woogh

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today is hopefully thr last day of the move

this is hopefully the last time i ever move, holy cow

just gotta remember that some momentary acute stress is worth it if it improves my life in the long term (and hopefully it DOES improve my life)

also let’s stop catastrophizing about everything that might go wrong, especially with the cats, okay? thanks

The kitchen remodel curse

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Seattle, 2007: Redid my kitchen, ended up getting a job in San Francisco a month later

San Francisco, 2012: Redid my kitchen, ended up getting a job back in Seattle a month later

Seattle, 2020: got a kitchen remodel mostly done, last little project kept on getting pushed back for a year, and finally got scheduled… for the day before my move to White Center

At least I was able to enjoy (most of) my new kitchen for a whole year this time.

Given the state of the kitchen in my new place I think that will be one of the first things I do once my condo sells, just so that I can possibly experience a whole new form of my life being upended as soon as it’s completed.

Lazy Sunday

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Yesterday I spent some time at the new house, trying to install Ethernet, but I discovered that my drill doesn’t have nearly enough torque to successfully drill a sufficiently-large hole in the subfloor, as it turns out. Investigating some other things made me realize that I need to get a bunch more power outlets installed in the basement anyway, so I hired an electrician (the same one who did the work on my kitchen) and he said that he can also run the ethernet cabling while he’s there.

I was also feeling pretty cruddy from allergies, so I didn’t finish the other big thing I wanted to do (namely assembling my new standing desk), and instead I went home and took a nap before my vaccination appointment, which went off without a hitch.

So far I’m not experiencing any major side effects, just a sore left arm and some vague headachey feelings, but that said I have no interest in working on house stuff today.

Tuesday I’m going to be busy all day with preparing my condo for the movers on Wednesday, and part of that means taking all my computers offline. So my access will be limited until Friday, when Centurylink comes to install the fiber.

Annoyingly I’m probably going to have to go to the house at some point on Tuesday, because a package which was going to arrive over the weekend got “helpfully” bumped up to Tuesday and I’d really rather not have it sit unattended on my porch for longer than necessary. I mean, the neighborhood seems pretty safe, but package thieves are everywhere now. But it’s being shipped USPS so maybe they’ll just hold it at the post office anyway? Who knows.

Anyway, wow, I’m feeling so overwhelmed by all the stuff I need to do, even with paying lots of money for movers to do all the things. But in a few days I’ll be moved in! And then hopefully my condo sells quickly and then I can get started on all the projects I want to do in the new house. That list is long.

Taking possession

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Today I took possession of the house! The seller still has some belongings to move out (which she’ll do tomorrow) but today I went down and started to get ready for my move-in. In particular I delivered my new standing desk, installed some smoke detectors (for some reason there weren’t any in the dwelling, just one in the basement), and planned where I’d install my Ethernet jacks. I also explored some of the facets which I had some questions about.

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Vaccination

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It’s been nearly 13 months since COVID-19 made its way to Seattle, but I’m finally getting vaccinated on Saturday! And so many people I know are vaccinated now!

I didn’t have a lot of choice on the vaccination day, but at least I was able to choose a time in the afternoon. My plan for Saturday is to spend a bunch of time at the new house to install the Ethernet, and then to get my first vaccination dose, and then hopefully any side effects I end up with wear off by Tuesday which is when I need to spend all day preparing for the movers.

It’s pretty interesting to go back to March 2020 and revisit how things felt back then. Also the beginnings of the BLM protests. Holy crap, it sure has been a year, huh?

Charity backlog

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Today I finally got rid of a giant accumulation of charity shop donations that date back to… well, at least when I lived in San Francisco, perhaps longer.

My bedroom finally has a usable walk-in closet, a week before I move out. Oh well!

I donated four large bags of unwanted (either guy-mode or too-small-and-not-worth-returning girl-mode) clothing, a pair of basically-new shoes, and an older LCD TV (which came with my condo) to Lifelong, three large bags of older, worn-in (but still usable and/or recyclable) shoes to Redeeming Soles, and a big pile of boring white socks to WeCount (the charity itself seems to be defunct but their give a pair/take a pair drop boxes are still around Seattle and still work, what with being literally just a free newspaper box but with different branding).

Anyway now Fiona has a new space to explore, and I actually found a bunch of stuff I’d been missing since it was, y'know, buried in back. Whee!

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Adjustments

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I think the biggest thing I’m going to have to get used to in the new house is having to make actual grocery shopping trips again.

There’s a small mom-and-pop grocery store just down the street from my new place, but it’s more of a convenience store than a place to get groceries at. Fortunately, there’s actual grocery stores not too far away, but the nature of White Center is that it doesn’t seem very walkable, and even riding my bike there seems a bit risky.

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Melatonin isn’t the answer

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I’m finding that taking melatonin every night isn’t actually helping me sleep better, although it does make me tired at a reasonable time. But I’m still waking up in the middle of the night and generally being pretty restless. And it hasn’t helped me with my focus or my pain at all, but the working theory was that sleeping better would be what would help with that, and melatonin hasn’t done that.

I think having used it to adjust my sleep schedule was fine, though, and I’ll keep using it for that purpose in the future.

On the plus side, the daylight saving change didn’t mess with me any more than my sleep schedule was already hecked up.

Melatonin experiment

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Night 1 I had a lot of weird dreams and I was also awake or at least on the edge of consciousness for much of the night. Throughout the day I felt fatigued and crappy. My smart bed concurred, giving me a sleep score of 62 and a “time asleep” of 5:36 (which is an overestimate). I also had many very intense dreams of varying levels of surreality.

But night 2 went much better; I slept through the whole night, I only had one vivid dream (and it was pretty much grounded in reality, albeit about Kafka-esque Internet installation and support issues… so, grounded in reality) and I got a sleep score of 83 with a sleep time of 8:07.

It’s probably not entirely the melatonin to credit with that; last night I also did my longest DDR workout ever, and of course I had a lot of fatigue to catch up on as well. But today I’m feeling pretty good.

Tomorrow will be a bit of a test thanks to daylight saving kicking in (perhaps permanently, much to my chagrin — IMO it should be abolished, as well as making society not so reliant on time-of-day for “productivity” in the first place) so I’m not expecting tomorrow’s anecdata point to be that useful. Unless I’m feeling really good, in which case it’s extra-useful.

Anyway hopefully this week I’ll actually be able to focus on work more than usual, at least for the next two weeks; March 26 is when my house purchase closes, and then the next couple of weeks after that are going to be ridiculously chaotic, both with moving to my new place and selling my old place! Which is of course all the more reason that focus will be important.