Married 9 Years
As of 11:05 AM today I’ll have been married to Kiara for 9 years! We’ve been together for about 10 years, and we’ve known each other for about 13 years.
We originally met on a MUD called The Edge of Darkness back in 1994. She was playing a mage named “Jade” that worked for a mercenary guild full of black hearts, deep purses, and very few scruples. I was playing a paladin named (you guessed it) Beosig that was the First Sword in The Order of Justice. Needless to say, we didn’t get along all that well.
My roommate was playing a bard named Thain, and he joined Jade and crew as a mercenary. My roommate eventually stopped playing, and I took over Thain. Eventually the mercenary guild and the Order of Justice went the way of the do-do, and I recreated Beosig as a warrior because I was tired of being the guy that just hunted down killers and thieves.
About this time, Kiara started a new character named Crystal that was a cleric. Well, clerics need warriors, and warriors need clerics. Except for unlocking the occasional door, a cleric and a warrior together can handle just about anything. Crystal and I were a team to be reckoned with. We went everywhere together, and we took on pretty much everything in the world. It was great!
Also about this time a friend of ours started a new guild called the “Society of Honor and Valor” or something like that (I know for sure it had “Honor and Valor” in there somewhere.) We joined up with a good sized group of people that really just wanted to group, kill things, run around, and not cause trouble.
Someone else on the MUD decided that we needed an enemy and started an evil guild just for the express purpose of killing our members. This totally ruined the game for me. You could no longer take risks and go after the really hard mobs on the MUD because the other guild would stalk you until you were weakened from a tough fight, and take you out. You’d end up losing all of your gear, and, as a warrior, this pretty much meant that you were now powerless.
It was about this time that I decided to start my own MUD. This was February of 1996. I invited Kiara and another friend to join me in this venture, and we had a grand time writing bugs (me), finding bugs (Kiara), coming up with new ideas (all three of us), and fixing bugs (me.) We were splitting our time between The Edge of Darkness and Spear of Insanity, and having a good time doing it.
One night (I wish I could remember the exact date,) Kiara logged out of Spear of Insanity, and told me that she was heading over to Edge of Darkness to play. When she logged out, I felt a profound sense of emptiness. That’s when I realized that I had feelings for her that went beyond friendship, which was weird. I knew her. I knew her quite well. We had spent hours on Edge of Darkness talking about personal stuff while waiting for zones to reset. That night I realized that I wanted to meet her, and see if we could get along outside the digital worlds that we hung out in.
That’s when I asked for her phone number. She willingly gave it to me, and that started our almost nightly phone calls back and forth for a week or two. That’s when I decided that I wanted to meet her in person, and I got a plane ticket to fly from San Antonio, TX, to Great Falls, MT to meet her. I also decided that I truly did love her, and that I wanted to get her a ring. Not an engagement ring, but a ring with some sort of diamond on it. I could only afford about $100 on the ring, and it’s one of the most pathetic diamonds that you’ll ever find. Despite that, Kiara still wears the ring everyday, which makes me most happy.
I flew up to Montana for a long weekend, and we spent most of the time her small one-room apartment just hanging out, talking, and watching movies. She took me out to the nearby mountains where there was a waterfall, and that’s where I gave her the ring. She was very shocked, and I quickly realized what she was thinking. I quickly told her that it wasn’t an engagement ring, but just a symbol of my love for her.
When the weekend was over, I was heartbroken to have to leave her, but I knew that I would be returning to Montana soon. I had already decided to move up there to be with Kiara. A long month passed in which we both racked up $300 phone bills with all of the phone calls, but the time came for me to move to Montana. Everyone, including my mother, thought I was crazy for picking up and moving across the country for someone that I had only met once. Everyone, especially my step-father, was very supportive, and wished me the best.
Kiara flew into Dallas, and I picked her up there. We drove to Fort Worth, and spent the weekend at a party for Edge of Darkness players. We got to meet tons of people that we had known for years online. It was a great experience, and it was the first time Kiara and I had done anything like that. We had a blast while there, but it was over too quickly. While there, I had some car trouble, but some Edgers were kind enough to loan me the $300 that it took to fix my car. It took a few years, but we finally got stable enough financially to pay them back.
