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The wall between our house and our neighbor’s came tumbling down around dinnertime last night.
The wall *was* already leaning at a rather precarious angle, enough so that we had actually talked to the neighbor about fixing it just last week. He has a pool in his backyard, so I’m guessing his timetable’s been moved up a little now. We’re just glad no one, especially those of the pint-sized variety, was out there when it crumbled.
Thanks to kev for coming over this past weekend to help me wire up my office for ethernet, and the rest of my house for phone. My office feels much less ghetto now, and it sure is nice to not be using wireless on my iMac any more.
Sorry I haven’t written much in the past month. Could you even tell? Anyway, there’s a reason.
I’m pretty reliant on an internet connection. I work from home, I have an IP phone for work, I have a Tivo that needs to talk to the internet to get its program data, I have a son that loves to watch old Sesame Street clips on YouTube…etc, etc. We had been connected via Bell at the old house. The service was decent, but recently we’d started having problems with random charges or long distance packages being added to our bill without our consent. As the base monthly cost crept up, we resolved to go with something new and non-Bell when we moved. (Aside: we are, in fact, all moved now, and the old house has been sold. More on that later.)
I did some research, and had decided to go with a bundle from Rogers since we already had cell phone service with them. I arranged everything to be setup on the day before our move (Feb. 25th), and that’s where our tale of epic fail begins.
I won’t bore you with the details, I’ll just bore you with the summary instead: between Rogers and Bell, it took them from Feb. 25th until Mar. 20th to get all our various services running, with internet being the last one to come up on the 20th. The details are somewhat comical (if you don’t happen to be me) and I’m happy to share them over beer at some point.
Despite initiating the entire fail chain, Rogers actually salvaged a lot of good will at the end of the process by getting their act together, but I’m not very impressed with either company or their customer service to be honest. Thanks to my parents and in-laws for letting me work at their houses over the course of this fiasco, although I hope I don’t have to commute in order to telecommute again any time soon.
Gotta love a two-party system.
(With all due apologies to King Apparatus)
The past month’s work of purging, cleaning, and painting has finally come to fruition. Our house listing hit MLS today. The house looks awesome, if I do say so myself. I’d be tempted to stay, if only we didn’t need more space for our growing family.
You’re only trying to unload your most expensive asset, I’m just sayin’.
Kristina and I just signed up for Bullfrog Power. If you live in Ontario, you really should too. If you live elsewhere, more research will be required, but you should still do something:
This morning we had our tour of the hospital where we’re planning to give birth. With our pre-natal class scheduled for Saturday, it’s beginning to feel like this baby is really going to happen, instead of being just another excuse to redecorate.
With all apologies to my very pregnant wife. 
Kris and I have already treated each other to our Xmas gifts:
Not to ride Shaver’s coattails or anything — because I haven’t been doing that for the past, um, 10 years — but if others are looking for Xmas ideas for me and you are coming up blank, you could certainly do worse than a donation to Child’s Play.
The nursery is almost finished. We are so far ahead of the game, it’s scary.
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Kev came by for dinner on Saturday and helped me get my “new” Series 1 Tivo talking to the world over it’s network card. The Tivo is now doing its thing, and has even begun suggesting things for me to watch. Desperate Housewives == Thumbs Down!
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The engine of our car is now in many pieces on the floor of my in-laws’ garage. All I can say is that I’m thankful to have an engineer for a father-in-law. We would have paid for the car many times over in repair costs were it not for Don, and I’m pretty sure this most recent engine failure would have precipitated buying an entirely new vehicle were it not for his mechanical intercession. Thanks, Don.
I have spent the last few days in a mad rush trying to finish the paint job in the front hall and stairway. “Why the rush?” you might ask. Well, aside from the fact that it’s been over a month since I began prepping the surface, the aforementioned celebratory mood-inducing news became official today.
I have accepted an offer from the Mozilla Foundation and have already begun to immerse myself in that particular corner of the online world. I’m not sure whether the details of what I’ll be doing are meant to be common knowledge at this point, so I will refrain from comment for now. Suffice it to say that I am quite excited by this opportunity. The ranks of the Mozilla Foundation are full are hyper-talented individuals, some of whom I’ve even had the good fortune of working with before.
This just in: good things also come in bunches.
