(Phaysis)

If you’ve not been following along in other forums, I have moved to a new apartment. Moved the furniture on Wednesday, and cleared the last things out the next day. My friends Jerry and Tam helped me with the bulk of all that, and I’m grateful for their help. Now I’m finally free of the tyranny of heavy footsteps above me and namecalling in the halls.

Because I didn’t give the required 30-day notice (since I seriously wanted to get the hell out as fast as possible), the landlady informed me that she would be keeping my entire deposit. If I would’ve known that, I would not have even bothered cleaning the damned place. I gave as much notice as I could, but since everything was moving so fast, I wanted to wait until I actually signed the new lease before I made my announcement. Can’t fault me for that, but otherwise everything happened fast and smooth. My deposit was $300, about half a month’s rent. I’m writing it off, but don’t consider it a total loss. It’s the price I’m paying for peace of mind. My stomach no longer churns and pings when I think about going to my apartment.

The new place is bigger than the old, plus I have a balcony and an outside storage closet. There’s a dining room attached to the living room that’s almost too small for my table, but perfectly sized for my music gear, so I’ll be setting up my studio there. Finally, my gear will be within sight and within mind, instead of being in my bedroom and an afterthought on my way to bed. It’s my hope that I’ll eventually be more productive in my music. I’ll also assume that the floors are a little thicker here, so I can relax and be comfortable with using my audio monitors instead of trying to mix through headphones to keep from angering the neighbors.

I managed to exchange a few greetings with the neighbors next door; nice couple, I assume. Seldom hear them. Haven’t met the neighbor downstairs, but I’ve heard she’s a professional or graduate student. She dresses well, so that’s something. I do hear her on occasion, mainly during the day. I assume she uses the weekends to clean and play some music while she does so. I could hear her stereo, but at least it was during the day. Heard her knocking around this morning, which kinda woke me up a little.

Honestly, I’ll just have to expect that when I live in apartments. There’s absolutely no way to get around hearing your neighbors knocking or slamming. Landlord says this is a quiet complex; that just means there’s little crime and everybody goes to sleep. Otherwise, it’s the internal noises of apartment living that are unavoidable.

Some noises, however, were unexpected, like the loud humming in my bedroom. The hum is from the A/C compressor which is mounted on the roof directly above my bedroom. At least I can control that noise…just don’t run the A/C when I go to bed. Thankfully, winter is coming up, so that’ll be easy enough to do. The neighbor’s A/C compressor, though, I can still hear it, but her compressor’s over my bathroom, so it’s not as loud.

In the evening, around sunset, some of the trees near the complex get crowded by screaming birds as they do their daily quorum. There’s also a family of parrots that live in the cellphone tower just outside my apartment, so I hear them cawwing at times.

My balcony also overlooks the back parking lot of a busy restaurant. Car alarms and door slams.

One of my neighbors is, apparently, a professional bongo player. Haven’t heard him practice yet.

About once a night a trash truck will come around and bang around one of the many, many dumpsters that are in front of the many, many businesses along my street.

It sounds like I’m in for a bad time, but I guess as long as I expect it and learn how to take it like a man, I’ll be fine. At least I don’t have the shitheads in #214 stomping, slamming, and being otherwise intentionally abusive with their noise.

Quick note to inform you guys that I’m intending to move out of my apartment by month’s end. The neighbors upstairs have gotten aggressive with their noisemaking, and since my lease expires on the 30th, it’s high time to get the fuck out. Tired of being rudely awakened every morning before 7 by their stomping and chores. We had a “discussion” in the breezeway yesterday, and it came out that my sarcastic note on their door (as well as my banging on my ceiling) meant I was an asshole. “At least have the decency to talk to us,” they said. Like that would end well.

That was all the prompting I needed to find a place and get wheels in motion. I checked out a place coming up for rent that adds 120 square feet for only $85 more. It’s one more exit up MoPac, but I’ll live. Put in my application, application fee, and earnest money on the place…here’s hoping my rental and background check come up OK. Assuming that’ll fly, then I got it. Here’s hoping.