Kiara and I drove back down to San Antonio where she met my folks, and we hung out for several days. My mom was sad the whole time because she knew that I was leaving home. She had a feeling that it was for good, and she was right. I wasn’t 100% sure about it myself, but I was going to give it a shot. I packed up all of my stuff in my Corsica, and we started the long drive to Montana.
We stopped off for a few days in Midland, and I ran Kiara ragged around town meeting all of my friends, my family, and saying goodbye to everyone. My grandmother was concerned for me, but my grandfather knew that it was something that I had to do. He even gave me some cash for me to live on until I landed a job. It’s a good thing, too. The money barely lasted me until I got my first paycheck.
On the road from Texas to Montana, we stopped off in Colorado Springs (which is where we ended up living) to meet some more Edgers (including some of the gods!) and hung out for a few days. It was a good time, but it was also too short. We had to get to Montana in time for Kiara to get back to work.
The longest drive of my life was from Colorado Springs, CO to Great Falls, MT. It took a little over 14 hours, and the last several hours of that was through some very horrible weather. I was exhausted, bedraggled, and not looking my best when we pulled into Kiara’s folk’s house. I met my future in-laws for the first time, and I was too tired to try to impress them. My future father-in-law was very understanding, and told me that we could get to know each other the next day. I stumbled downstairs to their guest bedroom, and slept the sleep of the dead.
The next day, we got up, ate some breakfast, and then headed over to a miniature family reunion at Kiara’s grandmother’s house. I got to meet aunts, uncles, grandparents, and all sorts of people. I was on full inspection alert. Kiara was their golden girl, and I was the stranger from Texas that she met online. I was told later on that I did quite well on my first day with my future family. Kiara’s aunt even told everyone else (after we had left) that she knew for certain that Kiara and I were going to get married.
We ended up in Havre, MT where Kiara was going to college. I had arranged for an apartment of my own in the same building that Kiara was living in, and I unpacked there. We spent the next couple of months “living apart”, but spending every waking moment together. After a few months, I asked Kiara if it would be ok if we moved in together in order to save money. I was hardly at my apartment, and it didn’t make much sense to be paying rent on a place that I was only using to store my clothes, and books. She was obviously nervous at this proposition, but she agreed to it.
We lived together for about a month when I decided that I was going to ask her to marry me. On July 4th, 1997, I cajoled Kiara into taking us out to the waterfall where I had given her the tiny diamond ring earlier in the year. When we got there, we hung out, climbed on some rocks, and finally Kiara wanted to leave. I was going to ask her to marry me while at the waterfall, but I couldn’t get up the nerve. Finally, before we left, I decided that it was now or never. I got down on one knee and asked her to marry me. I felt bad because I didn’t have a ring, but I was more concerned about Kiara when I asked her. It looked like she was going to pass out. She kind of stood there for a moment, swayed back and forth, and looked a little pale. I had totally caught her off guard. After what felt like forever, she finally smiled at me, and simply said, “Yes.”
When we got home, we turned on the TV to find the news that Mars Pathfinder had successfully landed on Mars, and was sending back images from the surface of Mars. It was the first time that we had full color images of Mars from the surface, and it was a great day for astronomy. Somehow NASA’s and the JPL’s accomplishments echoed how I felt. We decided to go watch some fireworks, and we spent the night in each other’s arms watching the beautiful fireworks displays. It was the perfect end to a perfect day.
The next weekend we broke the news to Kiara’s family that we were getting married. We had already picked March 15th as the day because that was the first day of Kiara’s spring break, and that was pretty much the only time that we could do it unless we waited until the next summer when she graduated. Kiara’s mom was in a tizzy about flowers, preachers, churches, tuxes, dresses, invitations, guest lists, catering, etc., etc., etc. We had to slow her down, and we told her that we had eight months to figure this all out. We had already bought some books with information and checklists in them on how to arrange a wedding.
