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We moved. I am so exhausted and it feels like we haven’t emptied most of our boxes.
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Your eyes do not deceive you. The date above says this was published on Tuesday but you swear you didn’t see it until Friday. This week and last week, I’ve backdated these entries because the events I’m writing about are the ones that ran til the end of the previous weekend. Hopefully, things are back to a normal posting schedule from next week.
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They probably won’t.
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So we’ve been in the new place for a few days at this point and mostly it’s been good. The Internet connection isn’t the best but it’s not god-awful either. The biggest disappointment is that, while a wired network has been run throughout the walls of the apartment, it’s not a good idea to actually use it. From my testing, the way the system prevents excessive usage is for the router that’s built into the apartment to cap the connection speed of any wired device to 100Mb/second. That’s the case regardless of whether the transfer is happening between local devices or not. In other words, for local transfers, it’s faster to hook up your own router and to transfer data via it (even over Wi-Fi). That’s a shame but not the end of the world.
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One thing that hasn’t been a disappointment is the backyard. Although we’re in an apartment, it’s on the ground floor and we have a nice little backyard at the back of the place. The previous place had something similar but a horrible mosquito problem made it completely unusable. The backyard here doesn’t have this problem and Emma and John have been regularly enjoying running around in the (admittedly small) space.
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I’m not sure whether to count this as a disappointment or not but the dishwasher has been… well, like every other dishwasher I’ve ever used. Which is to say that it mostly cleans the things you put into it but not always. I find this maddening. The analogy I drew in discussing it with Eri is ‘intelligent’ assistants like Siri and Alexa. I use our HomePod Minis multiple times each day to set timers, create reminders, play music and issue simple commands to the Apple TV. I do this even though Siri screws up around 1 out of every 10 commands. Eri almost never uses Siri precisely because of this unreliability. That’s me with dishwashers. As soon as I unpack a load and discover it’s not cleaned something properly I immediately avoid using it. Yes, yes, dishwasher apologists: I am aware you should ‘pre-wash’ things before putting them in but why should you have to do this? It’s a dishwasher. It’s job is literally to wash dishes. If I have to wash the dishes to any degree before putting them in it, we should view this as a defect. That instead we all accept this as some natural law of the universe is one of the greatest cons pulled on the modern consumer.
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The biggest surprise of the place has been the ‘fuel cell’ that’s apparently just outside the apartment. I’m curious to see what effect this has on our monthly gas and electricity bills.
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I finished the Liar’s Poker audiobook and decided to follow that up with an omnibus collection of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, read by Stephen Fry (Audible). I read Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was a teenager but I’d never read Animal Farm. That comes first in the collection and I enjoyed it. It often seemed like it was making rather obvious observations about the nature of communism in the Soviet Union but I’m guessing they were a lot less obvious and a lot more contested at the time the book was written. Even though I’ve read it before, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been the more interesting of the two and I’m about halfway through it.
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I enjoyed the Hit Parade episode about R&B Queens. It encourages me to go and rustle around in the discography of Roberta Flack and while it’s the obvious choice, ‘Killing Me Softly with His Song’ is so good (Apple Music).
