Every time I move, I always get sick at least once. I don’t recall it happening whenever I traveled with the military, but if I stayed very long anywhere, I always got hit with some kind of adjustment that manifested as temporary illness. This time around it was a couple of things, but apparently my body is now adjusted.
So today I felt well enough to engage in my wake-up work out as soon as I got the coffee started making. The main workout today was cleaning the apartment. You know, moving stuff, sweeping and mopping. I finally unpacked the last of the books I actually tend to use.
Across the breezeway some folks were moving out just as we were moving in. They apparently didn’t obey the lease requirements, because there were a parade of notices attached to the door, followed by a notice from the sheriff’s department. Then today a deputy watched while the maintenance guys broke the lock and opened up to a stinking, trashed-out mess. You have to wonder if rent would come down a bit if there was less of that. It can’t be cheap to clean that up and get it ready for another renter. And then there’s the similarly abandoned apartment just next door to us…
Right before the move, I used some of my PayPal donations to get a netbook. It was very handy during the transition, and it was still useful the other day after the ice storm knocked out our electricity. It’s easy to carry that thing to some place with free wifi and get caught up. But I’ve got to replace it with something that will run CentOS 7. I got a donation to cover that, but the transaction wasn’t what I expected. You see, on Ebay right now, a tower with moderate specs for Vista era hardware — just the tower alone — costs more than a good laptop with the same specs. So now I’ve got another laptop coming and I wonder what I’ll do with the netbook. I’m not a collector of devices like some folks.
Apparently our street address is quite an issue with various services. I don’t pretend to know what is, or ought to be, the absolute correct answer, but the local post office says one thing, the USPS website says another, and different utilities are wholly inconsistent. The street name doesn’t change when it comes around a corner, turning from east-west to north-south orientation but the addresses change radically to reflect the different orientation. So it goes from “West Glenhaven” with three-digit numbers to “North Glenhaven” and four-digit numbers (bearing no relation to the E-W numbers) just before it comes up past our building. So naturally some of our mail has already gotten misplaced.
None of this is a cry for help, by the way. It’s just giving you a peek at my life and what I now find normal. We are really happy with this place, and I’m very comfortable here. Our living expenses have gone down quite a bit and everything we need is within walking distance for me. I’m still not sure whether I like the change in cycling terrain. Gone are the long quiet hilly rides along backroads in the country. There’s very little rural area anywhere near now and virtually no brutal hills within striking distance. Instead, there are vast stretches of purpose-built bike routes, but they go places I’m not sure I want to see all the time. I see way more traffic than in the past. But for now, it’s not a really big deal because the weather hinders riding much in the first place. It’s mostly strapping on a knee brace and taking a walk. Lots of quiet neighborhood streets that are easier to walk than ride around here.
I really miss the woodlands and the hiking trails. The highly limited foliage around here is awfully quiet compared to the noisy voices of the woods.
Prayer requests: We hope that the tax refund covers a new kitchen stove. They gave us the oldest piece of junk available, featuring those old hinged electric burners and no oven light. I had to buy my own reflector pans because the ones they used were completely wrong and poorly modified to just barely fit in the holes. We’d like to see our missing mail and get our ISP to correct major billing errors; we have service but the billing is really messed up. My son and his wife are still dealing with the insane manager at the trailer park we just left. We can’t transfer the title for the trailer to them until we pay the taxes for this year, and that’s a fair chunk of change.
Finally, I still have my eyes on the mission to teach the message. I still have the calling to do computer tech support as a cover for that mission and I still sense things are about to go crazy on that front.
