As you'd know (in brief) if you had read Malaya's blog from the 14th, I did arrive here (the Bay Area) safely and soundly late Thursday night. More on that stuff below, in a long essay/entry I wrote Saturday night, so I'll shut up about it now.

What I don't talk about below, is why this is being posted Tuesday night, rather than oh, Sunday or so.  The reason for that is my lack of a phone modem card in my computer and the delay in buying one, as well as the delay in just getting the Cable Modem service set up here. I have no real explanations for either of those things, other than to say that there was a lot of packing and unpacking and redecorating to do, not to mention spending time with Malaya, and those things got a higher priority than getting the new card in.

We did hit a Best Buy on Sunday, but they were as overpriced as you'd expect, trying to charge $30 for a phone modem card.  Since I paid $10 for an ethernet card (which is virtually identical in function and design) over a year ago when I got my current computer, I thought $30 was outrageous.  So we put off getting one until we could get to a CompUSA on Tuesday, and I still had to pay $20.  I bet they are available for about $7 at a Fry's or other larger stores, but we didn't care enough to drive way the hell out to one of those just for this one thing. 

So we didn't, and you poor souls suffered through several extra blogless days.

I will have several hours to write tomorrow while Malaya is over at her mom's, and I'll probably get some sort of blog thing done then.  I have a lot of semi-interesting recent events to discuss, at least judging by the series of quick topic notes on my notes page, but they all seem sort of unimportant.  I feel like now that I'm in love and in a relationship and living with my girlfriend and all of that real stuff, I should be discoursing about more important things in my blog.  You know, adult stuff like love and relationships and um... living with my girlfriend.

Instead I have notes about movies (T3: liked it a lot less than I could/should have) and food and restaurants and driving a U-Haul with a trailer and such.  But I suppose me blogging about some of that stuff is better than nothing at all, and I do have some stories that should be interesting to relate.

What I really want to get writing is fiction, but it's not as if you haven't heard me say that on a weekly basis for about a hear and a half. (First blog entry... a year and a half ago.)  This time it's different though, 'cause now I'm like, motivated and stuff.  By money and love and all of that.  I do have a lot of thoughts about the fantasy novel I'm working on, and will make good progress once I'm spending several hours a day on it, and I think that time will begin soon.  One of the major conditions of me living here was Malay and me both feeling like we could really get work done living together, and we both have tons of work to get done.  So once the apt is all squared away and we're settled into more of a routine, I think we'll get on a good working schedule.  And yes, I say that every update now also.  We'll see how it goes.

I'll shut up now, and leave you to my shrimp chips essay, written several days ago, but not posted until now due to technical issues.

here has not been a fresh blog for several days, due to me being busy packing up everything I own, and driving it 500 miles to the north, moving my permanent place of residence from the San Diego area to the San Francisco area.  Rather than detailing the biographical events of the last few days in a normal, logical, chronological, step by step, boring fashion, I will instead tell you about how I ended up sitting on the kitchen floor of Malaya's our condo at 2 in the morning, alone, eating shrimp chips.

Moving sucks.  Most of you know that, the rest of you will learn it soon enough.

It's not so bad moving when you're a kid; sure you have all of the issues with being the new kid in school and leaving behind all of your friends, and having to throw away a lot of your old toys away to save on moving space, and your parents screaming at each other about whose fault it is that mommy left the directions in a box that's now been packed and trucked off to somewhere in the southern Oklahoma area (Answer: Your fault, you little bastard.)  But at least you don't have to pack, or make change of address arrangements, or drive a U-haul with a balky trailer, or carry about 50x your body weight out to and into a truck that's parked down 2 flights of stairs from your shitty apartment and back up 2.5 flights of stairs into your new place.  (And while you don't believe it when you're 10, you will make new friends, and you'll be just as happy living somewhere new, once you get used to it.  If it weren't true, all of the kids there would be miserable, and desperately hoping daddy would get transferred to wherever you are moving from.  Right?)