The next eight months was full of drives from Havre (where we lived) to Great Falls (where we were getting married) which takes about 2 1/2 hours one way. When I would get off work at 5, we would get on the road right away, drive to Great Falls, meet with a florist/caterer/priest/tux shop/dress shop/church. After the meeting, we would get back on the road, and get home around 11 PM. We’d do this 2-3 times a week until it was all planned out. We spent most of our weekends in Great Falls because we could get so much done during the day.
It may sound like the eight months dragged on, but we were so busy that we hardly noticed the time fly. Kiara was going to school (her senior year), and I was working full time as tech support for one of the two ISPs in town. Before we knew it, it was time to get married.
The wedding started at 11:00 AM, and ended at 11:05 AM. That’s how weddings should be. Of course, we had the reception afterwards that lasted several hours, but that was fine. I got to meet tons of Kiara’s family, and we had a good time.
The next day, we hopped on a bus (should have taken the plane, but oh well) to go from Great Falls, MT to Midland, TX. It took 2 1/2 days to make the trip, and we encountered all sorts of sketchy people along the way. I would suggest to everyone that they take at least one long bus ride during their life because it’s a great growing experience. I’m just glad that I’m not one of the people that must rely upon buses to get across country on a regular basis.
We had a reception for my family in Midland, and all of my family and friends were there. There were people from all over Texas there. It was a great reason to get together and have a good time. I was so happy to see so many of my relatives, and I think Kiara enjoyed it as well because she knew some of my friends already. She had someone to talk to while I made the rounds to all of the various family members. She even got to meet my Aunt Melba, who is, by far, the most interesting and enthusiastic member of my family.
After the reception (and a few days) in Texas, we hopped back on the bus, and spent another 2 1/2 days riding back to Montana. While passing through Colorado Springs on the bus, I looked around the city and decided that I liked what I saw. At that point, I decided that Kiara and I would move to Colorado Springs after she graduated. We hadn’t talked about it, and I didn’t tell her about my decision until much later.
The last couple of months of us living in Montana was made up of Kiara doing tons of homework, me cooking quite a bit (a shocker, I know!), the rare trip to Great Falls on the weekend, me working at an ISP, and enjoying Tuesdays. Tuesdays were our most expensive nights out on the town. We would hit a small Mexican shop that had “Taco Tuesdays” where you could get 2 tacos for $0.49. We’d usually load up on 8-10 tacos. Also, our favorite movie rental place had movies for $0.49 on Tuesdays. We’d get a movie or two to go with our tacos. We’d end up spending about $5 for a night of food and entertainment, and that was about all we could afford. Man, how times have changed.
As Kiara neared graduation, I started breaching the topic about where we were going to move to once she was done with school. Havre (population 8,000) offered no future for either of us, and we knew that we had to get out of there. Great Falls was a little better, but I had enough of Montana winters after just one of them. I told Kiara that I wanted to move someplace that was about halfway between her hometown and my hometown. She agreed to that idea, and I already knew that Colorado Springs would be the place. To make it fair, we got a map of the U.S., and we started marking cities. The only two that we would consider, and that met the equidistant requirement were Colorado Springs, and Kansas City. We started researching both cities in terms of employment, cost of living, crime rate, weather, entertainment, etc. Both cities were fairly close, but the two most important factors that we had were Kansas City’s higher violent crime rate, and the fact that we already knew people in Colorado Springs. We decided on Colorado Springs, and I’m glad that we did.
After Kiara graduated, we moved to Colorado Springs. We had arranged for an apartment, sight unseen. We had put $100 down on the apartment, and we got there, we found that it was a total rat-hole. We decided to make a go of it for a few months, and then move to a better place once we had jobs and some money. That first night, we heard gunfire in the apartment complex. After things settled down, I looked out the window and noticed several police officers standing around, so I went outside to talk to them. I asked them what was going on, and one of them told me that there had been a shooting. They thought that it was either drug or gang related. I immediately decided that we weren’t going to stay there, and I asked the police officers what neighborhood we should look to move to to stay safe. He told me to look to the north end of town (we were on the south end of town.)
