New Home

It's official. After my freaking out for a good week and a half during the search and then waiting another week+ to get the lease put together, Steve and I now have a place to leave on September 1st. Now we just need to find out if we can move in before we get kicked out of our current places on August 31st ;-). It's two bedrooms, 3 minutes from Davis Square (on the Red Line T for you non-Bostonians), reasonably large living room + marble countertops in the bathroom/kitchen...oh and there's a dishwasher and garbage disposal, A/C, and an outdoor patio area only for our apartment that will be perfect for BBQ and grilling. All-in-all, I'm pretty pleased with it, even if it is going to cost us a bloody fortune.

I saw Cars and Pirates 2 this weekend as well as getting some more solid wandering around Boston accomplished (I kinda know my way around the Common and related areas/T's now). I'd recommend both - quite amusing, but the ending on Pirates made me quite annoyed. I mean...there's cliffhangers and then there's just stopping mid-plot. But I digress.

Work is going well. I'm going to be doing some variation on training for probably another 2 months or so. I think I'm slowly getting a handle on what I'm actually supposed to be working on and I think it'll be pretty interesting.

Oh and I'm averaging an Olin Challenge (going somewhere and not running into an Oliner) failure every 5 or so days since I got back. I've run into Sam Freilich and Ginnee at the Davis T stop, David Soo also near Davis hangling out with his friends, Ransom & George at Fanuiel hall...and I think one more that I'm forgetting.

And lastly I'm watching Monk again! I caught the midnight new episode on Friday and downloaded the rest of Season 5 on iTunes. I'd forgotten how entertaining that show can be.

Tomorrow is a trip to IKEA (thanks to Emma) so I can see what sorts of things I might want to buy there for my bedroom.

Macy's, Layouts, and Stereotypes...

So I spent a chunk of time on Saturday afternoon scooping out different knife brands and trying to decide what kind of knife set I wanted to get. For it's size, Boston has surprisingly poor diversity in terms of knife stores. Anyhow, one stop on my journey was a Macy's near Downtown Crossing. I'm looking for cooking knifes, so those would naturally be in kitchen supplies/housewares...which would of course be in the basement. So what confronts me as I get off the escalator? Bras bras and more bras. Then women's clothing. Then housewares. Given how much thought probably goes into the layout of these chain stores, I'm sure Macy's did some research to justify how its laid out, but still...it definitely hit me in the face that they strongly suspected that women were going to be heading to housewares and kitchen supplies and thus they wanted other products that women might want to buy as they wandered by.

In other news, I went to Emma's first professional play last night (Rhinoceros / Rinoceronte
by Eugene Ionesco) and then hung out with Emma and Tori (a friend of Emma's from IMSA who just graduated from Wellesley). We watched Forever Young with Mel Gibson which was pretty good. This afternoon Christie, Jon, and I went out for lunch and watched a movie. Jon's dropping Christie off at the bus to NYC now and then we're going to game for a couple of hours. Oh and so I'm writing this from Olin. In fact from the 4th floor N suite in East Hall...which has morphed into the nerd suite for the summer...it's rather interesting. But yah...strange to be back.

Drain Cleaning Suggestions + Stagnant Nalgene water?

Does anyone have any particularly good suggestions for unclogging a drain (sink or bath)? Or for dealing with hair catchers if your landlord seems to really want them in the bathtubs?

Also, I've noticed that if I leave water in my Nalgene bottle while it stays in my room during the day it, the water changes flavors and starts to taste...stagnant for lack of a better word. Anyone else run into that problem before?

When Birds Attack

Okay so it was only one bird, but odd enough that it felt worthy of a post. So I'm walking back to my apartment after lunch with Mikell and as I'm walking through Powder House Square about 2 blocks from my apartment a bird flies directly into my left arm and then vears away. As I'm glancing back at the bird it takes another dive towards me, so I move more quickly away and fall outside its little bombing loop. This continues for another couple of iterations: bird charges and I move away faster until I'm in the crosswalk walking across the street at which point I can't see the bird any longer. So I'm kinda bemused by what I could have done to incure its aggression. anyhow, I thought it was a rather odd little story.

You know you have a nice boss...

When he walks around on Friday at 5pm telling people to go home.

Also when she (my more day-to-day supervisor) offers to give me a lift to Target and then to the bus stop (I bought another fan and laundry supplies)

Can anyone explain to me why the heck Somerville seems consistently hotter and more humid than both Cambridge and Watertown and the Watertown seems to always be the coolest of the three?

Mmmm...iPOD

I would like to thank Fisher Barb and my mom for the charming little nano that I'm enjoying during my commute and during the workday - it's good stuff. Thanks also to Adam for telling me where to buy a really good rubber cover for cheap.

Oh and I'm now no longer an Anna's Taqueria virgin. A couple of the guys I work with go out for burritos every Thursday and they invited me along.

I'm now a card-carrying member of Boston Sports Club, which is in the same building as athena, and I can get at an incredibly good membership deal. I've also got the 411 on a bus about 15 minutes walk from athena that will take me to Harvard in case I miss the shuttle (whose last run is at 6:30).

Oh and I got so involved in what I was doing at work during the end of the day that I stayed about an hour after I had planned to leave. My boss kept saying "weren't you going to leave early today?". Good for job satisfaction. Bad for "social life".

