Seriously, next time I’m hiring movers. I bribed a friend with pizza and beer and still wound up sore from moving stuff! I hate moving, but I think this is the last time for a while

The new apartment is super cute, and in an awesome location. Pod says he doesn’t think we could have gotten a better place without paying out the nose, and I’m pretty inclined to agree. We’ve got the MAX walking distance on one side, and all kinds of stuff on the other side; Fred Meyer’s, Monteaux’s, IHOP, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Great Clips, and more! Freddy’s has pretty much everything we’d need.

Our couches are totally awesome.. they’re vibrant red without being tooooo bright. Ok, they’re pretty bright, but not Stop Sign Red bright. Our coffee/end table set has cool black bars and black tempered glass.. they’re sleek and shiny and I love them! My new desk sits in the corner and has a whiteboard, though I need a new chair.

We’ve still got some unpacking to do but it feels like home. I can’t wait for it to be all clean and unpacked though! There’s a few sneak peak pictures on my Flickr.

In totally unrelated news, some of you may remember me talking about getting involved with the roller derby. I still really want to do this, but need some help as I’m super broke and getting started is not cheap. I made a page for donations; every little bit will help! If you can’t donate, you might spread the link. Anyway, the page is at Katie On Wheels

So, I’m getting ready to move this weekend. I still have a lot of packing to do… I hate packing. I’ve bribed some friends with pizza and beer to help me move my stuff. I’ve bribed another friend with more pizza to help me paint the walls back to the boring off-white color they were when I got there. I’ve secured a killer vacuum cleaner to rescue my rug that my grandma gave me, and will be renting a super steam cleaner to get the carpet back in passable condition so I don’t have to pay to have it replaced. My plan of attack is to finish packing this week, move the stuff on Saturday (and by “move my stuff” i mean “drive the truck and let the boys load/unload”) during the day, unpack the important stuff Saturday night, and paint the walls and clean the carpet Sunday.

I hate moving. I’m kind of excited though. Xoie will have a friend to play with, since my friend that we’re moving in with has a dog, too. I think having more places to go will help calm her down, as well as running and playing more. Pod is going to bring his computer over to my house so that we can get a little more spread of where we spend our time, cause I’m *always* at his house, and I would really like to spend more time at home, but still spend time with him. We haven’t been playing EQ a whole lot, cause we’ve been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead, which is totally awesome. If you’re on Steam, add me as your friend. lifelessmind. I’d link to my profile but I can’t find the URL while I’m at work cause anything fun is surfblocked.

I had to take back the super sweet 3.16 dual core processor I bought. Turns out my motherboard only supports 65nm processors. So I already bought a new power supply, and got a video card sent to me, and if I bought a new motherboard to go with my new processor I’d need new RAM cause mine is slow, and I’d need a case, and at that point I built a whole new computer and that just wasn’t in my budget I did pick up a 2.2 dual core, which is the best 65nm I can still find at this point.. which, yea, is still better than the 1.8 I had in there, but not NEARLY as exciting as the E8600. Cest la vie. I’m excited for my new video card My friend Shawn says the video card will do me more good than the processor anyway, so the combination of the two is pretty good I’d say.

I’ve also been doing a lot of designing/coding lately. I’ve started (and scrapped) a good 4 or 5 layouts for this site already. I’ve got the main page (mostly) coded for the one I think I’ll be keeping. Here’s a sneak peak of it. Don’t bother clicking any links; none of them work yet. If you have any feedback, let me know. I always like hearing other peoples ideas. I’m also starting a new project. Domain has been bought… but I’ve also scrapped 2 or 3 layouts for that one. I don’t want to get too much into specifics until the site is up, but it was inspired by this random freak-out I had over the weekend. While Kat Scratch Fever mostly is about the NOW of my life, this new project will give a little more insight about my past. I’ll let you know when it’s up and running.

Oh, and I got a new tattoo. I suppose technically it’s 2 tattoos (that technicality meant I had to fill out the paperwork twice! that, and I split it up into two sessions cause we ran out of time the first day). I just got the second one last night and it’s crazy swollen and red still. The left one hurt more than the right one. Probably because I’m right handed so the muscles in my right arm are stronger and more used to abuse. Anyway I don’t have pictures of both of them together yet, but they look the same, just mirror images. Pictures on my Flickr. Go look, leave comments!

