At long last, the moving is completed. Sure it only took about 4 days to move everything out, and no thanks to Uhaul for having screwed us twice! But the old apartment has been swept clean, the keys have been returned, and the Terror from Canadia and I are offically roomates now. And, since I had so much more stuff to move than he did, he’s almost completely unpacked and I have only barely started. :-P

battle scars

Make no mistake, I am not a fan of Charles Dickens. But I, like many other poor souls, was forced to read Tale of Two Cities, not once, but twice in my early school years. About the only thing I remember was that the book was 1) remarkably boring and 2) had an old lady in it who knitted the names of all her enemies into a blanket, so that she might get revenge on them when the revolution came. I may not be able to knit myself such a list, but I’m certainly keeping a mental list of all the bastards who’ve screwed me over in the past two weeks. Top on my list right now:

1. The shady U-haul place that screwed Trev and I twice on our truck rental. First they called two days before our move to tell us we could only have the truck for about half the time we were originally promised. Then, they gave us a truck that had an empty tank of gas, right off the lot. Finally, when we had rent a second truck the next day, the lame-ass manager didn’t even come to open the store until half-an-hour late. No apology at all. Gee thanks. But if we bring the truck back late, we have to pay $40 an hour! So they way I see it, those lazy bums owe me at least $40 for not opening on time.

2. The damn, obnoxious, stupid, incompetent people at the Hyde Park Office Depot. I do admit that I’m getting used to the slow, crappy service I get in nearly every store in Hyde Park. But this latest incident with Office Depot really takes the cake. I wanted to order a filing cabinet and an office chair, and I wanted it delivered. I should have just gone to the website and ordered these things online ::kicks self hard:: but I was there in the store, so it didn’t seem like it would be a big deal. Wrong. It took over half an hour to even check out of the store because no one seemed to know how to schedule a delivery. Then, the price of the filing cabinet that was supposed to be on sale kept coming up $20 higher than advertised. So, as I said, 30-45 minutes later, I walk out of the store with a receipt for my stuff and the asusrance that they will be delivered on Tuesday. Tuesday, 4:00pm: still no delivery. I call and find out that my delivery was never scheduled for Tuesday, it was scheduled for Wednesday. Yay! I love wasting an entire day for no reason!! Wednesday, 5pm: no delivery. I call and one woman tells me that sometimes residential deliveries come as late as 7pm. This was after I had been told numerous times that window for delivery was 8:30-5. I ask to speak to a supervisor and get disconnected. This is apparently because supervisors all go home at 5pm. 7pm: still no delivery. No one at the Office Depot hotline can tell me where it is. All they can say is that a supervisor will have to call me in the morning. Gee thanks. There’s two days of my life that I won’t get back.

I have finally cooled down a bit after my last angry rant about all the morons who made my life hell last week. I’m still prettty ticked off, mind you, but at least I’m not losing sleep over them anymore. It helps that the moving/unpacking process is at last more or less completed (thanks in large part to Ikea and Staples, who can actually deliver stuff when they’re supposed to!) After much head-scratching and three or four trips to the hardware store, Trevor and I managed to install some nifty looking Ikea wall shelves in each of our rooms. Nevermind that we also have at least half a dozen extraneous holes in our walls and toggle and molly bolts because the studs are crazily spaced in our apartment.

Pretty sweet… as long as they don’t fall out of the wall.

Most importantly, my room is finally put together. Not that I minded sleeping on an air mattress, but how could I get any work done without a desk? Impossible! So after a week and a half of uh, reluctantly watching episodes of Star Trek: TNG season 3 on DVD instead of trying to study for my exams, I am at last ready to be super-productive. Really!

This is mission control beginning launch sequence…

I guess it always happens this time of year. My efforts to maintain my site slowly taper off as I am called upon to fulfill a million other obligations. In other words, a new school year is beginning. And of course all those things that I couldn’t motivate myself to do over the summer are coming back to haunt me. But at last I think I’m starting to recover from my slump. I’m actually able to look at my work again without feeling sick and disheartened. Perhaps one of these days, I’ll be able to say the same about this poor little site. Come on, creative genius! Big money, big money, no whammies…

I so want this shirt!

I realize that I frequently confess all kinds of uber-dorky things about myself, but it can’t be helped. Some things are just so cool that people ought to know about them. For example, this course that I’m planning to audit:

War in the Middle Ages

Description: In modern popular culture, the Middle Ages are often imaginatively synonymous with war: knights in shining armor, Vikings in their longships, Robin Hood with his longbow and “merry men.” This lecture-discussion course seeks to complicate this image by examining warfare as a central fact of European civilized life. Problems to be addressed include the technology and economics of warfare, the sociology of warfare, major phases in the development of European warfare from the Carolingians through the Hundred Years’ War, and the literary, religious, and psychological significance of war for the development of European civilization.

See? It sounds cool, right? Too bad it has nothing to do with my field, but it should be good for a little, um, perspective. Yeah, that’s it…