Things have been busy around here, or couldn't you tell? My old place is mostly empty (that's the picture)...just a few stragglers to pack up and a bit of cleaning left to do. Thanks to my friend Tom who helped me pack up the Uhaul and carry the stuff into the new place in DC. There wasn't all that much, really.

The rowhouse has filled up quite quickly. It will take us a few weeks to go through our things, weed out duplicates, and find the best arrangement. Right now the bedroom is an obstacle course. Stacks of clothes are pushed in the corners with crates and boxes of all sorts of things covering the floor. Picking out a matching outfit for work is pretty hopeless, and all evening I wander around looking for one little thing I need. I know it's here somewhere.

At least my bed is here now. No more sleeping on the floor! And the commute is down to 40 - 50 minutes. Hopefully I can find a few city streets that are a little quicker.

I'll write something more interesting when I'm done with this tiresome packing and move! 

 

welcome to the cube farm! 

The land of misfit furniture.

 

This week I put an ad in the paper to sell some of my furniture. I've had a few calls and sold the dining room table and chairs. This weekend I tried to have an impromptu yard sale, but there weren't many takers. I'm mostly worried about selling the sofa, but I wouldn't mind getting a few bucks for the rest. 

Guessing game.

I just finished filing my taxes online. It took about 14.57 minutes to do both state and federal. Not bad. The hardest choice might have been deciding which free online service to use.

Not having paper instructions in front of me was kind of interesting...for some lines I was thinking, "Okay, this value sounds good..." It seems like the government may want to have better guidelines on the online procedures so people know what they are doing...

Then again, when has this President or Congress been concerned about efficiently using money? Can you say, Highest Deficit Ever? And after several years of record surplus... Bush's answer: selling publicly-owned forest land.

Springtime in Virginia.

  

I wish I knew how to quit you.

 

This is a shot of the coffee bar at work. You put individual K cups in the machine to brew your personal mug of joe or tea. I only started drinking hot beverages in the past three years, and I'm not a huge fan. Especially because they stain my teeth, I get no kick from the caffeine, and it dehydrates me. But having it close by is hard to resist...

 

Here's the front of the new place. I like the color, as well as the blue on the left! We're taking the big bush down. In front is a nice patch of dirt for flowers and herbs. 

 

The backside. The upstairs window is where my bed will be. It's narrow! 

 

Here's the scary garage where I park Montana. It's behind the house and in a dead-end alley. I'm still deciding whether I should trade in my soft top car. I bought some motion lighting to put in it temporarily, but we're planning on tearing it down. In front of the garage you can see the dirt plot that will be our vegetable garden this summer. On the lower level will be our 10' square patio.

there goes the neighborhood...

I hope my many readers don't feel this blog has come to be used as my platform for complaining. Bear with me. I've had a hard life recently. And just when it's started to show signs of easing, I break out in hives! This is a new, traumatic experience for me and I'm unsure if it's stress-related or caused by cleaning the new pad over the weekend (an assumption here that everyone knows of the nasty off-gases new home products emanate for months).

Yes, that's right: I finally have a new place to call home. I'm moving in with a friend from college who bought a renovated row house in the District of Columbia. Finally, city living!

And for putting up with my complaints, you are the first to see a few pics:

 

Soon-to-be Party Central. 

 

Here's the cubby for my bed. My room is in an 'L' shape. I have two windows that face east, which I like, but I will miss the trees outside my current bedroom window. 

 

Here's the rest of my boudoir. Notice the 'closet'. 1' x 2.5'. Perfect for storing stacks of books, I guess. 

Help reduce junk mail/email/calls

I can't imagine the days I used to open every envelope that came to me to be sure I wasn't missing out on anything or throwing away anything important. Now I toss envelopes resembling junk in the trash, sometimes first tearing them in half. What a tragedy to think of all the wasted paper! (I do reuse the reply envelopes for personal mail by crossing out the upc-like bars and slapping on a stamp and blank mailing label. Haven't bought envelopes in years.)

Anyway, to save some of Earth's resources and to save you some grief, here is some useful contact info:

To receive less commercial advertising mail, you can register for The DMA's Mail Preference Service (MPS:
http://www.dmaconsumers.org/cgi/offmailinglist

To stop receiving offers for "prescreened" credit and credit cards, you can call: 1-888-567-8688

To sign up for the Federal Do Not Call Registry for telemarketers:
https://www.donotcall.gov/default.aspx

And all those junk catalogs you get at home? It only takes a minute or two to call the 800-number and ask for your name to be removed. Then they won't share it with others!

This blogger has been busy and wiped. The commute to the new job has been taking about 1.5 hours one-way on the average. My back kills me by mid-week from all the sitting. Unfortunately (in some ways), the Sacramento adventure part of my job has fallen through. I've started apartment searching in the DC area and am quite overwhelmed. I still need to make some basic decisions, such as living solo vs. roommate, DC vs. NoVa, etc. It's quite disappointing that to live in the District one pays Manhattan-like prices, w/o any of the excitement of living in Manhattan! DC has many great things, but still has a small-town feel to it.

 

Flowers cometh. This flower stem sprouted back in December. At least the buds are coming out now, so a few more weeks... Hopefully this year I can properly trim the flower stem so the plant can reuse the same one instead of growing a new one. 

 

A picture of one of my new toys. Mine is the external hard drive on the bottom...a Seagate 250GB for under $100! The one on the top is my friend Chris's. We've been sharing some files. I've copied my entire CD collection to the external drive to make a big phat jukebox. 

The true cost of the war.

I feel a little guilty about the post from a few days ago because it was about money.

The real tragedy of the war is the number of people that have been killed or wounded. 2296 Americans have died, while an ASTOUNDING (and little publicized) 16,653 Americans have been wounded. Let's keep in mind that most of these Americans are teenagers or in their early twenties. These young men and women that have been wounded will struggle with their disabilities and dismemberments for the rest of their lives.

Little is said about about the tens of thousands of Iraqis that have died. Official figures do not exist because the governments will not release them (or is it that their lives weren't important enough to keep accurate figures?) but they range between 30K and 100K. They are men, women, and children. Many are like you and me, trying to go through their daily lives. Many died trying to defend their own country (not talking terrorists here), even if their ruler was a corrupt dictator (like our own?).

I did mention the dollar amount because the figure is quite surprising. When one includes the lifetime healthcare costs for those injured in the war, the figure explodes. Not much return for our money since Iraq slides towards civil war more and more every day and is less stable and safe than it was under Hussein. And remember that Bin Laden guy? He's still running around, though no one seems to care much anymore. The saddest part is that we will be paying for this war for the rest of our lives, and then our children will be paying it off.

Check out this cool site: terrapass.com. Based upon the car you drive, you can make quarterly payments that will go to subsidize the development of new windfarms. It's a way to make up for the carbon dioxide emissions we make by driving throughout the year.

I'm not exactly sure how these 'green e-credit' organizations work, or how effective they are overall. My impression is that by purchasing wind power through a third party, we're creating demand for a renewable resource. This will encourage more development of windmills, make the technology cheaper, and improve the technology through further investment.

There are also numerous places to purchase green energy to offset our use at home!