That’s all for now.

So, I decided that I wanted to play with the Windows 7 beta, but that I didn’t want to overwrite my operating system on either computer.

I started with Bob 1.0, my poor sweet 5 year old computer with Windows XP on it. I used GParted off of a CD-Boot of Ubuntu to shrink the partition on my main drive and then partition the new, un-partitioned space left by the shrink process. Windows 7 took ages to install, and ran a little slow on Bob 1, but certainly ran much faster than I expected it to run in the first place. I half-way didn’t expect it to install at all.

So last night I decided to shrink the partition on my storage drive in Bob 2.0 (my much newer computer) and poke around on that. I have no idea why, but the process didn’t go NEARLY as smoothly on this computer. Some of you may have seen my panicked Tweets about it. Oh, then then to make it worse, I discovered that Vista has tools to do this built in, well after the fact

So anyway, I guess when Windows Vista first partitioned the drive, it left blank space at the very beginning of the drive. When I went to shrink the partition, it decided that it wanted to move the partition to the left. So it took 2 hours to read my partition (why?!) and another 2 and a half to move it and create the new partition.

So I cleaned my bathroom while I waited, since I’m moving in a couple of weeks and have to clean it at some point anyway. I kid you not, that bathroom is positively SPOTLESS. Even the crazy muddy parts of the bathtub where Xoie puts her paws. I had a lot of time to kill.

Anyway, 4.5 hours later when I could use my computer again, I went to get some pictures of my camera (The bathroom only killed about an hour) and Lightroom started freaking out at me. “ZOMG I can’t find your catalog!” ... well, said catalog is stored on my storage drive that I just manipulated the partitions on. So I go to My Computer, and while I could see the new G: partition.. the original partition was nowhere to be found. I just about died. I panicked and mourned my lost data, then started wondering “well.. if the data is gone… where the heck is the 350 gigs of space?!”

So i went into the drive manager, and found my data partition! Yay! Windows had arbitrarily reassinged drive letters and changed it from Z: to F: which made it get lost, because F belongs to one of my removable devices (I think it’s my Rebel, IIRC). So I changed the drive letter back to Z and I could access all my data and Lightroom stopped spazzing out.

So I did my photo stuff and set Windows 7 installing and went to bed, cause it was about 1 in the morning at that point.

So yet again, I haven’t gotten a chance to really poke around with Windows 7 but it looks pretty sweet from what I’ve done so far. I’ll be playing with it and will likely write a post about it in the nearish future.

Isn’t that just the luck.

I finish moving my home over the weekend, and when I get to work they’re all like..
“So uh, Katie, we’re gonna go ahead move your desk now”

LMAO.

Have I mentioned lately that I hate moving? Well. I do. I’d probably be dead now if it wasn’t for my little legion of friends though. Thanks guys <3

Thursday a couple friends moved my desk for me.. that thing is massive and it was quite an endeavor. I supervised. And the desk just *barely* fit in the little nook that I wanted it in. It’s pretty impressive actually. Also moved a few small boxes. Then I went to another friends house to watch TV and wound up drinking way too much and then Friday sucked. Oops.

Friday we moved all the rest of my stuff (garbage bags FTW!!) and were planning on having a Packing Party (read: throw stuff in bags while drinking beer) but we left the beer at the wrong house. So after we were done moving we had 2 beers and played like, half an hour of video game, then passed out from sheer exhaustion. Yay.

Saturday I went back to the old apartment with Tom cause we had to clean the carpet and counters and stuff, and sign over the lease. Tom was rude to me on the phone but when I got there he looked really sheepish and apologized for being rude, so all was well. It was a little bittersweet to look at the empty apartment ... much as I am pretty close to over the whole thing it’s still a little sad to look at the utter finality of it. Signing the lease over made everything so official *sigh* Soooo I was a little down most of Saturday. I spent the whole day over at a friends house with Xoie playing with a few other puppies and sitting in front of a fire pit and trying not to dwell. The day was really unproductive but I think I really needed it. I felt a lot better.