I moved several times as a kid, and then a couple of times as an adult, but none of them were a big deal. The last time, five years ago, I rented a U-Haul truck and had a friend help me fill it with with the 20 or so boxes I had full of books and games and clothing and stuff, along with a couple of non-waterproof aquariums and a desk and table and some chairs.  We drove about 10 miles across town (from one small and crappy apt to a slighter larger and less-crappy apt), and he helped me carry all the stuff in.  Took about two hours to load and an hour to unload, as best I recall. I don't remember spending more than a day or so pre-move packing stuff up, if that long.

This time I was moving into someone else's place, and therefore I had a lot less room for my stuff, but also a lot less need to take stuff.  It seemed like it would be easy, and during various pre-move blog fantasies, I had envisioned being able to move in the back of a pick up, or an SUV, only needing a few things, etc.

Ah-ha...ha...ha...hah.

Funny how just sorting and packing those "few things" into boxes and getting them into the truck took something like eight hours a day for three straight days, and on the second day my mom and stepdad came over and helped me pack the majority of that stuff, carry out furniture that I dropped off at their house or my dad's house, and in the middle of that my mom even made a run back to the U-Haul place to buy a bunch of boxes and get packing tape.  On day three I even got the fun of postponing my departure for last minute packing, highlights of which included driving out to buy a cooler to transport the content of my fridge (I didn't want to, but figured it was worth $14 for a cooler vs. throwing away $50 or so worth of food), as well as making all of the calls to cancel my account with the phone, cable, and electric companies, turning in a change of address card at the post office, and several other things I should have done weeks before, but didn't get around to until the very last minute.

I do get some bonus points for thinking ahead of time and grabbing about 25lbs of dry ice from work Tuesday night, as well as buying a cooler from Wal-Mart that night, on my way home.  I put the ice in it, and in addition to the fun of seeing the condensed water running off of the cooler and freezing it to the floor, it worked quite well, keeping the frozen shrimp and veggie burgers and small rodents rock hard all the way to Malaya's freezer.  The pre-move cooler was funny, since water kept condensing on it since it was so cold, running down the sides, and then actually turning to ice on the carpet.  I'd go over and pick the cooler up every few hours, an action which was accompanied by a ripping sound as actual visible white frost cracked and yanked out bits of carpet when I tore the rimy cooler free.

Unfortunately, those are about the only bonus points I earned in this endeavor, with most everything else taking place hours or days late, and in a very disorganized fashion.

What I still can't quite figure out is what the hell all of the shit in those damn boxes was.  I filled them up, packed them very tightly, and I had all of my books and clothing and most of the food set, gave away most of my pots and pans and tupperware and other such stuff, and had about 8 medium-sized boxes full of stuff, with just some furniture left to disassemble and other stuff I was taking over to my mom's and dad's houses, to drop off or install there.  Yet when it came time to pack up the living room and get everything left into the truck, it took all day Wednesday, and about 10 off the boxes that mom dashed off to U-Haul to get with the $40 I gave her after she took one look inside the mess of junk in my apartment and decreed in entirely accurate fashion, "You need a lot more boxes."

And even after packing them myself there, and unloading them here, I still don't know what it all was.  I had various knick-knacks, and several boxes were needed for my CDs, DVDs, video tapes, and the electronic equipment required to turn those objects into shiny entertainment. But what was in the other 7 or 8 boxes?  I didn't even have any boxes full of sheets or blankets; a common space-consumer.  I brought up a few towels and one quilt and one pillow.  Other pillows were used in the truck as padding devices, mostly around my monitor and computer tower.  I didn't need any of that stuff since 1) my sheets were all for a much smaller bed than the one I'm now sharing with Malaya, 2) my sheets and towels and such were all ragged shit I would hardly dry a dog with, much less wrap around the pleasantly-scented body of my beloved.

The unpacking here is pretty much all finished, save for a few odds and ends (I'm feeling a need for a desk with actual storage drawers; this one has just a little cubbyhole for the tower and an unprotected alcove above that), and we (I) haven't completely wrecked Malaya's nice decorating scheme.  It seems like I was packing to get ready to leave for weeks, and like I've been here for days, but in reality I've been here for just over 48 hours, as of late Saturday night, when I'm typing this.  When this will be posted is less easily-ascertained, since we don't have the cable modem set up here yet, and my new tower, which I'm now using, doesn't have any way to get online with a phone.

