] so I can connect from pretty much anyplace, even the dead zones in my apartment where my cell phone doesn’t work.
So, I suspect the next week or so may actually be leisurely, after that it’s anyone’s guess. Here are a few links to other things you might like to look at.
I came home from the transfer station today [i.e. the dump] and there was a little paper bag of cucumbers on my steps. They were delicious.
I didn’t realize until I actually went to get my mail that Box 345 may have been empty for a reason…. Not totally sure what is going on here, but they said they’d fix it.
I’m not sure why this phrase isn’t all over the Internet but my folks always say that three moves equals one house fire. This is especially true if a move is accompanied by a data disaster. But let me back up and let me tell you about my backups.
This is the first time I’ve moved in to my own apartment. I’ve lived alone before in various ways (caretaker of an Odd Fellows Hall, caretaker for Ola’s place, first or last roommate in an apartment share, bought a house) but not me and my stuff moving into an empty place. It’s sort of neat. The space is nice and I’ve put some photos up. Moving day was amazing. Ten people and six cars and most stuff was moved in about 45 minutes. There was a short list of post move-in problems including the landlady’s smoke detector beeping non-stop for the first few days, a little bit of leaking during the downpour (renter’s insurance on the way!) and a collapse of the shelves in the closet which were holding my stereo equipment (yes I am old enough to have stereo equipment) also since repaired. Fortunately, the closet is also one of the guestrooms, so there was a mattress on the floor and my stereo is fine. I’m not sure if I mentioned, but the camera I dropped in the toilet last week is also fine.
I was not so lucky with my hard drive. I was using my laptop, just plugged into the wall, in an old house while a roofer used power equipment outside. Past experience has shown me that this is a bad idea. However, a lesson you learn once every ten years tends to not sink in well. At some point my laptop’s hard drive stopped working and did not start working again. I have spare laptops. I even have backups. However, my backups are a few months old meaning I’m missing a chunk of photos, chat transcripts, work documents, calendar junk and stuff I probably don’t even remember. I thought I could tough it through this, but I’m rethinking that position. This is a problem money can solve and I may want to use some of my money to solve it. If anyone has suggestions for decent data recovery places, please feel free to let me know.
Otherwise unpacking and readjusting is going well. I slept in my new apartment finally. It’s hella quiet and dark here which pleases me. I’m still trying to figure out how to create counterspace in my kitchen and maximize the very few grounded outlets here. I think I’ve learned which corner of the house my cell phone actually works in and the wifi I share with my landlady seems to work well as long as she’s not on the phone, which may be good enough. I’m getting okay with being only approximately contactable. I mentioned this on Twitter a while ago (re: Neal Stephenson) and wound up getting namechecked on 43 Folders. Woo. Maybe it will catch on. If not, postcards always reach me, albeit slowly.
I decided to get a post office box again even though I don’t need one because I do enough workish-stuff through the mail that having a non-home place to get mail seems like a good idea. In the post-9/11 world, you need to prove what your home address is to get a PO box. Since I got the PO box before I moved, and I can’t get mail delivered to my house in Bethel, I had to get a note from Ola saying that I live here. Ola thought this was amusing and scrawled me a note in pencil. The post office found this amusing but what could they do, say “go back and have her type this”?
My new mailing address has a nice sort of number pattern to it. Box 345, Randolph VT 05060. The box has a combination (letters instead of numbers) so I don’t need to carry a key around with me. Today is moving day.
I hit the ground running when I got back from my Portland-DC-Boston trip. As most of you know, I’m moving at the end of the week. However, there were hurdles to jump before then. I had a writing deadline last night. I had books to pack. I had signed the lease to the new place and sent a check but my check hadn’t been cashed and my new landlady is in a house without electricity or phone most of the summer. I tend to worry about things like this.
I’ve been couchsurfing because my current landlady’s son just got married and the house is full of their family and a little too crazy for sleeping in. On my way to dinner with friends, I saw my new landlady’s car in the driveway and pulled on in. I’m still not used to this “stopping by” way of getting things done but it works better than any other method I have yet to try out.
Stopping by netted me the key to the place and information on how to get the electricity turned on. There is one key and it is on a paperclip along with a little piece of tape that says FLAT on it. I also got a copy of The Pushcart War. I’m not sure if I mentioned this before, but my new landladies are the writer/illustrator of that book respectively. Today I’m going to walk over and take a few photos with whatever available light there is there and maybe take some measurements. The place is small, just a few rooms, but it has nice windows and big wide floorboards and it’s quiet and there’s a tree outside of every window.