So yesterday I went to IKEA and bought a mirror and a shelf and an armchair, and a new bed set, and a really cute little red dot rug. Oh and a light fixture, my buddy Marcus is supposed to come put it up for me sometime this week. I need to go get Xoie a doggy bed. She took over my armchair haha. Then I unpacked some stuff and went to sleep early.

Today I think I will go cash my check (it’s pretty much all accounted for, bleh) and make some dinner and get back to unpacking. I can’t wait for my room to be all done so that I just don’t have to think about moving any more.

I’ve been kicking this idea around in my head for the past couple of months…

Gas is getting ridiculously expensive. Like… srsly. It doesn’t really look like it’s gonna be getting lower anytime soon either. My truck is getting expensive to keep drivable… the high mileage oil costs almost twice as much as the regular oil… my car insurance keeps going up (wtf? I can’t figure out why because I have no tickets and no accidents so it shouldn’t be getting more expensive…) uhhhhm, oh yeah and it’s doing this really cool stalling thing when I am braking. Yeaaaah. I can’t really afford to take it to the mechanic. I’m sure it just needs a tuneup but even those tend to be a couple hundred bucks that I simply don’t have budgeted to spend on the truck.

So according to the Kelley Blue Book, I could feasibly get $2-3k for my truck… that wouldn’t be bad. Then I can do one of two things…

I can either buy a (hopefully) more gas-economical little car with that money…
Or I can just not have a vehicle for a while and put that money in savings. Gain some interest on it and experience not having a car. I’ve been gathering lots of life-experiences lately, it’s pretty cool. Anyway, I’d save money on insurance and gas which will be cool, since my other bills seem to be getting bigger, and I’m getting paid less here. The monthly pass for the MAX and buses costs less than my insurance alone.

Down in L.A. I would have *never* even CONSIDERED not having a car. I almost feel like having that ingrained into me is why I haven’t already jumped ship and gotten rid of the truck. I love my truck but I kind of wonder if I actually NEED it. Hmmm. The MAX is really cool and runs often. It’s a 4 minute walk from my new home (I’m moving over the next couple weeks) to the stop there, and then a 4 minute walk from the MAX to my work, so that would mean I wouldn’t have to find parking here (it’s a nightmare). I already take the MAX to go to Downtown cause it’s faster most of the time and parking over there blows too. The buses seem to go pretty much everywhere that the train doesn’t go…. lots of people get around just fine without having a vehicle. My new roommate has a car so I can go grocery shopping with her, which is really the only time when you actually NEEEEEEEEEED a car no matter how close the public transportation is.

But I dunno. I can’t decide if I should go carless or not.

Happy Tax Day people. Mwahaha. I hope you all got your stuff done I finally sent in my Oregon taxes yesterday (they wanted money from me so I put it off for a while haha). Anyway yeah taxes suck.

So last night we had alcoholic Orange Julius’s. Have you ever bought a bottle of rum, and then gone to the house that you’re all hanging out at, only to realize that nobody remembered to bring the Coke? Yeah, that was totally us last night. So the only thing in the fridge at my friends house were a couple cans of this sparkling orange flavored… stuff? Damned if I know what it was but it was a pretty good mixer. Our drinks were rum filled melted orange julius’s. Good times!

Hrm. What else to blog about… well, I’m moving this weekend. Puppy is a spaz. Work is fun, but people are stupid. That’s about it.

Oh, I also made like, an invite only blog on Blogger for posting about things that are fun but that I don’t need the whole wide internet to know about. If you want access (and think that it’s possible that I’d let you read it LOL [if I talk to you I’ll probably let you in]) leave a comment here saying that you want access and I’ll hook you up with an invite email *nods* Gmail acct if possible, I think it works better that way. I’m way too lazy to go track down all your email addresses. I plan on posting about last weekends shenanigans (those of you that follow my Twitter might be curious) some time soon! Yay!

That is all. I will try not to be so sparse and update more often but I make no promises.