Tag Archives: apartment

General, Sports, Uncategorized

Quick Notes Slash Recap

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Hi.

Successful weekend for the most part, but I still have more to get done this evening…

  • Brewers took until today to win a game, but at least they avoided the sweep.  What the hell is with the Cubs?  How long do you think they’re going to wait to start losing?  All-Star break?  Maybe.
  • Here is my new address, effective June 28: 4121 N Ardmore Ave, Apt 9, Radio City, WI, 53211.
  • Grandma’s floor is back, it’s dry, and it only took about 4 hours to finish up.
  • Since Marty and Lise are going to start showing my place tomorrow, I have to go now and get some stuff picked up around here.
General, Uncategorized

Twinkies and the Weekend

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Schrubbe couldn’t make it to the baseball game last night, because of the flooding up in Oshkosh.  He didn’t miss much.  Just 12-20 thousand g-damn Twins fans making a ruckus and the Brewers doing exactly squat at the plate.  Seems like they’ve had a tendancy to make average or below-average pitchers look like Cy Young a lot this season…

Anyway, Michelle went with me to the game instead, and we still had a good time.  It was hat day, so we got those, and the weather was really nice for a game.  Summer is 100% officially here, and I don’t mind one bit.

I have to make a run today over to my new apartment building to confirm which unit I want– the one that I’ll probably move into is occupied right now, so I wasn’t able to see it the other day.  Worst-case scenario, if there is something horrific about this one (I don’t anticipate that, but…) I will take the other that I saw on Thursday.

When I get home, I think I’m going to get busy with packing.  I’m going to pull all my stuff down from the hotter-than-hell attic, and see if there’s anything there that I can get rid of.  If not, it’ll just be time to start putting stuff back in boxes and getting it set to move.  Two weeks to go, and I’ll be on my way out.  After this afternoon, I’ll know my exact new address, too, so I could make calls to arrange for moving my electricity and cable services, forward my mail… I could probably get the trailer booked, too.  So I’ll be busy.

Tomorrow, Joe and I are putting Grandma’s kitchen floor back together.  So, y’know, fun weekend top-to-bottom.

General, Uncategorized

You Can Really Actually Call Off the Dogs Officially This Time– No Kidding, I Am Absolutely Certain

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I’m going to be moving into the place I looked at yesterday afternoon on Ardmore Avenue in Shorewood.

A few of the major features that sold me on it:

  • Less money overall per month than the one I saw on Knapp the day before, and more space
  • wood floors– look nice, easy to take care of (the other one had carpeting)
  • I am dead serious– the storage unit in the basement is about TEN FEET by TEN FEET.  It’s frakking huge.
  • Parking readily available, and cheap
  • Month-to-month.  If it becomes necessary, I can check out at will, with a scant 28-day notice.

More on this as info becomes available.  To my peeps in Osh Vegas: stay the course, good luck bailing out, things will get back to normal.

See you at the Brewers game later if you end up there…

General, Uncategorized

Scrambling

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So I found out on Monday morning that I did NOT get the apartment on Capitol Drive.  Since that afternoon, I’ve been working madly (with some help from Jen) to try to find another place, and soon– I’ve got just 18 days left on Wright Street.

I told the manager at 1029 E Knapp yesterday that I would take one in that building.  I wanted to secure something as a backup, and since that building is owned by the same folks as the one on Capitol that I didn’t get, they already had my application and a security deposit.  They don’t have a signed lease yet, though, so I’m still going to take a look at this place on Ardmore Ave in Shorewood.  This place that I’m going to see this afternoon could be a LOT cheaper per month overall (50 bucks or so).  An extra 600 clams in your pocket at the end of the year makes a diff, y’know?  The description is a little frightening, though: “small but charming.”  In apartment hunting for me, size is going to matter a bit, and if it is somehow smaller than the place on Knapp, well… I’ll have to cough up that 600 bucks.

General, Uncategorized

Minor Accomplishments

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Yesterday I didn’t leave the house for a very long time; I think I was gone a total of 40 minutes, but I felt good at the end, having gotten a ton of little stuff done.  I got my kitchen and bedroom cleaned up, did a ton of laundry, and I figured out two or three little nagging problems I was having with computers for quite a while.

It’s rare that I feel good enough about what I did during the day that I’m OK with just kicking back and relaxing in the evening, but Saturday was just such a day.  I think tackle another room or two and get some writing done today…

General, Uncategorized

Call Off the Dogs

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I believe that I found a new place to live.

I can’t say that with 100% certainty, since I haven’t heard back yet about the application that I filed on Wednesday, but I think it looks pretty good.  All things considered, I will be trading a lot of space and the free & available washer/dryer that I have now for a significantly shorter commute and slightly lower overall per-month living expenses.  I’m glad that I’ll now be able to focus on thesis work and getting packed in the short term.