There was an apartment that we had found that we liked better, but we passed on it because they didn’t allow ferrets. We had two ferrets, so we had to pass on the better apartment. This lead us to the rat-hole that we were in. We decided that it would be best to move to the better apartment, and not tell them that we had ferrets. The next day we had arranged for an apartment in the better location, but it would not be ready for 2-3 days. We got a hotel room down the street from the apartment, and lived there for a few days.
We finally got our apartment, got unloaded, and took the U-Haul back. Oi! That bill was high. Between the days of packing it, the 2 days of driving, the day at the rat-hole, the 3 days at the hotel, and the 2 days of unpacking, we racked up quite a bill. We had saved up money for moving, but this pretty much tapped our reserves. Also, since neither of us had a job, the apartment wanted the first three month’s rent up-front. That was reasonable, and we had the money in the bank account. We were able to get established in Colorado Springs, but we were pretty much flat broke by the time we got settled in.
About a month later Kiara and I both landed full-time jobs, and the money started pouring. Neither of us had made this much money individually before, and now our incomes were combined! We dug ourselves out of our financial hole fairly quickly, and life was very good.
We lived in that apartment for about a year before we decided to buy a house. It didn’t take long to find the one we liked, close on it, and move in. That was July of 1999. We lived in that house until July of 2006 when we bought a larger house with more land out in the country. The years between 1999 and 2006 were up and down, but they were mostly up. Kiara held a steady job, which allowed me to chase job after job after job. Most of the time, when I would change jobs it was for the better. This was the rule, but there were exceptions. I would quickly run away from the poor jobs in search of a better one.
The last 9 years (10 if you count the pre-marriage ones) of my life have been the best that I’ve ever had, and it’s made me wonder what the next decade will bring. I guess I’ll just have to stay on the road of life, and see where it takes me.
Sold Our House!
Sorry for posting so late today, but I took the day off work. We closed on our house (the one that we just sold!) this morning, so I’ve been running around town. There was a potential hiccup on the part of the buyers’ finances last night, but it was resolved this morning. That’s a good thing. I would probably be in jail right now for a double murder had things fallen through.
Anyway, I’m off to class, so I don’t have much time to post. I’m just glad that we’re finally out from under the mortgage payments on that house! Woo Hoo!
Moving and Teaching
My dream started with me standing between an office building and a moving truck. I was sweating profusely and hurting quite a bit as I hauled large, heavy boxes from the building to the truck. I would talk to the building, pick up a box, and heave it to the truck. The people that I was helping to move weren’t lifting a finger to help because they were busy with closing on their house. Oddly enough, they were doing it at a cheap folding card table that was piled high with papers. Their real estate agent kept telling me that I had to go away because they were going to discuss the purchase price, and she didn’t want me to be privy to that information for some reason.
I constantly told the real estate agent to blow off because I was busy moving stuff. She finally got to the point in the paperwork where they were discussing numbers. That’s when the three of them (husband, wife, and agent) approached me, and told me that I would have to leave. That’s when I realized that I didn’t know any of them, and I blew up. I started screaming and cussing at them because I was busting my ass moving for people that refused to help me, and I didn’t even know them!
I told them that I had other things to do, and that they were on their own for the rest of the move. That’s when I walked into the office building, and down a few hallways. I finally entered a room that was laid out exactly like my algebra 2 classroom that I was in when I was a sophomore in high school.
Instead of walking to one of the student desks, I walked to the teacher’s desk and sat down. I looked down at a syllabus that suddenly appeared on the desk, and I knew that I was going to have to teach the class what was on the syllabus. I looked up from the paper to find that the classroom had filled with students.
I took the syllabus and started walking around the room with it. I kept reading from the syllabus, and telling the students what we were going to cover for the semester. The syllabus made no sense, but I went through it anyway. There were entries on the syllabus that looked like:
- Discuss the philosophical meanings of grok.
- Formulate a thesis on the hidden values of cromulant.
- Find three unique snowflakes and photograph them.
- Learn to ride a horse backwards.
- Grapple with a fellow student until you find a way to choke them out.
- Write a software routine in PHP to generate Fortran code that can be converted to assembler for the development of an artificial intelligence.
It just went on and on like that. None of it really made much sense. As I was explaining it to my students, I could tell that they were just as befuddled as I was.
