I Have Little Choice But to Laugh.

My next door neighbor moved out last week. This is relevant.

On Tuesday I came home for lunch and found that my water had been turned off. I phoned the water company, and it turns out the person they had sent over to turn off my neighbors water turned off mine instead. No biggie.

Last night I came home and found my house without power. We have been having thunderstorms for the last couple of days, so I phoned the power company to see if it was an outage. They said that there was a power outage and that they expected it to be restored by 8:00 that night.

Around 8:00, with the sun rapidly setting and my power still not back on, I phoned the power company back. While talking to them I realize that my other neighbors have power. After going through various rigamarole and discovering that my circuit box has been locked by the company, they agreed to send somebody out. About an hour later they came by, unlocked the box and turned my power back on, mentioning that the yellow tag on the lock means that the power has been deliberately shut off to this residence for some reason. When I phoned the company today to confirm the status of my account, I confirmed that they had in fact shut off the power to the wrong house.

I suppose it's a good thing that I don't have any more utilities.

Where Does the Time Go?:

Is April nearly over already?

The last month has streaked by far to fast. I am now unpacked and semi-moved in to my new place. I say "semi-moved in" because there are still a few relatively important (though not essential, I suppose) appliances and pieces of furniture that have yet to be purchased. Thanks BMO for attending the Air Canada school of customer support.

I suppose that the blame shouldn't be put entirely at BMO's feet. I should have been wary enough to make sure that I had the paperwork all taken care of before I left Calgary. I'm also not too thrilled at my current bank down here right now. When I learned that I couldn't arrange to wire my money from Calgary without being at the BMO in person I wrote myself a couple of cheques. The bank here said it would take two, maybe three weeks to get them deposited. We're now into the fourth week, and I found out on Friday that they've changed their tune and it's now 4 - 6 weeks. My rage is endless.

Anyhow, on to happier matters. As I said, I've unpacked. I suppose it speaks volumes about my cooking geekery that it took me longer to unpack my kitchen than the rest of my house combined. I actually managed to get through the extended version of the Lord of the Rings trilogy while doing it and still have more kitchen unpacking to do.

Also, I found that unpacking is a lot like Christmas morning with all of the niceties thrown out the window. The movers packed everything up themselves, so I had no idea what anything was. It was somewhat fun to try to guess what the heck most of the stuff was as I unwrapped it, and more than a little liberating to go "why the hell did I keep this?" and throw some of the stuff in the trash.

Weather down here is improving. We went through a cool snap last week (I think it was last week) but it's been getting better since then with mid to high 20's since. The humidity's also been rising relatively steadily. It's not bad now, but I imagine in another month I'll be soaking.

Of course, with the heat and humidity comes bugs. Mosquitoes haven't been too bad down here but they've got some pretty good sized beetle-type things that are everywhere. There's also a lot of spiders. Personally, I don't have too much of a problem with insects in small amounts, as long as they stay out of my house. It seems like every day, though, there's 3 or four spiders or smaller versions of the beetle-things crawling around in my place. I keep hoping that I've killed the last of them, but every time I come home there's another one. Fortunately, I haven't woken up with a Brown Recluse spider on me yet.

The weather also seems conducive to growing plants. I took some time last week to get my herb garden planted (I'm going to wait until I get my money transferred down here before I work on the orchard). So far, only the cilantro isn't doing well. Not too bad considering my past history with plants. I do wonder about the coincidence that I first started seeing rabbits in my back yard about a day after I got my herbs. I'm not too worried though. I'm waiting for the little buggers to try chewing on the serrano peppers that I'm growing.

Last weekend was one of the few that I've had down here completely off. I celebrated by stocking my fridge & liquor cabinet and spending the entire weekend cooking. It was glorious. Of course, now I have to do something with all the food in there. I'll have to think these plans through a little more thoroughly next time.

Home Sweet Home

Signed the papers earlier today. I am now officially in financial debt. I can't really move in quite yet (the moving truck broke down in Denver, so my stuff won't get here until tomorrow night or Thursday morning), but I don't mind. It will give me time to start on the landscaping - I finally took a really good look at where the survey flags are and suddenly realized how huge my yard is. As a matter of fact, I imagine most of my spare time will be going into landscaping. I'm actually looking forward to stuff like the planting the trees and setting up my herb garden. It's the weeding that's really going to try my patience. I've got over a half-acre of weeds & quackgrass laughing at me.

And one little private message to the Bank of Montreal before I forget: F**k you. I've had enough of the run-arounds, lies, and outright screwjobs. Thanks to you it'll be about 2 more weeks before I can actually get some appliances into my house. 2 more weeks of restaurant food. Thank you so much.