Unpacking Week
Gee, unpacking sure is a lot of work.
Things are going well, though. Sunday my friend Bill came over and helped me set up and unpack my CDs, and audio- and videotapes. We also went out to a nearby store named Rasputin Music, which turns out to be excellent. The selection of new stuff is good (although the prices are nothing special), but what makes the store is their excellent used selection. I bought five CDs, including the outstanding and out-of-print Live at Newport album by Duke Ellington. This store was a good find.
The next couple of evenings were mostly spent unpacking my comic books. Since my new apartment is larger than my place in Wisconsin, this gives me a little more room to spread out bookshelves in the bedroom for the comics. Problem is, in Wisconsin my bookcases were stuffed to the gills, and I don't actually own more bookcases now. So claiming another case for the comics means some of the books are going to have to sit in boxes a while longer. Most likely the humor and cartoons will languish in favor of the baseball, computer and non-fiction books being organized in the study.
(I keep vascillating between calling it an "office" and a "study". I seem to be leaning more towards "study", although "office" is probably conceptually more accurate.)
Actually, in a sense I do have (if not 'own') more bookcases than I did in Madison, since I had two half-height cases, one of which was being used to hold junk (e.g., unread comics), and the other of which was in my storage room not being used. But I claimed both of those to hold hardcover novels, so the humor still gets the screw. Unpacking the fiction was actually a lot of fun, since those two extra bookcases mean I have more than enough room to hold all my fiction. Indeed, my custom-built paperback shelves are only half-full! Nice!
I've also hooked up the audio-visual system, and the computer - except for the printer. While doing the computer it occurred to me that what I really need is some of that modular metal shelving to put in the closet holding the games, and to use a bit of the shelving to hold the printer. Then I can use the current games containers (large, plastic cubes) for random storage around the apartment.
The extra space also means that I can now finally buy myself a new dining table (my current table is in the classic "urban curb" style), and I'd also like a new TV/stereo cabinet, since the one I have now is about 15 years old (maybe older!), and is particle board in somewhat questionable condition. So I'll ruminate about all of that.
As things stand now, I have about 16 boxes of books still to unpack (about 1/3 of the original total), and I need to find 'living space' for a few random things. But, really, I'm nearly done. A good feeling!
The development folks all have network-based accounts which give us access to a big UNIX disk space, among other things. For a wide variety of reasons, mine wasn't working. The reasons included file ownership confusion, the fact that my home directory is hosted by a new machine which wasn't mounted on many other machines, and my having accidentally created a local account under my name on my Rhapsody machine, which was masking out the network account. Gah. It took a day and a half and help from four different people to iron all this out. On the bright side, it needed to be done, and it taught me some things about how the systems are set up here.
The funny thing is that all this started because I'd asked my boss a trivial question about creating Web graphics and moving them between my machines - a task which I don't really need to do yet, I was just curious, for future reference.
And this morning I visited TCI to get my cable system set up. I think I saved a little money by switching over the previous tenant's cable rather than getting it installed from nothing. But who knows? Finding their place was a really big pain in the ass, though; they were well-hidden and some distance from home. Another pain is that cable in Campbell is of the 'A' and 'B' channel variety, meaning two separate cables coming from the wall, each with about 35 stations on them. Fortunately, I can just run one cable into each of my VCRs and it works fine. It's even a little convenient, since the two shows I regularly tape - Homicide and The New Batman/Superman Adventures - are on separate channels, which means I use separate tapes for them, which I bet will be convenient when I play them back.
(And I have about 14 hours of TV stored up from the past two weeks, so I should probably start going through them soon.)
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