Before I could make any sense out of the class objectives, my alarm went off. As I was getting ready to go to work, I was still trying to process the syllabus. I finally decided that it would never make sense to me, so I put it out of my mind on the drive into work.
Sun Worshipping
I almost missed today’s blog. Been a busy day so far. Here’s what I’ve got written for today.
When we were looking at buying our new house, I knew right away that if we got the house, I wanted the downstairs office. Matter of fact, I called dibs on it when we walked into the room, and I saw Pikes Peak out the window. What I wasn’t thinking was that it is the smallest room in the house, and the sun tend to come into the window in the evening times.
The small quarters are not a problem. I managed to fit my three bookshelves full of role playing books, tech manuals, fantasy books, and other misc stuff into my office. I also have my desk, desktop computer, laptop, and data CD collection in here. I also have both printers and my mini-fridge in the office. It’s a little cozy, but it’s nice to have it all in one room. If I want something that is mine, I know that it is most likely in this one room.
The thing that I don’t like about the office is the evening sun. Around 4:30 in the afternoon, it streams in on the surface of my desk, reflects off of the laminated surface of the desk, and right into my eyes. I have to close my blinds and cut off my great view from my office. Around 4:50, the sun is at enough of a different angle to no longer shine in my eyes, so I can open the blinds again. However, starting at around 5:25, the sun starts to come in directly into my eyes. I have to once again close my blinds for the remainder of the day. Once the sun goes down behind the mountains (typically 7:30ish) I can open my blinds up once again. If I remember to open them up in time, I get a great view of the sunset, though.
All-in-all, I’m happy with my office. The only thing that I would change would be to maybe make it a little bigger, so that I could fit one more bookshelf into the office. I might be able to pull that off once I get rid of my two spare desktops. That’ll free up space to move my mini-fridge, and then setup another shelf where the fridge currently is. We’ll see how it goes…
Unpacking
Here’s probably my last post about moving. Been a while since I’ve posted about it, so I figure you’re not tired of it anymore. We made a bull-rush on the boxes last week, and we’re down to 1 box in the living room, and 2 boxes in the garage.
Before I can do the boxes in the garage, I have to fix the peg board that came with the house. The guy that put in the peg board didn’t do a great job. There’s very little space between the wall that it’s mounted on and the peg board. That means that the pegs won’t mount properly on the peg board. I have to take the peg board off. It’s held on by a series of screws (easy to remove), and some nails (which are in deep, going to be some work.) I plan on mounting some 2x4s to the wall, then mounting the peg board to the wall. That will give the necessary gap for hanging the pegs.
Once that is done, I can proceed with unpacking the rest of the garage. Once all of the unpacking is done, we’ll move on to taking the broken-down boxes into the attic. That will clear up enough space to put the tractor into the garage in front of Kiara’s car.
I can’t wait to get it all done.
Networking Printers
With the move, our network topography changed. At the old house, we had two isolated networks. We had 192.168.1.0/24 on the cable modem, and 192.168.0.0/24 on the DSL. The printers, file server, and desktops were on the cable modem network. Our laptops were on the DSL network via wireless connection. In order to print, we had to swap to the wireless network that was hooked up to the cable modem, or plug in a network cable.
With the new house, we just have DSL. This means that the 192.168.1.0/24 network has vanished, and we’re just using the 192.168.0.0/24 network. The laptops were already configured to work with the new network, so there was no trouble there. The three desktops that we own are going to be rebuilt. The plan is to take the biggest hard drives that we own, and put them into a single machine to act as a file server at the house. The remaining parts will be used to build out two machines that we’re going to sell or donate. This will get us down to one desktop as a file server, and two laptops.
One set of equipment that we’re keeping is the printers and the print server. The print server is an embedded device that has an RJ-45 jack, and two parallel ports on it. You hook it up to the network, configure it, install some custom software on your Windows desktop, and print over the network. It’s pretty slick.
The problem that I had last night was that the print server was on the 192.168.1.0/24 network at the old house, and I needed to move it to the 192.168.0.0/24 network on the new house. I knew that I needed to talk to the print server, so I pulled out my crossover cable. I used it to hook my laptop up directly to the print server. I changed my network settings to use the old 192.168.1.0/24 network, so that I could talk to the print server. I could see it just fine, but when I attempted to load the “advanced settings” in the configuration software, it would fail.