Rented a storage unit as a way-station for my packing. It’s what I did last time I moved, and it proved immensely useful to have things mostly moved out so all I needed to do on moving day was furniture and a few final boxes, and then move all my stuff from the storage unit to my new place on my own leisure. I’m doing that this time, too, mostly to ensure that I can get out as fast as possible.

In that light, I’ve been digging through my boxes. Can you believe I’ve come across at least five boxes full of miscellaneous paper crap that I’ll never, ever need? We’re talking bills from 1997, check stubs from jobs I had a decade ago, paperwork for health insurance I’m no longer covered by. Like who the hell needs that crap?

If it’s older than 2007, do I really need it? No. No I don’t. So unless it’s something interesting, like a sketch, doodle, greeting card, letter, tax paperwork, or something to do with any of my current concerns, it’s perfect fodder for the shredder and trash bag. Seriously, I’ve collected too much bullshit, and it’s time to clean that bull out. So far, I’ve liberated five boxes. Immensely gratifying. And there’s more to come!

I’m really hoping I’ll get this place. It’s got a balcony, it’s upstairs, has outside storage, and except for the smaller kitchen is more spacious. There’s some quirks that I’ll have to adjust to, but all told, it’s a change for the better. Wish me luck.

Sometimes I just want to click off. Existential angst of late. I’ve had the desire to formulate some kind of journal entry, but as things are going, it takes too much work and energy to do so. I’ve had so much Life coming at me at once, there’s not enough energy or will to put the words together. Hence my usual silence. Seriously. Too much of Life.

Big fires to put out, little fires to put out. So scattered, all over the place, bunched up in little notes and to-do lists. So concerned with forgetting to do something that I write it down, make a note, and then I fail to remember. Sometimes I fail to actually attempt to do what’s on the list.

To-Do lists are the tool of the devil. Make a note of that.

I’m looking for another car. It’s that season again, and now that I commute 25+ miles a day my Mirage is failing sadly. The increased smoke is drawing attention, and there’s an aweful lot of cops on the road. Was looking at a Honda Civic: 2002, 130k miles, EX trim package with power everything and a sunroof, stickshift, 4-door. Everything I wanted in a car for $7,000. I didn’t move soon enough; the dealer jacked the price up another thousand. Fuck that. My search passively continues.

I am currently digesting the first season of Battlestar Gallactica (the remake). I wish I had been old enough to follow the plot of the original, but I was in 2nd grade; all I cared about was the kid and his creepy robot monkeydog. I will tell you this much about the new show: I am hooked. Damn you all to hell, I am hooked. This is the most I’ve ever seen Edward James Olmos speak, and he’s perfect for the part.

You should know what kinds of assholes I share my apartment complex with. Monday night, the jackasses downstairs decided to crank their music loud enough that my floor was vibrating. So, I did what any angry neighbor would do: I kicked the floor. Expectedly, they turned it down…and then proceeded to agressively slam their ceiling with whatever they had. I fully expected them to start fucking with me; I don’t care so much about breaking and entering now that Texas has the Castle Law, I’m worried about them doing something stupid to my car, to the plants in front of my apartment. People can be that trivial.

I hate apartments. Keep thinking about moving out.

Found out there’s a hiring freeze at my job which is expected to last a while. Even the permanent employees are required to burn off some of their vacation time over the holidays; mandatory closure as a cost-cutting measure. Last time I saw that was 2001, during the dotcom crash; I was contracting at Motorola and after the layoffs of unimportant staff, they had each department take one week off. Shortly afterwards, Motorola sold its Austin campuses to its spinoff company Freescale. I don’t see much logic in mandatory closure; I guess it saves energy and infrastructure costs and requires employees (most of them salary, mind you) to spend their vacation hours instead of acrue them. But you lose so much time during the ramp down and ramp up periods after the closure. How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot, 2.0.

