Uncategorized

I moved into the new apart­ment Mon­day morn­ing after a 1-hour hasty repack of all my stuff. It took two trips in the relo­ca­tion agent's car to get it all because since I arrived I had already acquired a DSLAM, 3 boxes of modems, an iron, and some food.

The move-in has been bumpy. The reloc agent found lots of defi­cien­cies in the apart­ment of bro­ken fur­nish­ings, not well cleaned, and miss­ing basic items. Not to men­tion the boiler didn't work. Almost all of this has been fixed since then. By late after­noon the place some men had fixed the boiler and a clean­ing ser­vice was sched­uled. I fully unpacked every­thing and put away nicely, oth­er­wise it would have dragged on for days with me feel­ing only semi-settled.

Some idio­syn­cra­cies of the place are that it had no microwave and no freezer. The freezer is pretty nor­mal in Ger­many and I will look into buyin ga small one. I bought a microwave the night I moved in down at Sat­urn. That place is always jam-packed and the hol­i­days are worse. They only have a few cash reg­is­ters and each had 35 peo­ple in line!

Heat­ing the place has been prob­lem­atic. The boiler is work­ing but seems not cor­rectly adjusted or maybe there is a prob­lem. with it. I had all the radi­a­tors set at max heat for 30 hours and the tem­per­a­ture reached only some­what com­fort­able and seemed to stay there. It might be a real bat­tle to keep warm this win­ter and I worry the heat bills will be mon­strous, even if I don't pay them myself. At night the burner kicks on for sev­eral min­utes, turns off for one, then starts up again. It seems not right.

Tues­day night I went over to Karl­splatz to buy an alarm clock. I also bought a big cal­en­dar of nature scenes from around the world. I won't be using it as a cal­en­dar, just 12 nice big pic­tures to hang around the place. Also found a new book in the Star Wars Repub­lic Com­mand series! That made me happy to have some read­ing mate­r­ial finally and one of my favorite series to boot!

Also got to see Anne before she heads to the US for 2 weeks. She lives in a big place over on Sendlinger­strasse. She was get­ting ready for an office Christ­mas party so only had 10 min­utes to talk. She lent me her air mat­tress for John's visit next week. I talked her into going ski­ing in Jan­u­ary with Carina (another friend in Munich) and I and made out to some clubs sometime.

I really should move this blog to my own domain and get some more rel­e­vant ads that actu­ally pay me. Or they would if more peo­ple vis­ited here. I do have a feel­ing that this next year I will be writ­ing a lot, and hope­fully the mas­sive odd­ness of my sur­round­ings will inspire me to cre­ative and lucra­tive cre­ative heights.

Spoke to Rachel tonight a long time on Skype. The hotel wifi is quite good, with video work­ing and every­thing except for occa­sional freez­ing for a few sec­onds. We are try­ing to have real con­ver­sa­tions instead of "sched­ule updates". These "sched­ule updates" are the usual type of sim­ple "what did you do today?" and "what will you do tonight?" things. We drifted into that early last spring and as a result really drifted apart.

Some­times it is hard to dis­cuss things because the ten­dency, at least for me, is to get off the phone. I am not much of a phone per­son, even when the phon­ing is with full-motion video. Plus peo­ple do not have sub­stan­tive con­ver­sa­tions all that often. But it is nec­es­sary to main­tain a real con­nec­tion over the long term.

Tongiht, for exam­ple, I ranted about the copy­right sys­tem and grilled her on var­i­ous aspects of it, par­tic­u­larly of the com­mon sense ver­sus the legal stand­point. Also dis­cussed her job search and unem­ploy­ment prob­lems around the coun­try. Most places have set a hir­ing freeze or are actively fir­ing peo­ple. It's not a good time to be get­ting out of school.

I tried call­ing my par­ents and sis­ter on Skype (to their phones) but it just didn't work. My par­ents could not hear me at all, and Claire said it sounded like I was shout­ing down a long tun­nel. I could hear them fine. I obvi­ously have the band­width nec­es­sary to talk because I could do the video thing with Rachel. I won­der if the prob­lem is the Skype exit point to the nor­mal phone net­work. I can't try with my hand­held Skype phone because it needs an eth­er­net con­nec­tion not wifi. In the end, I called them for a few min­utes each on my US cell phone, whcih will cost a pretty penny (or $10 worth of pen­nies). Hope­fully Mom & Dad can get Skype work­ing on their com­puter to use until this Skype->Landline thing starts work­ing better.

I went apart­ment hunt­ing today to see 3 apart­ments and chose one in an neigh­bor­hood called Haid­hausen, also known as the Parisien dis­trict. It is a big apart­ment — only a bit smaller than my house! Has a nice bed­room, very nice kitchen, and a din­ing room that will actu­ally be my office most of the time. There is plenty of room to put down an air mat­tress for guests. It has col­or­ful walls and some dec­o­ra­tions (the color is less intense than it looks in the pic­tures). Also has washer & dryer in-apartment. It's in the kitchen, oddly. And it is a sin­gle machine rather than 2 sep­a­rate ones. Here is the place with full info and lots of pic­tures: http://mrlodge.de/app/3834/eng/index.htm

The place I orig­i­nally wanted was not good at all. Very small, ster­ile look, and the ter­race just fed onto a street basi­cally. Def­i­nitely a short-term bach­e­lor pad type of place, not good for a full year. The washer and dryer were down the stairs, through the base­ment, down a hall, around the cor­ner, there was 1 machien for the whole build­ing, and it was expensive.

The other place was very new and mod­ern, I just didn't like the layout.It had an awe­some kitchen. Lots of restric­tions on using the washer and dryer in the build­ing because it is next to the house owner's daughter's room.

Relo­ca­tion agent is already call­ing them to arrange the apart­ment, but I prob­a­bly can't move in until the 15th which is a bum­mer. They only do move-ins on first and mid­dle of the month in Ger­many and don't just pro-rate the first month so I have to wait. For­tu­nately the hotel is quite good.

The really nice weather from last 2 days is gone and it has turned rainy. I need to go get some food then I doubt I will ven­ture out tonight. I had a really strange night of sleep last night and am tired today. It was one of those nights where one thinks hours have passed in fit­ful night­mares, then find it's only been 15 minutes…whole night was like that.