yesterday was another day of deliveries at the house. actually, it was two deliveries and one pick up. i rarely get things picked up at the house, but this was actually a rather large pick up that i had been meaning to do for a long while.

we had an old refrigerator come with the house that we bought. they said that the refrigerator works, but it leaks. the refrigerator actually leaks at the water dispenser, not from some other random part of the fridge, so it’s still a working refrigerator. but a very old, ugly working refrigerator at that. so we bought a new refrigerator moved the old one into the garage.

instead of dealing with craigslist and having someone come to the house to pick up the refrigerator, i found out that pg&e has a recycling program where they credit you some money for recycling a refrigerator through them. so i scheduled the appointment and they picked up the refrigerator yesterday.

i was huffing and puffing moving the refrigerator out to the curb, but when the guys came to pick it up, they picked it up like it was a fluffy almond pillow and threw it into their truck. yeah, i’m, uhhh, strong.

another major delivery to the house was this couch/bed/chaise lounge thing for the home office. it’s actually pretty cool. it is about the size of a full size bed, but it can fold both lengthwise and widthwise. so in one configuration, it’s a futon. in another configuration, it’s a chaise lounge. very cool, indeed.

the furniture company wanted to charge something like $50 for delivery and assembly. i didn’t want to spend that much money on delivery (all the other furniture we payed for didn’t have delivery or assembly fees) and the piece of furniture only costs like $300 to begin with! another $50 to delivery and assemble? we finally negotiated it down to something like $20 where they would deliver it to the house and we would have to lug it upstairs and assemble it ourselves.

this thing is a lot heavier than it looks. i thought i could get it upstairs by myself, but after nearly having the thing come crashing down on me on the stairs, i waited until christi came home before i tried to move it upstairs again. we finally got it set up in the office and it is working out great.

the last delivery was from BR. the groomsmen’s pants came in the mail. it’s so hard to see what colors would look like on the web. these pants weren’t the color that i was expecting, but i think that they’ll be ok.

i helped john move some stuff around at his new place yesterday. he bought this ENORMOUS wine cellar off some guy at ebay and we had the wonderful task of moving it from this guy’s place to john’s place. when i saw the wine cellar, i thought it was going to be so heavy that we weren’t going to be able to move it anywhere. i think it holds something like 168 bottles of wine. craziness, i tell you.

i still have a lot of stuff at the house to move around, but i’ve started the painful task of hanging all of my clothes. i think that i need to buy more hangers. christi made me throw away my wire hangers. she doesn’t like them, but i think that they are just fine.

i actually didn’t throw the hangers away. i just put them away in the give-for-free pile. speaking of which, i have a lot of stuff that i want to sell or give away. i guess i should hurry and put that stuff on craigslist so that it doesn’t keep the garbage packed.

i made sushi for dinner last night. it was the usual spread: tuna, hamachi, salmon, eel, cucumber, and tamago. make your own sushi is always good and it was nice to be able to enjoy some sushi with friends.

for those who don’t make sushi at home, i always hear about how special it must be to make sushi. sushi is probably one of the easiest meals to make because you don’t have to cook anything. all you have to do is cut some stuff up and you are done. how easy is that?

things around the house are moving along, we’re slowly getting moved in. i tried to clear out some boxes from the garage last night. we can ALMOST get a car in the garage now. ALMOST.

i’ve been going on a major shopping spree for the house. i’m buying all sorts of necessities and “necessities”.

for example, my wireless router is dying at the apartment. i don’t know why i go through so many of these things, but i ordered another one because this one is dying. so far, i’ve decided that wireless networking, though insanely convenient, is also very problematic for me. i don’t get why. really, i don’t.

with the purchase of a wireless router, i thought it would be time to start planning my media center needs, so i purchased a gaming adapter for the xbox so that i can have access to the network wireless. i am THIS close to purchasing a file server. THIS CLOSE. but i’m going to hold off for a little bit more until i can be convinced that i really need one. that i really, really need one. i do. really. i know i do.

i also got a PCI wireless NIC. i know, lame, but i can’t help it. i need it, it sucks. i’ve moved on. you should too.

