Posts Tagged ‘moving’

Moving Sucks And Other Banal Observations

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Things have been some­what hec­tic in Casa del Tolbert over the past month.  In late June, we learned that we would not be able to renew the lease on the nice lit­tle house we were rent­ing because the own­ers had decided to put it up for sale.  We scram­bled to pack and find a new place to live.  Luckily, the rental agency we go through had a nice lit­tle condo in the cen­tral part of Fort Collins, a place with cen­tral air, a pri­vate pool and pri­vate lake access.  To adopt the par­lance of the time, it’s pretty swank.  Monday, we drew on the awe­some might of our social net­work and moved house;  three pickup trucks and one A-​​Team van (for serious–it’s painted the same!)  fer­ried our belong­ings from the old and busted to the new hotness.

Moving is prob­a­bly my least favorite life activity–with a caveat that ‘dying’ will prob­a­bly suck more, but I hope not to know for sure for some time yet.  I am always astounded by how much we own when it comes time to pack. I use very lit­tle of my belong­ings on a day to day basis.  I could prob­a­bly sur­vive with only a few changes of clothes, a tooth­brush, a cell phone, and a lap­top to my name.   If I wanted to save a lit­tle more money, I’d prob­a­bly need a microwave and a but­ter knife too.  Everything else seems mostly extra­ne­ous, espe­cially when you’re lug­ging it up a long flight of steps in 90 degree temperatures.

Early on, I man­aged to pawn off half my books and all of my graphic nov­els on Paul and Mo Hummer.  Suckers!  I’m a big con­vert to the Kindle app on my iPad, and real world books seem almost vul­gar to me at this point.  I still have an affec­tion for them, but with space at a pre­mium, my affec­tion only goes so far.  Honestly, if there were some kind of Netflix-​​like ser­vice for ebooks (an ebook lend­ing library? Lendle doesn’t count.), I would make the leap and get rid of every­thing that doesn’t have a strong emo­tional attach­ment (books from my child­hood, signed copies by favorite authors–that sort of thing).

We go through life accret­ing belong­ings like a cad­dis fly larva builds its shell of stream peb­bles.  An inher­ited table here, a box of books there, and the next thing you know, you’re 33 and your belong­ings take 3 trips in 4 dif­fer­ent vehi­cles to move from one space to another.  It feels like only yes­ter­day that I moved every­thing I owned from Lawrence to Grinnell in the back seat of a Jeep Cherokee.  Of course, now I’m mar­ried and my belong­ings are really the pos­ses­sions of two peo­ple.  And she’s pretty attached to that table in the same way I’m attached to my signed copy of Perdido Street Station.  What’s a few peb­bles on the back in the name of love?

If I’m lucky and not-​​lazy (fat chance!), we may get every­thing unpacked in time to move again.  Not that I’m plan­ning to do that any time soon.  Three times in four  years is plenty, thank you very much.  But life has a way of zig­ging when you expect a zag.  There’s no sense in fight­ing it unless you enjoy being frustrated.

In that last sen­tence you can see a bit of a shift in my life atti­tude, actu­ally.  Railing against the injus­tices of the world was prac­ti­cally my num­ber one hobby. If “get­ting angry at things you can’t change” were an Olympic sport, I would be on a box of Wheaties in a super­mar­ket near you.  But you can only stay stressed and irri­tated for so long before you finally real­ize that get­ting frus­trated, angry, and so on is often a choice.  You can choose to roll with things as best you can instead.  And it’s the health­ier reac­tion most of the time.  Pick your bat­tles, because your time is lim­ited and nobody has ever said “I wish I had spent more time com­plain­ing about my life” when it enters the final act.

My Life as of Late

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’m not spend­ing nearly as much time in the blo­gos­phere lately.  Clearly, bore­dom at old jobs was the pri­mary moti­va­tor there.  I still like read­ing all your blogs and LJs, but with a job that takes 8–12 hours of my day, with­out breaks in vol­ume, my energy for spend­ing time read­ing web­sites is low. My energy in gen­eral is low.

My activ­i­ties out­side of my day job have been win­nowed down to a few things.  I watch TV.  I will never ever crit­i­cize any­one for watch­ing TV over other forms of enter­tain­ment.  When you are men­tally drained, it’s sooth­ing, and helps you unwind.  The qual­ity isn’t that bad these days.  And it’s eas­ier for my wife and I to have a shared expe­ri­ence via a TV show or a movie than it is via a book.  Part of the rea­son I think fic­tion fan­dom is so frac­tured com­pared to the old days is that there are too many choices and we hardly never read the same things.  So lit­tle over­lap in inter­ests anymore.

I’ve found my inter­est in SFF short fic­tion wan­ing quite a bit since tak­ing on the new job.  Roundbottom oddly enough is the only project that inter­ests me.  I haven’t missed actu­ally writ­ing as much as I thought I might.  I guess that’s because I’m writ­ing as much as I ever did, just in one big con­sol­i­dated storyline/​lump.  One post a week is about all I’m good for, see above rea­sons.  I’m not even read­ing since get­ting back from our trip.  Shame, because I was finally start­ing to get into Sam Henderson’s novel.  Maybe I can this week­end.  I need to force myself to take computer/​TV breaks just for the sake of my eyes.

