Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
General ramblings connected to my personal life and activities.
After returning home from Hawaii (no, those pictures aren’t done yet, I’m just busy with work and school), Prairie and I found out we had to move (here’s my post and here’s Prairie’s on the debacle).
This shot is of what used to be our cute little apartment.
We’ve got a new cute little apartment now, sure, but…(sigh)…this one was our first. Not so cute now, is it?
A little birdie reminded me that I hadn’t said anything about this yet…
This quarter’s schedule:
And, most M/W/F, a 3pm – 10pm shift at my ‘real job’ selling cameras. Another busy quarter, but that’s pretty typical.
Besides, barring unexpected catastrophes, I’ll be walking across a stage and graduating with my AA degree this spring. There’s a point to all this after all! ;)
A few snippets from the past month…
Us (On Sept. 4th): Is there any way to speed up the process? This move was unplanned, and we couldn’t call you before now to set things up.
Them: Yes, we’ll have an installer out there on the 21st. How would that be?
Us: Would it be possible to have anyone out here sooner than that? You see, the move was unplanned.
Them: Yes, we’ll have an installer out there on the 21st. How would that be?
Us: Yes, but could you make it sooner? We’ll be without phone and Internet for a month by then.
Them: Yes, we’ll have an installer out on the 21st. How would that be?
At which point we just gave up and agreed that the 21st would be lovely…
A few shots of me and my parents as they stopped by in Seattle on their way back up to Alaska after picking up the Turtle (their new RV).
And now, we have one last night of ‘summer’ before school starts tomorrow morning. Yeesh. Weren’t we supposed to be able to relax in here at some point?
After twenty-two days, we’re finally up and running in the new apartment — internet and phone are both finally working as they should.
This took far, far too long.
But, it’s done, and we can finally start paying attention to and staying in contact with the world again.
So.
What’ve we missed?
As Prairie’s mentioned, work on moving into the new apartment continues, and we’re making progress. I’ve had to work just about every day (though I was able to get most of yesterday off to help), and Prairie and her family crew have done the lion’s share of the work so far, so in this case saying that “we” are making progress is really only strictly true for certain values of “we”. But still…progress is being made. At least I’ve got a day off tomorrow to pitch in all day long.
One side effect of all this is that both Prairie and I are going to be essentially out of touch for the next two weeks or so. As we use Speakeasy for our ‘net and our phone connection through VoIP, we need to get that transferred over to the new apartment…and, unfortunately, Speakeasy says that that can take up to two weeks. Not what I was hoping for, but pretty unavoidable, as all of this has happened so quickly.
We do have our laptop with WiFi access, so we may be able to check in from time to time, but it’s pretty much safe to assume that we probably won’t be reachable via e-mail or phone for the next two weeks, and certainly won’t be responding to messages in a timely manner. Not ideal, but that’s what it is.
The move is in progress — tons of boxes filled with crap floating from one apartment to the other, and all sorts of unfun disarray and nastiness. Ugh. Moving’s stressful enough when it’s anticipated and planned, but having to suddenly dive full-force into it with no advance notice is horrendous.
It should be pretty obvious that given the situation, I’m not checking in with much of anything online right now, and likely won’t be for at least a few days (we still haven’t set up switching the ‘net and phone service to the new apartment). All things come with time….
I’ve still got a ways to go on the rest of the vacation pictures, but I finished the set for P and H’s wedding this morning. I’ll fill in the rest of the vacation as soon as I can (we’re in the midst of moving uproar at the moment, with boxes all over the apartment as we wait for the apartment we’re moving into to get its finishing touches).
I’m starting to work on my pictures from the trip, but as the first priority is going to be the wedding shots, it’ll be a bit before I get everything up, and before I get my vacation recap posts written.
In the meantime, Prairie’s posted all of her photos (here’s one of me and a flippered friend), and has put up a few posts about the trip on her weblog!
We’re home. Generally speaking, this is a good thing: the wedding was wonderful, the experience at the resort was good (though not really our style, as we ended up deciding), the camping was incredible, and even traveling home was surprisingly pleasant (and I’ll get to all of those in more detail in due course). The actual arrival home has been one of the most traumatic we’ve yet experienced, however.
While we’d done a pretty good job of staying close to Seattle time during our camping, going to bed as soon as it got dark around 7:30 PM and getting up at first light around 6 AM (both times local to Hawaii, 10:30 PM and 9 AM respectively Seattle time), our flight home left Kona at just after 9 PM (local, midnight Seattle) and arrived in Seattle at about 5:30 AM (Seattle). Neither of us sleep well on airplanes, so by the time we landed, we were running on about twenty-one hours without sleep. By the time we collected our luggage, caught a shuttle to the parking service’s lot, picked up the car, and then fought our way through the construction on I-5, we didn’t get home and into bed until right around 8 AM, at about twenty-four hours straight without sleep.
Three hours later, the banging of construction in the apartment next door woke me up. Prairie had earplugs in, so she made it for another hour, but then she was up, too. And here’s where the real fun begins…
Well, all worries aside, we made it! Right now, I’m sitting in our room on the sixth floor of the Hilton Waikoloa Village‘s Lagoon Tower, looking out over Waiulua Bay. Stepping out onto the deck, I can look nearly directly down into the Dolphin Quest pool, where people (with a whole lot more expendable money than we have) are swimming with dolphins. Not long ago, I was snorkeling along through the resort’s lagoon, surrounded by schools of fish, diving down to get a closer look at eels, pufferfish, and parrot fish, and sidling on up to pat a sea turtle’s shell as it nosed through the spray of a waterfall.
We may never stay someplace this ritzy again, but boy is it a treat to be doing it now!