i also bought the mediagate MG-350HD media center. wireless. neat. yeah, man…that’s a lot of wireless gear.

the greatest thing of all? they are all shipping from different places and all of them are arriving tomorrow. tomorrow is gonna be like christmas.

when you own your own home, lots of things start to matter that never mattered to you before. for example, i never cared about grout color. dark grout? light grout? never made a difference to me. so when i went to lay tile in my kitchen and was posed the question, “what color grout should i use?” i was dumbfounded. i had no idea. should it be red? black? brown? gray? white? off white? i don’t know!

or take the small hedge that i have outside in the front yard. it is very difficult for me to justify purchasing a motorized hedger to maintain a 3 foot by 3 foot by 5 foot hedge. i mean, it’s TINY. how can i justify spending over a hundred dollars to trim it every so often? so instead, i bought a little $8 pair of shears and trimming that hedge nearly killed me. i haven’t used shears in many years because my parents have motorized garden tools. i never knew how much of a difference it makes. let me tell you, though, after i cut the hedge, i had never felt more proud of any garden work i have ever done before. crazy, isn’t it?

and just last night, christi and i spent more time that you would think is reasonable installing a keyless entry system in our house. the biggest problem we had was that the hole in the frame for the locking mechanism was too small and we needed to make it a little bigger. of course, i don’t have a chisel or hammer which would have made this process easier. the big question i have every time i need to fix something around the house is, “should i go buy the tool to fix it?” the big question is how often will i really use a chisel? probably never. so, instead, i went to my trusty leatherman, got out a pocket saw, and proceeded to make the hole bigger with that instead. ghetto, i know! but it worked and saved me from having to go to the hardware store…again.

packing is both a chore and a joy. part of it is liberating to get rid of stuff that i haven’t looked at since i moved into the apartment nearly a year ago. part of it is just a pain trying to efficiently and intelligently pack things so that i can find it again. but now, time has become a factor. i need to get it done.

so now i’m just throwing stuff in boxes. whatever fits, goes. it’s actually not that bad, but there have been some questionable packing choices. why is my sleeping bag packed with my board games? good question. i don’t know myself.

i went to the house and it is still mostly empty. it looks sad. it needs furniture.

today marked the first day that i really tried to pack up some stuff. it’s overwhelming. i’ve lived in this apartment for about a year and i didn’t think that i accumulated a lot of stuff, but there really is quite a bit of stuff here. i just went through all of the books that i own and am deciding what comes with me, what goes to my parent’s house for permanent storage, what i’m going to try to sell, and what i’m going to donate.

i’m going to try and donate a fair number of items on my move out. last time, i didn’t try to sell anything, but this time, i think i’m going to try to sell things away and see how that works out. one of the things that i’m not looking forward to is moving my bed and tv. i still don’t know how i’m going to do it. i’ve packed about 5 boxes and i think i’m going to call it a night. i’m exhausted and sweating again. it doesn’t help that the weather here has been in the 90s and it’s midnight now and the apartment is still over 80 degrees. it’s crazy i tell you. wasn’t it just last week that it was RAINING??

after many years of service, my trusty canon s400 elph finally gave up and stopped working. it’s been through a lot with me and i have been contemplating whether or not to replace it. one of the chief complaints i had with the camera is that its low light performance was really sub-par. i also missed the lack of aperture priority or shutter priority controls. but now that the elph doesn’t work anymore, it was time to think about what kind of point and shoot camera i would replace it with.

i’ve always been a huge canon fan, so it was very tempting to pick up one of the new canon point and shoots. technology has evolved and canon digitals are better than ever. still, i wanted something that was a strong low light performer. then i started to think about what else i might use this camera for and it got me thinking.

i don’t want to invest in a huge setup for underwater photography, it’s not like i dive a lot, but i do dive every so often. on my last dive, i took pictures underwater for the first time and it was kind of neat to take pictures while diving. so i got to thinking that i should buy a digital camera that i could dive with. low light photography and underwater shooting…hmmm.

i looked around and eventually decided on the fujifilm f41fd with the manufacturer waterproof case. we’ll see how it performs when i get it.