I was told when I saw the apartment that I would have the opportunity to move in early, paying a pro-rated portion of a month’s rent.  I’ll probably shoot for a week ahead; I took a few days at the end of the month off for that very purpose.  I’ll now be just under 2 miles from work; an easily bike-able distance.  Maybe I’ll even get a chance to shed some of this doughy flab with the balance of my summer, too…

Been very busy at work, which is my excuse for the gap of several days between posts.  In the meantime, what’s happened?  The Brew Crew is on a tear— here’s hoping they can carry that momentum through the road trip.  Even if the Cubs haven’t gotten around to losing just yet, you know they’re not going to win out for the rest of the season.  Brewers just have to keep it up, and put the lengthy losing streaks behind them.  It’s a well-documented point that a season is going to have ups and downs, but Milwaukee has pretty much used up their allotment of “downs” already.

Also very glad to see the Democratic presedential primary season finally coming to a conclusion.  I was glad to deliver the news to Petters last night that Hillary is going to officially leave the race at the end of this week.  In the short term, that means that focus will shift to Obama selecting a VP.  I am NOT at all in favor of the Obama/Clinton ticket for one major reason: I would be concerned that Hillary was trying to run the show from the backseat all too often.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the Clintons are really, really, REALLY pushy when it comes to politics, and that’s probably putting it lightly.  Barack needs her to be a valued campaign resource, and he definitely needs her endorsement, but he also needs to make this potential presidency his own.  I’m pretty sure that’s what we (his supporters) got on board for.

OK, back to it.  These phone calls aren’t going to ignore themselves…

General, Uncategorized

33 to Go

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There are a lot of things that I will not miss at all about living in this apartment.  The astronomical energy costs during the winter are probably number one.  The water that takes at least 2 or 3 minutes to heat up (and sometimes quite a bit more) is another.  There’s also this ridiculous issue of hardware with my cable.

Back in February or March I started to notice a major upload-speed issue, and I had to have a tech come out to install some signal dampening device on the modem.  Then about 2 weeks ago, my connection went down, completely, and I was only able to get back online by removing that device.  Well, today it is virtually impossible to get connected to my house.  I waited around 4 minutes for my website to load, and retrieving email is more or less impossible.

Don’t know why I’m ranting about this, since no one is going to be able to read this entry today anyway.  But yeah, I’m looking forward to living somewhere where they’ve had cable before, and probably have the whole neighborhood network regulated a bit better.

Just 33 days left til moving day…

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… And There Was Much Rejoicing

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Ya-ay.

After a typically vaguely-worded meeting that I had with my fellow fin aid advising staff last week, I had the distinct impression that I would NOT be getting the three days off that I requested between Christmas and New Year’s.

The uni is a graveyard during that time. Sure, you can get a lot done, but if there is nothing to do, you just get angry that you had to go in.

Turns out my expectations were unnecessarily low. I will be leaving work on 12/21 at 4:30, and I won’t have to be back until 1/2. Pretty nice.

I guess this means I can continue to blow off cleaning my wretchedly disgusting apartment, since I’m not anticipating a lot of visitors until 12/31.

And on THAT– more to come soon…

"Roll Your Own", General, Uncategorized

Windows- Good for Some Things

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Jen stopped by last night to pick up a CD while Michelle was making dinner and I was working on laundry. One of the things she mentioned is that the place is still not completely put together, and she speculated that my general ambivalence about living there is the problem.

That is true, in part.

The other part, to be completely honest, is the level of “computer-hobbying” that I’ve been doing at home ever since I moved to Milwaukee. Honestly, it is partly just a coincidence of timing– right about the time I got hired at UWM, I switched my daily use OS on the laptop over to Ubuntu. Linux is so flexible, and so many people are working on writing software and doing tweaks of this or that, it tends to make a geek want to experiment and try new things. Sometimes that means you break something and have to start over. Other times, it spurs you on to think of other things to try or to mess with.

In that sense, then, Windows is GREAT. Windows, as an operating system, is so boring and rigid and unchangeable, there’s really not much reason or influence to entertain yourself tweaking the system and messing around with it. Sure, you can (and I have) dick around with the way it looks, or you can hunt for free software, but eventually the computer is just a tool and there’s not much else to do with it. You turn it off and go do something else.

I have to get myself to do that more often, even though I’ve always got some new project I want to try. If I don’t, not only will my apartment never get completely set up, my thesis will never get completely written.

General, Uncategorized

(Relatively) Clean

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Work is madhouse, and will continue to be such throughout the month of September.

However, I have somehow gotten caught up on a number of things that were lagging over the last couple weeks around the office. This has made me feel better about being here in general. I am still weary from the endless droves of people who don’t have enough money for school and are not considered “needy enough” to get it from the government, making my options for helping them close to nill.

Things at home are a lot cleaner, too, as Christy and/or Michelle could attest to. I have one room left that still needs significant organization, but for the most part, I am “settled in.” This new-found comfort is a double-edged sword, since I am nearly certain I’ll be moving again in 10 months.

OK, more to do. Look at this in the meantime, and think about what you’ve done.