Out in LA

This post is brought to you from sunny southern California. I could also say sunny Southern California, because I am on campus at USC (and it is, of course, sunny). I am out to go through orientation and payroll sign-up, etc, and of course there are wrinkles. The first is that although I thought I had to attend meeting Tuesday morning, I actually don't. I only need to go to the one Friday morning. But there's a wrinkle there, too. Friday is graduation day, so the meeting has been moved to Thursday. Oh, but there's a wrinkle there. On Thursday I'll be out on the island. Sigh. So we're trying to schedule a time I can meet with the benefits people. The Wrigley staff has been very friendly and helpful.

The house is ever closer to being ready for the market. This weekend we straightened the basement and did more painting (ugh). Sweetie worked more on the landscaping. Thing 1 and Thing 2 successfully avoided making any big messes. All the cabinets are back together, the floors are looking good, I installed the backsplashes on the countertop, and the garage is full of stuff. (I guess we still need to work on that.) Our real estate agent wants to list very soon. This may actually happen.

And now a technology tale: When we painted the kitchen, I moved the cable modem down to the cellar. I connected it back up using the same splitter and cable that the installation guy used upstairs. Since then, however, our cable connection has been spotty at best, and this weekend it was out completely on Saturday. On top of this, on Friday I decided to update some of my linux packages and ended up killing the X server, thus no nice windows-based GUI. Most of the time this would be aggravating, but tolerable. However this weekend I was trying to finalize my travel itinerary. I hadn't yet printed out my plane and car reservations, maps of campus, forms to fill out, or the itinerary itself. All of this was in my email and on the web on my linux computer. I was thinking, as I checked in at the airport with just my credit card, got my car with just my name, got to where I'm staying using my GPS unit, and arranged meetings with people on my cell phone, that if technology fails on a grand scale, we're screwed. (While I'm sure my father would point out that people survived thousands of years without such technology, they didn't have to fly to California.)