My old tower has a phone input, but it's such an old card that it's ISA, from about 8 years ago when I last was living without high speed Internet access, and the older motherboard in my old tower supports that.  My new tower (which is over a year old, and therefore in computer years, only "new" in comparison to its predecessor) has no ISA ports on the motherboard, so I can't remove the old one modem card and stick it into the new(er) tower, and I while I'd like to update my blog and check my emails (neither of which I've been able to do since Tuesday) I don't want to do them enough to write up the blog on this machine, save it to a floppy, transfer that to the old tower, switch around the keyboard, mouse, monitor, power supply, etc, and get that one online.  Especially not when we're getting the cable modem service this week (I think) and I will at least be buying a PCI phone modem card Sunday. I figure they're about $8, so hardly a major expense.

I got two ethernet cards for this machine early last year for $10 a pop, which is where I get my price guideline.  I would check it on the Internet, but as I just said, I can't get online until I get the card and install it. That's also why you won't be seeing very many/any links in this update, though I suppose I could fire up Malaya's laptop and surf with it, and then transcribe those Internet addresses into this blog.  A really fun proposition, given how many sites are now all set into a script or programming language and have URLs with more numbers and random characters than a bowl of multi-lingual alphabet soup.

One thing that helped on the moving task was the stuff Malaya already had. During my two recent visits we had done a lot of shopping, mostly for housewares type stuff, pots and pans, dishes, glasses, furniture, small appliances, etc.  Malaya had just moved into her condo before my first visit in late May, so she needed better-quality items than the various parental hand me downs and leftovers from her college years. So while we weren't explicitly shopping for stuff for "us", the stuff we bought together during my two one-week visits served well as a foundation for things "we" are going to use as a "couple" in our "condo" while we "burn" vegetables for "dinner".

I only brought a few pans, a few dishes, hardly any drinking glasses, just my favorite knives and utensils, and so on.  And no, I am no closer to explaining the dozen boxes it took me than I was half a dozen paragraphs ago. Wait until you move and see how many more boxes you fill than you expected to, despite your parents throwing out tons of stuff you'll forever hate them for so callously-discarding. Not that you'll be able to explain the amount of boxes it takes you either, but at least you'll identify with me.  Better do it soon though, since I'm going to be working hard to forget all about the difficulties of this move so I can quickly get back to feeling superior when I read/hear about other people's moves and how much trouble they had.

Moving is easy for me, you know. I travel light and could probably move in the back of a pick up, if I wanted to.

I left SD Thursday, after initially wanting to get out Wednesday night late, or at worst right after the morning rush hour end Thursday.  After the last minute shopping and packing and carrying with already-Jello'ed arms, getting my car into the car-trailer behind the rental truck, and driving across town to make stops at mom's and dad's to drop off furniture, I didn't get out of San Diego until Thursday afternoon.  Left at a perfect time to make the 2+ hour drive to LA and arrive there just as rush hour traffic was in full swing. I'll talk more about the truck and trailer and the whole drive up some other day (or not) but suffice to say, my travel up here was not much fun, but not horrible either.

I arrived here around 1am Friday morning, and since Malaya waited up for me and was game, we double-parked the U-Haul on a busy street where we could never have parked it during the day, and were able to unload everything in about two hours.  Most of the boxes went right to her back patio, but we still had plenty left to clog up her entire living room and most of the bedroom as well, much to her delight, after my frequent boasting of how few things I was bringing, and how easily I could fit into her tight little space. *cough*

Friday was a day of rest and unpacking, with a few errands and lunch at a Chinese place.  We had prawns, which I'll mention later, in relation to the introduction to this blog entry, the topic of which you have no doubt entirely forgotten by now.  I, fortunately for the already-dragging pacing, have not.

