Moving house

We've moved house. It wasn't very exciting. Removal men came, with 180 items of 'stuff', and put it in the new apartment. We opened some of the boxes and put it away.

We've had a phone line installed - I bought two phones for $5 each from Craigslist, although one doesn't work. We went to the thrift shop and bought a TV ($30) and a toaster ($5). The toaster seems to work OK, but smells like a toaster that hasn't been used for a while when you turn it on (I've not actually tried putting bread in it yet). S bought some cups and a very, very large wineglass thing (so large I suspect it's ornamental, not actually for drinking from).

The people in the thrift shop are all peculiarly, well, peculiar. At the till, we were paying for the telly, the toaster, and the other bits and bobs. (Remember now that the telly was $30). They rang up the total on the till, and it came to $29. "That's not enough" I said. The woman looked at me like I was insulting her. It's a thrift shop, and the money goes to charity, and it was a big telly for $30. The telly is $30, it's less than that. This went on, and I won't bore you with it, but it took some time, and two attempts to fix it.

We then went to pick up the telly (there was a bit where you can drive in, to load it). I put the TV in the car, and asked the man about the remote. "Has it got a remote?" he asked? It said remitte #81 on the TV, so I showed this to him.

"Can I get it?"

"Oh yes, it's #81." He smiled.

"Where do I get the remote?"

"#81"

Lots of friendly smiling, but no progress getting the remote. Eventually I went back into the shop where I paid, and discovered that remotes are kept under the counter.

This happens a lot, that people misunderstand me in shops. I wonder to what extent this is because (a) I speak too fast (S says this is the case), (b) my accent (the most common guess from Americans is that I'm Australian, although someone guessed Scottish the other day, one of the removal men said "You're not from London, are you from the North", which was the most accurate guess from anyone here), (c) I don't use the right words.

I went to Subway to buy sandwiches for the removal men for lunch, it was a nightmare. Subways always try to serve you fast, 'cos there's a queue. But there are about 100 choices to be made, and I was trying to make simultaneous choices for 6 sandwiches at the same time, including D and A who wanted cheese, black olives, and nothing else, which kind of confused the chap serving. There are 5 kinds of bread (helpfully labeled), N kinds of cheese (I don't know what any of them are - sometimes they say "American cheese OK?". About 20 different sorts of salad things to put on, and I don't know the names of all of them (gherkins need to be called pickles, chilies need to be called jalapenos). There are all kinds of mysterious bottles of sauce - I know that mustard and mayonnaise are two of them, because they are the defaults. And I know that ketchup isn't one of them, because if you ask for that, they look blank, but I don't know what the rest are. There's salt and pepper, and two other pots that I don't know about, and they don't name them.

We've ordered $300 worth of bookshelves from Staples, and an inflatable mattress from Amazon (although we've nowhere to put the mattress until the bookshelves arrive and we can empty boxes onto them).

There are all sorts of rules in the complex we are in. There was a sign in the lift that said "I'm the new manager and the rules are going to be enforced now". Some people, it seems, were leaving toys on their balconies.

We have two parking spaces, and I had a cunning ploy - I thought we could buy a shed and put it in one of the spaces. But the rules have thought of that - you may only park a car in your parking space. Aha, I thought. I'll buy a knackered old van, park it there, and put stuff in it. But the rules have thought of that - read that first rule again, it's cars only. Not vans. As well as that, the rules say that the car has to have current insurance and have inflated tires.

Another of the rules is that if you have a shade on your balcony (like a blind, but outside) it has to be made of bamboo, so off we went to Home Depot to buy bamboo shades. Home Depot is like B and Q, except that it seems to have staff that are helpful and know what they are talking about. It also had more people that looked like they might do things to people's houses for a job, and fewer who looked like they'd watched "Changing Rooms" one time too often. And it had a McDonald's in it. And, when you buy more stuff than you can fit in your car, you can hire a van for an hour for $19, to get it home.

I also didn't have any electrical tools - there was no point bringing any, because the voltage would be wrong. And there was not much point in buying expensive tools, because one day we might return to the UK, and again, they won't work. And buying cheap tools is just an exercise in getting pissed off when they break after 5 minutes.

Quandary.

The solution was to buy rechargeable tools - then we just need a different voltage charger, and we're away. And if you're going to buy rechargeable tools, you might as well buy De Walt rechargeable tools, especially if, when you buy the combination of six tools, you get a free bag to carry them in, and a free hand Hoover thingy. So that's what I did, and it was very exciting. It also had an angle grinder - angle grinders are great. It's not often that you need an angle grinder, but when you do, you really need an angle grinder. You could put a screw in with a normal screwdriver, not an electric one. But for some jobs, it's an angle grinder, or it doesn't get done.

So I used my electric screwdriver to put up the blinds, and D and A used the vacuum and the light to make sure all the rechargeable batteries are flat so that none of the tools work next time. (The blinds, I should mention, are not just there to be blinds. They make leaning over the balcony and falling off much harder for both children and cats.)

Along with our phone line, we get a DSL line. But that takes longer to connect, and they have to post us stuff like a modem. "But J" (I hear you ask) "how are you typing this on the internet, when you have no connection?" One of the benefits of communal living is that a LOT of people around have wireless networks, and some of them don't password protect then. There are two with a pretty strong signal, and I alternate between them.

It's possible for someone to access some of what I'm sending over the internet if I use their network, but then someone who doesn't lock their network, and who hasn't changed the name of their network from "Linksys" probably doesn't know how to do that. (I feel that this is karma, as I never locked our network back in England. )