Not To Be Trusted With Knives

I’m tired just thinking about this week.  This afternoon I’m taking a ferry to Victoria for an all-day Stats Canada workshop I’m going to tomorrow.  Then I return to the mainland on Tuesday evening and first thing Wednesday morning, I drive to Hope for a full-day of stuff there.  Then Thursday I have to go to Langley for a meeting.  OK, so Langley doesn’t seem that far after Victoria and Hope, but I think by that point even the drive to Langley is going to seem like too much!

Because of all this travel, I’m not expecting my blog postings will be particularly enthralling this week.  I know, I know, you come here for all the well-thought out, thoroughly-researched, intensely fact-checked, Pulitzer-prize winning essays I’m pumping out.  But you’ll just have to make do.  Here’s a preview of what I expect to post this week.

Tuesday – “Look at me, I’m on the ferry!”

Wednesday – “I am in the middle of nowhere.” (Also, probably an obligatory joke about people being “from beyond Hope.”)

Thursday – “So. Tired.”

Tags: life, travel

I cleared out the last of the stuff out of my old place today.  Though I’d moved all the stuff I was keep to my new place a couple of weeks ago, I still had a pile of stuff to take to a thrift store and some old computer stuff to take to Free Geek.  And, in typical Beth fashion, I left that until the very end of the month to do that. In the end, I took two large boxes and a full back pack to the SPCA Thrift store and an old computer, an old laptop and various other geeky items to the Free Geek.

I also had to go the post office because the screwed up my mail forwarding. I’d signed up to have my mail forwarded from my old address to my new one for six months.  I was most concerned with the fact that it’s tax time and I didn’t want any of my T4s or other tax-related documents to go missing.  However, instead of forwarding my mail to me, they’ve been forwarding some other person named “Snow” who lives a block from my old place. The first piece of forwarded mail I received was from Blue Cross, which happens to be the company that I have my extended medical with, so I opened it assuming that it was mine, only to find that it was a cheque to some other “M. Snow.”  Nice work, Canada Post!  My mail was still going to me old place and thank goodness I still had access, because two of my T4s and my student loan tax receipts were at my old place.  So I went to Canada Post and asked them to fix this because I’d really to, you know, get the service that I freakin’ paid for!

And the last thing I did was say good bye to my old landlady.  She is moving out tomorrow and today was likely the last time I’ll ever see her.  And it was pretty sad.  Betty is a very sweet lady and it’s been pretty nice living in her house.  I didn’t even get to say good bye to my old land lord because he’s been in the hospital for the past few weeks – Betty said he’ll likely get out this week, but she’ll be in her new place by then.  So it’s pretty sad that I never got to say good bye to him.  I will miss them.

Tags: Canada Post FAIL, I hate moving, moving

So this will be yet another micro blog posting as I am still without Internet connectivity and I’m pecking this blog posting out on my iPhone. The Telus guy was supposed to hook me up today but he said that the people at the office hooked me up to the wrong doohickey and he asked them to fix it but they didn’t fix it right so he asked them to fix it again and now it’s fixed but oh, look at the time my shift is over, I’ll have to come tomorrow evening to install the jack. So even though tomorrow is the big Canada v. Russia hockey game that I would really like to be watching, thank you very much, instead I’ll be yet again listening to the hockey game on the radio as I wait for Telus to give me my Internets. I hate being being held hostage by Telus!

And now I go outside to try to get some cell reception so I can post this.

Tags: first world problems, Geekery, I hate moving

Apparently technology hates me again.  In addition to having no internets and no cell phone reception at home, the internets/network /all the phones at my office were down for most of the day¹.  Stupid technology.

While packing up my kitchen, I discovered that I had orzo and a pleothera rice noodles.  I also have three bottles of balsamic vinegar².  Tonight I shall make an orzo salad for dinner, and I forsee pad thai in my near future.

I am delighted with the amount of counter space in my kitchen.  I have enough counter space for my coffeemaker, kettle, Magic Bullet blender, toaster oven AND KitchenAide mixer, with room to spare!  I’m most excited about the mixer have a permenant home on the counter, as it’s way to heavy to move on a regular basis, so it’s spent the past several years stored away in a closet and I’ve been mixing things by hand like a sucker.

I also have a bigger fridge and freezer, which means I can actually find things in the freezer rather than having it jammed completely packed so that any time I want something from there, I have to unpack the whole thing.

I nearly have my first full load of dishes and anticipate an inaugural run of the  dishwasher tonight!

Now I’m off to a quick trip to the grocery store on my way home.  Tonight I intend to make that orzo salad and unpack the rest of my kitchen.  Hooray!

1. It’s back up now, so I’m writing this after hours at the office before I go home and enter the land of incommunicado [↩]
2. I know that I inherited one from Kalev when he moved, but I have no idea why I had two bottles to begin with [↩]

Tags: food, kitchen, moving, random

Today’s posting will be brief as I’m writing it on my iPhone. I’m writing it on my iPhone because Telus can’t get here to set up my internets until Feb 23. My thought when they told me this was ‘No problem, I’ll just tether my computer to my iPhone for a week.’. Which would be all well and good except I can’t get any cell phone reception in my freaking apartment!! Gaaaaah!

I didn’t even think to check cell phone reception when I looked at this place. And I really should have, because my old place – also a basement suite – had pretty bad reception. Dropped calls all the time. But this place is even worse – I get almost no signal at all! The occasional email will get through, but calls aren’t pretty much impossible. I got one call today, when I was sitting near the door with the door open, but it got dropped pretty quick and i couldn’t get signal again until I went outside and up the steps.