Ruby On Rails made me her bitch tonight. She spanked my ass hard with an important lesson. I’ve had this mind-crushing problem with trying to build a test harness for one of my model classes. I set the record attribute, try to save, and my missing-attribute validation kicks in. I know I fucking set that attribute, so why’s it not passing validation? Here’s the lesson: ActiveRecord uses automatically-created accessor methods to set/get the values of a database record. What was I doing? I was trying to use an ActiveRecord instance as a hash with special powers. That’s wrong, wrong, wrong. When I go “person[:password] = ‘secretpass’”, I’m setting something in a hash somewhere that AR is not paying attention to. I’m really supposed to go: “person.password = ‘secretpass’”. What a dumbass. So two weeks of frustrated freetime were spent debugging an issue that was all my own fault.

- I should call my mother some time. It’s been a while.
- I need to take a shower before bed.
- I should go into work early tomorrow.
- I need to start using my bicycle more; I paid so much for it, and I’m so out of shape.
- I need to pick up some antacids.
- I have a dentist appointment next month.
- I now have 1.5Gigs of ram in my laptop. I can play games again, but I need to make space.
- I have so much more to do with my Rails project, it’s unreal.
- I need new shoes
- I should get a haircut some time soon
- I’ve got to put all this on my to-do list

My apartments are the bestest. My neighbors are really neat. All of them. I got home ten minutes ago. Right now there are 4 police cruisers and 5 police officers in my apartment complex. They’re talking with some of my really neat neighbors. That’s so neat.

Can you guess what today’s secret word is? No, that’s not it. Try again.

Yes, there you go. Can you spell today’s secret word? Try it.

G-H-E-T-T-O

Very good! I knew you could.

Hey folks.

Not sure if I overreacted about the local newspaper’s choice of story placement (see last journal entry). I did get a reply from the editor two days later, though. Here was his response:

In some way, I can understand his viewpoint, but we each had a miscommunication about what our message intent was. My concern was something that the mousepox article barely touched upon: the ability to use the exact same research to alter the smallpox virus, which humans can get, into a supervirus. My stance remains; more exploration of the ethics and social code behind creating “superviruses” needs to be done in public forum. What we’re asking ourselves is if God can create a rock so large that even he can’t lift it. And right now, we’re creating.

Ok, on to current news:

I’ll be taking friday off (using some well-deserved vacation time) to head up to TRF a day early. Will be meeting my Texarkana friends and their entourage at the TRF campgrounds around noon to set up camp and begin festivities. The weather doesn’t look that fantastic, the group is smaller than expected (thanks to some last-minute backouts, dorks), and I’ve not been feeling my best this week, but it may end up a decent weekend. I can hope, at least.

Healthwise: monday, I suffered a sharp pain in my left kidney. It struck once and disappeared. My kidneys have been kinda tender for a few days, so I’m overdosing on water and trying to eat and drink right. So far I’ve noticed nothing else wrong — my “waste” is normal, in the normal amounts, no burning, no discoloration, nothing. Totally odd. I think after this weekend I may see my doctor if it persists.

Cardio-wise, last night I started tweaking out with something resembling hypoxia. I’m not a doctor, so I can’t make any diagnosis, but in my hypochrondriac research online it’s what it feels like. Google it sometimes. My smoker’s lungs breathe too shallow, especially when I lay down for bed. I just start freaking out. Today, after work, it was a bit worse, and it’s the head-rush-and-spin with the lung-tweak and the steady, hard heartbeat that only a smoker could love, and I hate it. I want to quit so badly. I need to. Again. For good. For life.

I’m a fucking addict.

On a lighter note, my roomate and I just extended our lease on the apartment for another sixth months. We love the apartment, and the feeling of semipermanence that living somewhere for over a year can afford, and this time around the rent is fifty bucks cheaper (to a grand total of $645/mo), but the tiresome situation with the stupider-than-trailer-trash neighbor and his fondness for “bass cars” is growing long in the tooth. I’m not sure how many people in this tiny complex appreciate his frequent gifts of “Skrew’d music”, and I most certainly don’t appreciate his and his girlfriend’s constant shouting, yelling, and loud thumps next door, but it appears to me the landlord, tho we like him, might be a little too soft on dealing with many complaints. Aside from calling the police on something that could quiet down as quickly as it flares up, what can we do?

Daily bothers, daily pains, daily regrets. I’m gonna take a “chill pill” and go to bed. G’nite, all.