After fighting with it for about an hour, I called Netgear’s tech support. I waded through the prompts, and finally got to a person. He collected all of my information (serial number, name, phone, email, etc.), and then put me on hold. After about 5 minutes on hold, he came back and told me that my support period with them had expired a few years ago. I wasn’t surprised by this since I had purchased the print server many years ago. He told me that I could either use the web as support for free, use email as support for free, or talk to him to get the problem resolved on the phone for $33 and change. I declined his offer to spend my money, and decided to give it a go myself.
After getting off of the phone with the tech support person, I hit Netgear’s web site. A few searches, and some clicks later, I came across a knowledge base entry that said that the print server’s software would not work properly under Windows XP with service pack 2. That was the operating system that I was running, so I finally found out the problem. Fortunately, there was a fix. I had to download a newer version of the software, install it, and use it. Sounded simple enough.
I downloaded the software, virus scanned it, and started to install it. It detected my older software, and told me to remove it first. Easy enough. I removed the software, which required a reboot (go figure.) After the reboot, I tried installing the newer software, and it installed just fine. However, I had to reboot again (no big surprise there.)
Finally, after about 3 hours of fighting with the print server, I had its config right in front of me. I changed the network settings of the print server, and saved the changes. The next step was the yank the crossover cable that I had been using, and plug the print server into the 10/100 switch that I had hooked up to the DSL router. The link light came on right away on the print server and on the switch. I was making progress.
I then launched the port setup software for the print server. It saw the print server over the wireless connection, and let me setup the ports. The way it works is that it sets up a bogus, software-controlled “port” under Windows. Then you point your printer to use that “port”, and the drivers behind the scenes send the print job over the network to the print server, and ultimately on to the printer. I still had the printers setup from the old house, so I just needed to configure the ports. I got both ports setup, went into my printer configs, pointed the printers to the new ports, and then sent a few test pages out.
Voila! We have working printers on the new network at the house. Our new HP ColorJet 2550n works like a champ. It takes a bit to get started on printing, but once it gets going, it churns out printouts at a pretty good pace. Our older HP LaserJet III jams anytime you print to it. I would go get it cleaned/fixed, but it’s really not worth the time or trouble. It’s a good, solid printer with new toner, new rollers, and some other new parts. We had it totally overhauled for about $200 last year. I just gotta figure out what to do with the thing.
My next project around the house is going to be backing up stuff from the three desktops to my laptop, and then figuring out which hard drives go into which machines. I’m going to build out the two spare desktops first, and get rid of them. Then I’ll build out the file server that we’ll use at the house. Should be a fun project. I can’t wait to get started on doing it.
Shopping Spree
Kiara and I haven’t been grocery shopping in a while because we didn’t want to buy a bunch of food that we would eventually have to move to the new house. Now that we’re in the new house, we decided to stock up on food. We went to the local Safeway because it’s closest to the new house. In past years we’ve shopped at Albertson’s and King Soopers because they were the nearest places to get food. I’m fairly loyal to a company if they give good service at a reasonable price. However, the large grocery stores are all the same, and going to the one that is closest to the house just makes sense.
We got to Safeway around 8:00. Neither of us had spent more than 5 minutes in this particular store, so we decided to walk down each aisle in an effort to figure out the layout of the store. As we made our way through the store, we would pick up items that we needed. The whole process took much longer than I expected it to. We ended up leaving the store a little after 9:00, and got home about 9:30. The total bill came out to over $160. That is quite a bit higher than our standard grocery bill, but like I said, we hadn’t been to the store in weeks.
Once we were home, we had to put away everything that we bought. That took another 20 minutes, and I was getting frustrated with how long the whole process had taken. We had just gotten Dish Network installed, and I wanted to spend the evening setting up the TVs. Kiara went downstairs to spend some time with the cats while I tried to move the furniture in the bedroom to where we wanted it all to go. I got the dresser pretty close to where we wanted it, but I couldn’t move it in the small increments that I needed to get it against the wall. I finally tracked down Kiara and got her to help me shift the dresser into the right spot.
