What a week

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This has been an incredible week. 10 days ago we shipped all of our belongings off to California. Since then:

  • We’ve stayed in four different hotels (one in Seattle, three in California). The California shuffle was because of having to continually adjust our expectations about when our stuff would arrive from Seattle, and because many hotels were sold out because of a sporting event for the older set over at Stanford.
  • We’ve set up local bank accounts, and found to our delight that Bank of America is California is actually wired in to the rest of the network, unlike BofA in Washington State which seems to be a poor stepchild.
  • We’ve bought two cars. Well, actually Kate bought her car; I’ve agreed to a purchase which will be consummated next week.
  • We’re moved in – finally. (Yes, the movers were a day late on an expedited move for which we paid an extra $500. Yes, we’re pissed. Yes, we’ll get over it.) Of course “moved in” is a relative term: we still have around 50 boxes to unpack or commit to the storage area. But the furniture is in place (the movers only broke three pieces), the kitchen is up and running, and we have somewhere to sleep.
  • We have internet connectivity, WiFi, and VOIP phone service. We would have TV as well, except for the creative ingenuity of someone at Comcast. And the (non-Comcast) VOIP setup was tedious, involving 40 minutes on the (cell)phone to tech support (including opening up the WAN side of the VOIP box so the tech could ssh into it), followed by a reconfiguration of the Time Capsule that we use for WiFi. TV should be set up on Monday.
  • We’ve discovered three wonderful Italian restaurants nearby, ranging from the fabulous to the neighborhood (in walking distance) to the delightfully creative. And we realized that this was something we missed in Seattle; while there were tons of good seafood places and eclectic nouveau wine bars, there were relatively few good Italian restaurants. Perhaps we missed them; it’s academic now.
  • I spent a relatively full week at work, including several breakfast meetings. Busy, busy, busy. I’m having fun.
  • And this evening we finally got to see the latest Harry Potter film. It was good. Watching the scene where they magically restored a house which a wizard had trashed, we both (a) thought of Mary Poppins, and (b) wished we could use some of that magic on our unopened boxes. Ah, well.

Tomorrow we’ll tackle the clothing and the rest of the geek infrastructure. (Printing would be good. Music too.) And we’ll do a grocery run, which will involve a tough choice: we have Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and Safeway within a few blocks….