Saturday saw my sweetie far away from me, since she and some friends are holding a long-planned yard sale at her parent's house on Sunday.  This is actually pretty cool, in terms of timing, since it enabled me to bring up a lot of stuff I would have otherwise had to throw/give away.  (Ahh yeah, junk for the yard sale is worth about two or three of the mystery boxes...) It sucks in terms of time though, since Malaya was gone doing planning and delivery and other things for that most of the day Saturday, and she'll be over there yard selling all morning and afternoon Sunday.

Hopefully we'll clear some coin for stuff; perhaps even enough to pay for the crap we'll be buying from other people.  Malaya is already in for $65 for a cool sword her best friend/fellow yard-seller/martial arts master was going to unload at the sale.  But since she's buying it as a gift for me, I can hardly complain. At least not audibly. Or sincerely.  I'm not making an appearance at the yard sale, for several reasons I'm not going into here (none of them involving lack of desire on my part to help out there) which is lucky for me being able to chide her for spending the profits on presents.  There are apparently loads of DVDs and shiny knives and other such things being offered by another friend of hers; all objects that I have a decided weakness for.

Since she was gone all day Saturday I was left to my own devices, and aside from a bit of unpacking and making an accurate count of the total number of our shared DVDs/CDs/video tapes, since we need to know to know how many storage shelves we're getting from Ikea, I didn't have much to do.  I hooked up this computer and monitor and checked into the modem card issue, and then since it was hot in the afternoon and I was alone and hadn't slept well the night before (too much hot sex, no doubt), I laid down for a nap that ran about an hour longer than expected.

That evening, Malaya was tired after being out all day and not getting home until after dark, and after we talked some and had a big fruit snack and put away my two bulging suitcases full of clothing, and watched a cheesy reality TV show called Cheaters (imagine I can get on the Internet now and there is a link there), she was pretty well done for.  I tucked her in and snuggled a bit, and came back out here to write some.  But before I got started on any typing, I had to put away some dirty dishes and look for some sort of a crunchy snack.  The fruit was tasty, we had an apple, 2 plums, a nectarine, 2 apricots, and a banana, but I wanted something with crunch.  And a lot of salt and grease and artificial flavor, with any luck.

The dry and canned food here lives on a lower shelf to the right of the sink, and while Malaya, who is built lower to the ground than I, can squat down and peruse the sundries pretty well, I can't.  I remembered that I had left half a bag of Trader Joe's Hawaiian Hot Mustard potato chips here last visit, and while I figured they'd be staler than granny's Xmas fruit cake by now, I had to look since I love them so.  This required me to get down on my knees, and while I didn't find the chips, I did spot half a bag of Shrimp Chips.  I've never had those before, but had always wondered what they tasted like.  These are a Korean brand, which I would look up online and link to if I could.  It's not like you would have clicked the link anyway, so just pretend there were golden letters in the last sentence.

The bag was half-open (our vastly-varying degrees of personal satisfaction towards resealed food containers is one ongoing issue Malaya and I have yet to achieve harmony on) and expecting that they'd be sort of icky, I sat back against the stove and sampled a few of the "chips".

My review? They're damn tasty.

I didn't expect they would be, I mean come on, who wants shrimp flavor in anything that's not um... shrimp?  Or possibly Ramen noodles.  They are a crustacean (or bug or something); shrimp aren't like cheese; you don't grate shrimp and sprinkle them over eggs and toast and tomato sauce. At least not in my country. And yet the shrimp chips are damn tasty.

They are far from chips, by the way.  These are little puffed wheat things that look like crinkle-cut French fries, made in some sort of mold and then baked.  They actually remind me most of Bugles, in terms of crunch and lightness. Sort of like lighter-Cheetos. The ingredients are scary, with things like palm oil and a very substantial portion of your daily required saturated fats and triglycerides. They also don't taste a whole lot like shrimp, though there is a vague, semi-crabby flavor. But I found them pretty tasty, nevertheless.

Which is how I found myself, alone, on the first night since Malaya and I have been together that we did not make love, sitting on the kitchen floor, eating shrimp chips right from the bag.

Things could have been more delightful, but what the hell, at least the experience gave me an introduction to my latest blog entry.  As well as a way to conclude it.

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