It seems like I come home, make dinner, do e-mail, and IM and then crash...I need to work on building in some more solid relaxation time during the week.

In closing news, I finished my small biography of King Robert the Bruce that I bought while I was in Scotland some number of years ago, this follows up my completion of a biography of William Wallace while at my grandparents. Now onward to fiction for a spell...

Humidity Humidity Go Away

Even if it means you rained today!

We got a heavy dose of rain today and tomorrow and (thankfully) were rewarded for the downpour with a major drop in humidity. So life around here is much more pleasant. My boss and I were exchanging horror stories about lack of A/C (or in my case when Olin's heating system went nuts and my room was 90+ by 10am in October. Fun times. The story-telling that is...not so much the times themselves.

Wireless is fixed!

I am the man. Thanks to D-Link for providing documentation online. :-)

Well I survived Day 1

And was not fired in contrast to my irrational fears. I was however completely exhausted by 6pm. You wouldn’t think 9 hours of orienting and no hours of actually working would do that to you, but yah…very tiring.

Anyhow, I’m still pretty tired and want to try to get more sleep than last night, but I wanted to throw out a couple of quick highlights for you all.

First, to you past and present Oliners. athena's Intranet is a wiki – a fact which I found most amusing, AND we use prox cards, AND we use meeting requests to reserve rooms (just like we kept asking IT to do).

Second, as Christie would say: ZOMG!!! There is soooo much stuff that I need to learn about the healthcare industry and athena’s systems. It’s just mind-boggling. That’s Z (for emphasis), O for “oh”, and MG for “my god” for the older readers.

The “wow I can’t believe they hired me moment” was when I went to HR in the afternoon to turn in paperwork and managed to take an elevator that doesn’t actually lead me to an exit, then go back up to the 2^nd floor (which also has no non-emergency exit) and then back to where I started on the 3^rd floor before continuing down. Not my finest moment – that’s what I get for trying to take the shorter way.

Everyone I met (and I met a lot of people) was nice. They really do have a very collegial culture. I think I’m really going to like working there once I settle into things.

Oh and they have an internal promo/cultural video with 100 Years by Five for Fighting as the theme music…that was pretty cool.

As a good demonstration of how fast things are changing there, my boss changed between hiring and starting. The old boss and someone else who interviewed me for this position were both promoted, so she’s now doing something related, but different and he’s the new head of the Denials Associates team. I think it’ll turn out fine, but it was a surprising thing to learn on my first day.

I have a nice shinny new dell laptop with widescreen…actually it’s almost too wide; my eyes are having issues with it right now.

After a glut of spending, I think I’m setting into an acceptable pattern and finally have a reasonable grasp of the layout of the nearest grocery store. They sell Tikka Masala sauce! I was excited. Though I did manage to kinda mess up a Bobali pizza yesterday (even if I generated leftover meals for two more nights) by using an aluminum foil pan so the crust didn’t really harden as expected.

In housing news, I moved into my temporary lodging near Tufts. The room is smaller than my dorm rooms at Olin, there’s no A/C, and the wireless makes me sad. I’m living on the 3^rd floor with 2 girls, the kitchen and two guys are on the 2^nd floor (which is part of the same apartment). All the people are nice; I’ll try to remember to describe them in greater detail later. “Holly” (spelled Hale), the girl from Turkey commented tonight that I seemed like I was always mellow and relaxed. I couldn’t help but laugh, but I guess I am acting pretty low-key around them and feeling reasonably relaxed.

Anyhow, I bought an interesting little desktop air conditioning unit and am working on getting a new wireless hub in an effort to resolve that issue, so we’ll see how well that turns out. I do get wired and wireless internet on the 2^nd floor in the living room and intermittent access in my room from the downstairs neighbor’s network, but it’s rather frustrating not to have a good signal. Anyhow, the apartment will be fine through August even if the walk is a little long in the humidity around here.

Alright, it’s almost 11 and I told myself I would be sleeping then, so farewell for now.

Taxes

So I've got a confession to make. I've always had a certain level of sympathy for a "tax and spend" philosophy of government and while I still think running the government into a financial hole is just utter stupidity, I'll confess to feeling a little bitter over how much of my paychecks are going to be going to various tax collectors. I'd run the numbers before, but I forgot about a few things (like social security & medicare), so my estimates were a bit high. I went through real numbers with my grandpa (an H&R Block tax preparer) and am confused about how people survive on much less and about how hard it is to save and still buy things even when I'm single and have a good salary. I guess we'll see how things play out once I actually have a couple of paychecks to play with since this is all hypothetical spending at this point.

Speaking of, I'm in Illinois now visiting my Dad's folks and having a nice relaxing visit (for all the mowing, tree planting, and car washing I've done). I'm glad I could swing by during my trip out to Boston. Speaking of, I'll be in Boston starting tomorrow evening. Oh and, yes Dad, I'm enjoying the food here. For those of you who don't know, my grandma makes excellent desserts.

So yes, this is my brief moment of anti-taxism. Relish it Chris, it probably won't happen again. Or if it does, then it's more likely to take the form of irritation at spending instead of taxing.