Tickover

It occurred to me that it's been a while since I wrote a blog entry. The superficial reason for this is that nothing 'blogworthy' has really happened. That's not strictly true, though... what has actually happened is that we're beginning to settle into a comfortable routine where fewer things are in any way exceptional. A lot of small stuff has happened, though, which all forms part of the comforting humdrum of everyday life. My subscription to TV Guide has finally kicked in, and so when I've finished writing this I'm going to read through the current issue and highlight things I think we might be interested in watching next week, and set them up to record on the DVR - this is what I used to do with the TV Magazine back in the UK to set up Sky+. The licence plates for our car finally arrived (it had Illinois plates when we bought it, and had to be registered in California). Now we've got all the official documentation for the car, and we're just waiting for our appointments for the driving tests (coming up on 13th October) before we're fully signed-up with the DMV. We managed to successfully apply for another credit card, so now we have one each (spreads the administrative load in keeping track of them). That particular application was a bit hairy for a while, though - Citibank Mastercard U.S. want a banking reference before they'll set up an account, which is fair enough. For some reason Citibank UK charge £20 for the privilege of sending a banking reference, even if it is to somewhere else in the Citibank organisation. But I swallowed this because I wanted something that they had. To complete the picture of a joined-up institution, Citibank Mastercard U.S. then refused to take the Citibank UK reference, saying that it had insufficient information, and the information was in the wrong form (not converted to U.S. Dollars, for example). My sense of humor remained intact, and I was actually quite impressed by this level of ineptitude. Anyway, the application all got sorted out quite quickly when I e-mailed my Citibank relocation consultant (they have people employed to deal with trouble-makers like me) and compared Citibank to HSBC - whose card I'd been happily using for the previous two weeks. The cards arrived a few days later by overnight courier. That's more like it. I've set up the computers that we need (using 'need' in one of its looser senses), and also taken the opportunity to buy some more kit on various lame excuses. I was happily surprised to find that the only thing that wasn't already compatible with the 110v power here was one of the PC power supplies. That was fixed easily enough with a quick trip to Fry's (as so much in life is). Unfortunately, the hard drive in one of the computers died catastrophically a short while after I turned it on (weakened by sea-sickness, presumably). The main down side of this is that I've lost the save-game from 'Half-Life' that I'd been working on for the last few months. My feeble progress through an outdated (but good) game is now history, and it's time for me to drag my game-playing into the 21st Century and start playing the (now 3-year old) Half Life 2. We've also splashed out on some technology that will hopefully pay off in the long term, and bought a cordless Skype handset (the LinkSys CIT200, for those interested), so we can use Skype without having to be surgically connected to a PC. You'd be surprised how much more we used Skype now that it feels like using a normal phone. As well as the savings on international calls, Skype calls to U.S. landlines are free until the end of the year, so hopefully that $100 will pay for itself quite quickly. The continuing unpacking of our boxes is suffering from the 80-20 rule. The remaining 20% of unpacking is progressing at the expected slow rate. To prevent us coming to a complete halt and living amongst a handful of boxes and small piles of random belongings for the rest of our stay here, the rule is that every day must contain a small but distinct amount of 'unpacking'. The study/office now has more than 50% of the carpet visible. This is definite progress. I also managed to unpack a lot of the garage boxes in a hunt for the 12v air-pump that I wanted to use to inflate my bike tires. As fate would have it, it turned up at the bottom fo the last box that I looked in. And why are the sizes for screw-in light-bulb fittings different over here? We have a standing lamp that we rather like, and we want to simply put 110v bulbs in it (nothing complex about the electrics - this should just work). But bulbs here come in two fitting sizes: too large, and too small. Luckily, ebay came up trumps with some adapters which turn the 'too small' bulbs to 'just right'. Good old ebay. We're beginning to get tuned in to the prices of everyday things. Petrol is strange in the amount that it varies from place to place. In the UK we were used to a few pence per litre variation, but here there can be up to 50¢/gallon difference between two gas stations on the same street. Well worth shopping around. Bread is very expensive, too. Between $4 and $5 for a small loaf of half-decent bread. Odd, that. So not much to say, really.