So I’m in Washington DC now, doing some work before heading home to Vermont this weekend for one final packing push. While I was in Portland I noticed that someone, not me, had bought a ton of stuff at Walmart.
Now, I’ve been known to shop at Walmart for the occasional box of Emergen-C or, regretfully, cup holders (my car lacks them, it’s so sad) but I’ve never spent maybe more than $14 there. Someone had spent upwards of $480 at a Walmart in California while I was in Portland Oregon. I discovered this on Friday evening which means that my wonderful mom&pop credit union was closed for the weekend. At this point when I told my friends this story they were all “OMG THAT SUCKS” but really, it didn’t. Part of this is because I try hard not to be a person who freaks out. Part of it is because, due to class privilege, or a general optimistic outlook, or maybe just seeing this scenario play out tons of times before with friends and Internet associates, I knew it would go okay. I did not spend that money and I was not going to pay it. My credit card has been with me the whole time.
My bank’s weekend answering service wasn’t too sure what to do and told me to call back Monday. They did laugh when I told them that yes I was absolutely certain that I had not spent that money at Walmart because I despise Walmart and would not give them any more money than was absolutely necessary. I figured I’d call the Gilroy [yes, garlic capital of the world] Walmart and see what they could tell me. Now, one of the nasty things about Walmart isn’t just that they’re putting a ton of producers and suppliers out of business because of their relentless cost-cutting and massive purchasing power. The nasty thing is that it’s not a great place to work, either. They’re the largest private employer in the US and the bulk of the jobs there are routinized cog-in-machine types of interchangeable paper pushing jobs. Which is another way of saying that Walmart couldn’t help me either, though I had a lot of nice conversations with the “loss prevention” people.
“Can you tell me what I spent $480 on at your store three days ago?” is apparently an unanswerable question. I watched my bank account like a hawk all weekend (nothing), checked in on all my other credit cards (zip) and asked my bank if they could just disallow any charges that came in from anyplace that was not DC, Portland, Vermont or Boston (no). Monday rolled around and my bank confirmed that the charges at Walmart were made from an actual credit card — meaning mine was likely cloned — and that there were a few more pending charges from gas stations around Oakland. They cancelled my card and are fedexing me a new one to my hotel here. I have to fill out a form which I then have to get notarized saying the charges aren’t mine. I have one recurring charge on my credit card which I’ll have to update and maybe three websites that I have to update with my new credit card number.
I guess Visa eats the charges. Or my bank does, but they have insurance to cover it. I have a few hours of hassle dealing with this. Someone in Gilroy gets $480 of “free” stuff from Walmart. I have pretty much no way of knowing when or how my CC number was diverted but I like to blame Disneyland. I have no idea if all of this means the system works, or that it doesn’t.
I’m in Portland Oregon at my friend Lisa’s house. For anyone from college, yes that Lisa. Operation Take a Vacation is going pretty well though I just got the crap scared out of me by the mailman (mail comes right into the house through a slot in the door making a huge racket, scary!). Lisa was saying before she left for the weekend that she thinks one of the reasons we have such easy hangout time together is because we were roommates (in Hampshire speak: modmates) in college, so we’re used to hanging out with each other in our pajamas sort of doing our own thing. She spent a lot of time before she left baking — oh the smells! — and I was keeping up on work stuff and planning my next few months of library-spaking travel.
My idea of a good vacation is to go someplace I’m vaguely familiar with, usually a city, and wander around eating great food, taking some photos, going for long walks, visiting libraries, and seeing friends. While my vacations are relaxing, they’re not sit-on-a-beach relaxing. So far I’ve gone out for Ethiopian, PacNW [good beer, good beet salad], Mexican and coffeecoffeecoffee. Today is sit around and read day and then explore the niehgborhood. Tomorrow there will be a MetaFilter meetup and then I scoot to the airport for my flight thats a day earlier than I was expecting it to be. I packed for or five changes of clothes for this trip but I seem to pretty much be wearing one outfit and one pair of pajamas this whole week. One of these days I hope to miraculously become that person who can travel for three weeks with just a backpack. I think if I could leave all my techie gear behind, I could. Food for thought.
