bolson

Also known as my condo, sometimes named "HashMap", wherein I have paid off 28.84% (and rising) of my 58% share of a building. It is my space, my home, and it lets me make space for my friends. I bought a three bedroom space for myself because - I could and I liked the space. That has let me make space for three friends who have a room to stay in sometimes instead of driving an extra hour out of Boston. It let me make space for a friend who needed to move on short notice when moving out after a breakup. It is a place for parties and hanging out and friends staying too late and sleeping over on the futon, as one is right now. It's a good place. I could neaten up a couple cluttered corners a bit ;-)

I used the Hugin program to these pictures of what my place looks like:
( 3 big panoramic pictures )

I was organizing and cleaning this morning, in this place I moved into at the start of August that is still littered with boxes, and made some decent progress in one room. I made the most progress in the space I spend the most time in (where the computer is). It was directly valuable improvement to me. That room over there, the dining room, was still full of boxes. Chatting with a friend she made the off hand suggestion to move the boxes into the computer room. beat. beat. Yeah! My dining room is now almost empty of boxes and things have been moved to where I should be more likely to deal with them. Hopefully I'll be able to report in a week or two that this little trick I play on myself will have had positive results.

I have a door I have no keys to. The door to my second floor porch fits my regular house key, but I tried all the copies and none of them turn it. I also have one key I was given by the sellers that still doesn't seem to match anything. (It's not the same lock family as my others, so doesn't even fit into the slot at all.)

TODO: re-key 4 doors.

My neighbor called me at work today to tell me that there was water streaming out of the house from a pipe emerging from my part of the house.* She said the basement was fine, but still this was kinda inexplicable, so it was 4pm and I decided the best thing to do would be to rush home and see what it was, in the mean time she turned off the water main to the building.

It turned out to be the outlet for the drain pan around my washer-dryer which was leaking and running a lot of cold water during the dry cycle. I don't understand the physics of what it's trying to accomplish by this. Maybe it's a bug. I called customer service and they told me to check a filter behind some panel and I said ok, I'd try that, and hung up. I shoulda stayed on the line. There was one little dust bunny of hair in the filter, which I removed. I turned the machine on again and it started doing the weird leaking thing again.

It's off now, I'm going out. I'll deal with it later.

(* I thought I was being terribly clever by putting the thing on delayed cycle so that I would have freshly done dryed clothes right when I got home so that I could fold things and be done with it. If everything had worked, this would have indeed been a good plan.)

The washer-dryer is in. Now I have the luxury of not needing a laundromat (unless it breaks), not having to haul laundry down and up stairs because it is on the third floor with my bedrooms where my dirty laundry tends to be, and not needing to move laundry from the washer to the dryer because it is an all-in-one unit.

And, stealing inspiration of the obvious from mzrowan, my new icon for house-related posts is a picture of my house.

What's the biggest thing I can do to make my household more energy
efficient? Insulate it. Well, that's expensive and hard (but totally on the
to-do list for next season if not this).So, what's the next big thing that
we all get reminded to do? Change lightbulbs. It's easy and cheapish and
relatively effective for that amount of work. So, I took stock and I have
over 40 lightbulbs I could replace. Half of those have a
smaller-than-standard socket as part of some decorative fixture in the
ceiling fan. Another quarter are much shorter than common bulbs. Between
these constraints my choice in CFL replacements will be somewhat limited,
but I'm pretty sure I've seen the right kinds of things out there.

I seem to have moved into some telecommunications wasteland where neither RCN (my current ISP) nor Verizoff offer internet service. Comcast will give me worse service than I get now for $70/mo vs my current $40/mo.
Anyone have other options I should know about?

Dear Friends,
Who among you can I beg furniture moving help from for the price of pizza and beer? (Pizza and beer may be substituted with other, nicer dinner since we're all grownups now, or may remain literally pizza and beer if we feel that such is yummy and good and/or we're in denial of being grownups now.)
I think we can get all the furniture (dining table, futon, queen bed, misc) in one day, either Saturday or Sunday, August 9 or 10.
[Poll #1234378]