• On Life and Love

    Moving: Done

    As this is posting, Greg is handling the final details of vacating our old house. It took a week and a half to clean that house suitably–a sure sign that the house was too ridiculously large in the first place. Oh, well. The me of today is not the me of two years ago. Unfortunately, my shoulder wasn’t completely better yesterday despite being done with the steroids, and an hour medfitation, half an hour sitting and discussing a book, and over three hours of climbing around cleaning house last night have reinjured my shoulder. Could be a different injury: I still have the jerky rotation, but my shoulder burns and…

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    The Move: Adventurous, Painful, Mostly Done

    All that’s left are little bits, the plants, and the cleaning. Oh, the cleaning… We had amazing and invaluable help from Chris and Shurn, but I’m pretty confident that our next move will use hired help. It’s just not cool to inflict that on people you love.

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    Organization vs. Convenience

    I have a moving date: July 13. We’re downsizing, moving out of a 1200 sq. ft., three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bathroom house into a 900-ish sq. ft., two bedroom, two bathroom apartment (awaiting final confirmation). Still bigger than I wanted, but significantly cheaper and almost 300 sq. ft. smaller. As I’ve been decluttering over the last almost-year (stalled for the last few months), I’ve struggled mightily with the conflict of organization vs. convenience. For instance, in my new, smaller office, I have all my office supplies in two small bins that fit on the shelf above the desk. Nothing overflows and I have exactly what I need. But getting out a pen…

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    Cell Phones: Going Prepaid?

    So, I have this iWone 3G. Greg has one, too. It’s something of a boat anchor these days, now that the novelty has worn off (it’s been about a year and a half). I’m not an iPhone gamer. I don’t really use social networking stuff (Hootsuite) on it except on rare occasions. Email is only for reference rather than composition. It is my primary camera at the moment, sadly, since my real one won’t hold a charge on fresh batteries. So what do I use it for? Contacts, calendar, phone calls, static music, and Pandora. The first two come from our good friend Uncle Google. The last two are definitely…

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    Stereo Reduction

    One of my latest home pet peeves is my stereo. I’ve got a nice, old-skool 5.1 setups (sans a subwoofer)… which means that my living room is chock full of cables. As I clear out things like the broken desk chair that’s been in our living room for a year and a half, more speaker cables are exposed. Fugly eye sore. I like my sound system–I’ve had it for over a decade now (mostly). The receiver is an old Harman Kardon AVR 110, and despite predating component inputs (much less HDMI), it sounds beautiful when I use optical/coax audio. In addition to the eye sore of the speaker cables, though,…