Off By One

It’s quite a sight, the spew of boxes collected into three large stacks and two small ones. An entire life… scratch that, two entire lives piled up and ready to uproot.

Char and I are entering into the second most significant collective choice we’ll ever make; it comes a reasonably distant second to having a child, but it’s still a link between us that we are never likely to sever. It commits us to the financial side of the relationship in a way that — in the all-too-human myopia that comes with large changes — seems to overshadow the real basis for the relationship for a time.

A short time, mind you.

I’m really looking forward to this. It’s been stressful, it’s been draining, but we get our keys today (I just talked to the lawyer, the money’s on it’s way to Bob now) and tonight, we move the first of the bits of our lives into the house.

All I can say is, “poor cats!” They’re terrified.

So, Char and I are — by virtue of the conditions of our current residence — about to embark on a second… adventure. We’re buying a house. Together. Like real adults, with real responsibilities. This falls firmly into the scary end of the spectrum.

I wrote the first part of this post with something firmly in mind, but for the life of me I can’t recall what that was. It’s worth noting, though, that blogging on an iPhone is not as effective as on a computer. It’s slower, by far, for one, and it’s a pain in the ass to do italics or bold text.

Anyway, house shopping.

Char and I are looking at some places tonight, some of which are just freaking gorgeous. We’ve got some nice neighborhoods picked out, and in general I’m pretty happy with the state of the housing market in Edmonton right now, which I suppose indicates that I’ve got radically lowered standards than I used to have. It’s grotesque, the prices I now consider to be ‘good’ prices for a house.

I hope that we’ll have more good news on this sort of subject soon, because we’d both like to get as little stress as we can out of this.

I’ll try to be more consistent, by the way; I’ve gotten right out of the habit of blogging (like some I could mention) and as a consequence I need to whip myself into posting. Rest assured, I’ve got a lot on my mind.

Update

Wow. What a pain in the ass.

So, I wrote this a week ago, and hit ‘publish’… or thought I did. Nope.

So, in the meantime, we bought a house. Nothing major, there

It’s funny how subtle things can bring memories… or at least fuzzy, vague recollections, trickling back into the foreground.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I have few clear memories of my life before leaving Grande Prairie. It’s not much of a stretch for me to claim that I only really ever became a whole person once the last vestiges of that place were stripped from me and I stepped out into the world anew. This isn’t to say I’m the best at the social interaction thing as it is. I can see from my relationships now that I still carry some of the baggage of what was, easily, the worst way I can imagine anyone having to grow up barring famine or warfare.

Thanks to the all-powerful Facebook, it so happens that I’m reliving some of the … less pleasant parts of my life so far, albeit with only one clear memory to act as an avatar of all of the unpleasantness.

(continue reading…)

My god, I’m tired.

I want this school year to be over.

This is starting to be a March theme, I think. I get swamped, I get a bit behind, and now all of a sudden, despite my best intentions, I am staring at deadlines I might not meet, with workloads I can barely handle.

Only one month to go. Perhaps I’ll get to see a couple of episodes of Die Nasty this year, yet.

Oh, man, it’s been a while.

Yeah, I’m still here.

I’ve been working on school a lot, and work — I’m pretty stressed these days, and my time is at a premium, so I haven’t been writing as often as I want to. I’ll try to remedy that, but this won’t be the post that does

To all of my assorted friends, book time while you can!

It’s been, and will be, an interesting couple of weeks. I’m creating some genuinely nifty things at work these days, and I’m going to be assembling interesting code for school.

The former has been an introduction to the general concepts of LDAP; I’ve had to get at least a bit familiar with it in order to put together a critical piece of functionality for our client. The latter, well, I took the hard part of the project, as is my wont, and it’s been nifty, getting it all working.

So, there’s that.

Plus papers..

Plus presentations…

Plus finals, upcoming…

Mind you, none of this is on the scale of Simon’s workload. Congrats on the thesis presentation!