The small TV stand that we use has, for some unknown reason, has wheels on it. They weren’t a problem at the old house, but something about the carpet at the new house and the wheels made the stand very unstable. I had to take the TV off fo the stand, put it back on the bed, flip it over, and take the wheels off of the stand. That took about 10 minutes to do, but we finally go the TV back where it goes. Then I had to wire up the cables for the VCR, DVD player, the Dish Network box, the signal switch, and the RF modulator. That went pretty smoothly, and in the end, I ended up with a working TV!
It was around 11:00 by the time I got all of this done, so I called it a night. I really wanted to get the living room TV done as well, but that just didn’t happen. I’ll work on that tonight… I hope.
Digital TV
We’ve had crappy Adelphia analog cable for the past 7 years. It’s been ok, but not great. With the move, Adelphia isn’t an option, which is a good thing. We went with Dish Network over DirecTV because of price, and DirecTV doesn’t offer anything more than Dish Network. The signal is great, the sound is clear, and the picture quality is outstanding. We’ve only got the bedroom hooked up for now. The TV in there is an older one with only a single analog input. We have to run the clean digital signal through an RF modulator to convert it to the analog signal. I’m sure we’re losing some quality at that point, but it’s still pretty damn good.
I’m really looking forward to getting the main entertainment center setup, so I can use S-Video to connect the Dish Network receiver into the TV. We’ve got to see about investing in some surround-sound speakers. The house is wired for it, but the old owners took the speakers with them. I may do that today while out at lunch. If they’re not too expensive, I’ll pick some up. They need to be able to mount on the wall since the holes for the speaker wires are fairly high up on the wall. It shouldn’t be a problem.
Bright Light! Bright Light!
I love my new house, but I have one complaint so far. It’s too damn bright in our bedroom in the morning! Our old house had blinds, winter blankets, and curtains on the windows to block out the annoying orb in the sky that people call “the Sun.” The new house just has these cloth blinds that pulldown to block most of the window. They don’t cover the arch of glass that is over the main window, so the sun streams in through that part of the window. The part that is covered really isn’t covered all that well.
All-in-all, it makes for a bright morning. I try to sleep in as late as I possibly can, but with the brightness in the bedroom, I’m actually getting up earlier than I need to. I normally do the morning routine, and head right out the door. The past couple of days, I’ve gotten up, done the morning routine, sat around, and waited for time to leave. It’s not enough time to be productive on anything, so I just sit there in the morning and wait for time to come.
Maybe I’ll take up drinking coffee in the morning…
Unpacking Begins
We have Dish Network showing up today to hook up our TV signal. I had to unpack the TVs, and minimal cables, so that the Dish Network installer could test the signal. That went pretty quickly. The next step was to move the end tables for the bedroom into the bedroom. This is where I ran into a snag. The end tables were buried behind boxes, printers, printer stands, and other stuff. I decided that I didn’t want to pick up those heavy printers more than once. I figured I would move them into my office where their final destination is going to be.
This meant that I had to organize my office. I put my corner desk together, moved my bookshelves around (twice, I didn’t like the first place that I put them,) moved some smaller table around, moved one of the smaller tables to Kiara’s office because I ran out of room, and put my mini-fridge into place. Once all of that was done, I moved the printer tables into my office, then moved the printers into place. The office is mostly done. I just have to put some shelves into the bookshelves, then start moving about a dozen boxes of books into the shelves. It’s going to be back-breaking work, but I’m looking forward to getting all of my books back out of their boxes.
By the time I was done with my office, it was late, and I was beat. I tried to move the end tables, but it required more effort to move them by myself than I was willing to put out. Kiara and I will double-team the end tables tonight and get them into place. Once we get the Dish Network setup, we’ll know where the TVs will go, so we’ll know where to point our furniture. Tonight will be putting the bedroom together for sure. We both agree on where all of the bedroom stuff goes, so it should go smoothly. Then I want to do the upstairs living room. That will probably be the end of the day, but I may try to unpack a box or three of books.