I also think I under­stand now why peo­ple take up drugs like meth.  The idea of get­ting my energy back after a gru­el­ing day fix­ing bugs is tempt­ing.  Meth itself isn’t.  Hell, I don’t even drink caf­feine and have not for over a year now (it messed with my anx­i­ety dis­or­der).  But if I could find a safe, non-​​panic attack induc­ing  method of restor­ing some men­tal energy after a long day, I would do it.  I’m still aim­ing to try Yoga.  I just haven’t had time to enroll in the gym.  I think we’re plan­ning to do that this com­ing weekend.

I feel behind on every­thing and out of touch.  But finan­cially, things have never been bet­ter.  So I can’t com­plain too much.  It’s funny, because I was afraid other peo­ple would stop talk­ing to me because I was tak­ing a break from writ­ing. The real­ity has been the other way around.

The other thing I’ve had energy for is play­ing com­puter games.  For a while, it was Spore, until I got tired of being invaded by unstop­ple alien forces.  I really enjoyed mak­ing things in the cre­ator though.  Now I’m into some Warhammer Online.  I think it’s an iter­a­tive improve­ment on the World of Warcraft model of MMORPGs.  I don’t get too bored run­ning around like I did in WoW.  I like the art and the twisted sense of humor.  I’m play­ing some­thing called a squig herder, a gob­lin class.  I make this lit­tle mon­ster run around and attack things.  It’s the hunter class, basi­cally.    But can the hunter class even­tu­ally jump inside its pet and ride around in its mouth? I guess that ‘s entirely pos­si­ble. I  haven’t played WoW in 3 years. But I doubt it.  I spend a ridicu­lous amount of time in game grow­ing seeds into alchem­i­cal ingre­di­ents. It’s get­ting to the point where I can’t pick up proper loot because I am car­ry­ing so much of that crap around.

We’re still debat­ing about where we want to go next year.  Kansas or Oregon?  Family?  or Friends?  A house? Or apart­ments and rentals.  I think the whole debate is tabled until closer to the date when we know bet­ter what our finances will be and what the state of the var­i­ous economies are.  I’m mak­ing bet­ter money, but Sarah still mostly needs to have a job.

In the mean­while, I’m going to use my time as best I can.  That weird sense of urgency I’ve had for the last sev­eral years has really faded.  Maybe I’ve given up writ­ing for the short story mar­kets for good. Maybe my future really is just in web archi­tec­ture.   I can live with that I guess, so long as the rest of my life is inter­est­ing.  Good friends and con­ver­sa­tion.  Fun is fun, what­ever the form.  Writing stopped being much fun, so it was a good deci­sion to make.

Now if you’ll excuse me, there is a squig that needs herded.

Personal Interlude

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Things have been very busy out­side of the day job (and at the day job as well, but who cares about that stuff?).  I put most of the fin­ish­ing touches on a new web­site for Rudi Dornemann last week.  I’ll let you know here when he signs off on the site, and I’ll try and write up a post­mortem at that point.  It was a fun project, involv­ing updat­ing an older design of mine for a dif­fer­ent sort of website.

I final­ized my art­work for the Strange Horizons dona­tion card over the week­end as well. I will let you know how to get that spe­cial Roundbottom art when the dona­tion drive begins. I’m really pleased with how the image turned out.  The poor lit­tle gob!

I’ve also put nearly every book I own into boxes for the impend­ing move to our new place (only six blocks away from the cur­rent house, but $300 a month cheaper).

Blogging will be lighter over the com­ing two weeks as I’m in the process of fin­ish­ing up a cou­ple of free­lance projects while pack­ing for the move. I cur­rently have no projects sched­uled for June or July, so if you are look­ing for a designer, and want to dis­cuss the pos­si­bil­ity of hir­ing me, you know how to reach me.  An awe­some new web­site would be a good invest­ment of your gov­ern­ment stim­u­lus check!

I will be on vaca­tion in Oregon for the sec­ond week of June, but I can still work on a project for the lat­ter half of the month. If noth­ing turns up, I’ll put that time into build­ing the new Roundbottom site to go with the relaunch, and in gen­eral, just doing more photography.

Have you missed some of the recent Daily Photos?  This link will take you to the tag that I file all the daily images under.  I don’t usu­ally post images over the week­end, but some­times I get excited about shar­ing the work I’ve done and upload it ear­lier.   On my list of things to do is to cre­ate a feed specif­i­cally for just the daily pho­tos so that I can offer up my blog as a photo blog and get it listed in the direc­to­ries for those.

One last excit­ing thing.  We pur­chased a 24 inch LCD for the office com­puter over the week­end.  It is mighty.  So mighty that it gives me eye strain to work on it cur­rently.  I’ve had to dim down its light as much as pos­si­ble just to han­dle look­ing at it for more than 20 min­utes.  But I opened up Photoshop first thing after installing it. Oh boy, the room.  The room…  Unfortunately, the machine it is hooked up to is not pow­er­ful enough to run the Age of Conan MMOG I just bought, which means I do not have a com­puter that can run it period.  Perhaps a video card upgrade will solve my prob­lem, but that is $100+ I don’t want to spend after drop­ping so much on the new mon­i­tor.  Luckily, I didn’t really pay for the Conan game, but traded in a ton of stuff for it at GameStop.  All part of slim­ming down my pos­ses­sions for the move.  The next step in this is hold­ing a garage sale this com­ing weekend.