So, anyway. Suffice it to say that I’m moved in, have unpacked about 75% of the kitchen, 25% of the bathroom and made my bed. Now I’m going to go outside where I can get enough signal to post this and then it’s bedtime for Bethy!

Tags: I hate moving, moving

I spent most of today and a good chunk of yesterday packing.  I now have the kitchen¹, the bathroom and the bedroom completely packed².  And I did all my laundry, including all the blankets and sheets³, and I took books back to both the Vancouver Public Library and UBC Library. The things I have left to do before moving day⁴:

• pack up my printer, scanner and the various things in my geek drawer
• pack all the food from my cupboards⁵
• make sure everything is saved off old desktop and laptop
• take old desktop to Kalev’s storage
• take various computer thingys to Free Geek
• take books to used bookstore and other crap to thrift store:

In other packing-related news, I was talking to Betty, my former landlady (who used to own the house until they sold it a few months ago, but is renting the upstairs until the end of this month) who said that I can have any of the furniture in my place (as I’ve been renting a furnished place⁶).  Which means I don’t have to buy a kitchen table and chairs! Yay!  I’m also taking this furniture, which I’ve been using in my kitchen these past three years:

And Betty let me in on a little secret: that’s baby furniture!  The thing I’ve been using as a microwave stand, is in actuality a baby change table!  As soon as she told me that, I could totally see it, but until that point it had never occurred to me that it was anything but kitchen furniture!

But even as the Flying Spaghetti Monster giveth, the Flying Spaghetti Monster taketh away. As I mentioned the other day, I’m making a concerted effort to get rid of things that I really don’t need.  For the most part, it’s been easy to toss things⁷ – like stuff that doesn’t fit/I don’t like anymore/is expired.  But there were two things that I needed to toss that gave me pause.  One was my old McMaster jacket.  It’s about 15 years old, and pretty wrecked up.  I know that I’ll never wear it again, but it was still tough to throw it away.  I took these photos to remember it by:

And the other thing I had to toss was my beloved eBay shoes!  You remember them, right?  Oh, the times we had!  I didn’t take a photo of them because they were pretty wrecked up and I want to remember them in better times.  I have photos like these to remember them by:

You will be missed, Mac jacket and beloved eBay shoes.

1. except the food [↩]
2. I’m staying at Tod’s this week so that I could just pack up everything at my place and not worry about needing to leave some stuff unpacked to use for the next week [↩]
3. have to take advantage of the in-home laundry while I still have it [↩]
4. Feb 15 [↩]
5. stuff from the fridge and freezer will get packed the day of, for obvious reasons [↩]
6. I have some of my own stuff, but a fair bit of it is theirs. But they are downsizing to a retirement condo so they can’t even keep all of the furniture upstairs, let alone the stuff in the basement [↩]
7. or put them into the “to donate” pile [↩]

Tags: eBay shoes, furniture, moving, packing

Given how many cardboard boxes must be used every day to ship all the things that get shipped, you would expect it to be really easy to get your hands on those boxes.  I’m finding out, however, that this is not the case. I went to two liquor stores, a grocery store, a hardware store, and a drug store last night and all I managed to get were two sub-par boxes from the produce section of the grocery.  The drug store told me to call this morning and ask them to put the boxes aside for me, as they break them down and get rid of them right away.  The liquor store said to drop by today as that’s when they get their shipment.

I raided the recycling room at work and when I was at a meeting at another health unit yesterday afternoon, I raided their recycling room too!  Working in health, however, means you end up with boxes like this one:

And this one:

And my personal favourite:

Tags: boxes, moving, packing, photos

Sometimes you have two vices that are in direct opposition to one another.  For example, my ex’s BFF, who I like to refer to as SFP¹ often used to have an internal battle between the vices of “sloth” and “gluttony.”  Would his sheer laziness prevent him from walking to the store to buy copious amounts of peanut butter cups?  It was always amusing to watch such a battle play out.

Right now, I’m having to face my own Battle of the Vices.  My pack rat nature is fighting with my extreme desire to minimize the amount of shit I have to pack and move to my new place.  Fortunately, I have been waging a conscious fight against my tendency to hoard² and so laziness is winning the battle.

When I moved to my current place more than three and a half years ago, I was finishing up my PhD and so I had a lot of paper.  Boxes upon boxes upon boxes of journal articles, data analyses and multiple versions of multiple manuscripts.  Seeing as I’ve been done the dissertation for three years, all the manuscripts are published, and I no longer do research in that specific area, I think it’s safe to part with the vast majority of that paper³.  As well, I had really, really old financial records that I felt it was time to send on its merry way.

So this is what I took out to the recycling tonight:

The big green bag is shredded paper.  The rest are the paper that didn’t need shredding.

The toboggan, in case you are wondering, is just there because I was too lazy to move it to take the picture.  It’s not being recycled.

1. Stupid Friend Paul [↩]
2. which I come by honestly, I might add. [↩]
3. I have to keep the original data as that’s not replaceable and someone could, in theory, ask to see it, even all these years later.  But all the journal articles can be obtained from the library again should I ever need them and I have electronic copies of all the data analyses [↩]

Tags: lazy, moving, pack rat, packing, photos, vices

Tags: apartment, moving, video clip

So here’s the “to do” list I came up with off the top of my head for all the things I need to do for my move:

Can you think of anything I’ve overlooked?

Tags: list, moving, to do, to do list