Good Luck & Noisy Technology

Today the Wife observed that regardless of our station or success in life, we’re probably going to forever be packrats and scavengers.

The morning began with a courier delivering more cabling, the last of the Wife’s orders from one particular tech company that had chosen to deliver everything seperately. This consisted of a 75 foot and 25 foot pair of ethernet cables. We decided “To hell with it, we’re going back on the wire.” After a week of reliably losing wireless connection at critical moments like sending e-mail, writing blog posts (which would promptly get eaten during the ensuing connection drop) or internet transactions it became pretty clear that either as a result of other wireless connections or too much cell phone activity, a wireless connection in this part of town Just Doesn’t Work. So the morning was spent running cable up doorframes, through holes in the wall that previous tenants had knocked through into other rooms and behold, our computers are now once again reliably connected and should only drop their connection when the service provider does.

We were also going to go shopping for a microwave. More to the point, the Old Friend was going to buy us a microwave oven as a belated wedding present, but it got kind of late by the time she was available so it’s been pushed back to tomorrow. Failing at that, we decided to do a little grocery shopping down on Bloor and figured we’d walk it. However, while walking down the street towards Bloor, we chanced upon some perfectly good tables lying out on the street, waiting to be picked up by the garbage fleet later in the evening. Since we had also just gotten a fairly hefty, 60 pound laser printer that we suddenly realized we’d need to put on something, the table seemed perfect. We poked, prodded, noticed the owners of the house staring at us from the window, and I went over to ask about us making off with the table since it was obvious they didn’t want it. The lady of the house had already opened the door before I could ring the bell and told us it was perfectly okay to scavenge the table, so I dragged it back home.

Things like this seem to happen with alarming regularity when ever we move to a new apartment. At the first apartment in Singapore that we ever moved to, one of the neighbors in our building had thrown away a large, solid, perfectly good shelf, and I made off with it, using it to store my DVDs and PS2 games.

After that we had dinner at a pizza joint that had recently opened up just 3-4 doors down from us and was promptly amazed to find that the pizza in question was the best pizza I’d had in 11 years, and that the last time I enjoyed a pizza this good was in… Canada. In the 90′s. I couldn’t believe it when I realized that in the 10 years I’d been in Singapore, supposed food capital of the world, with World Class dishes, I had never, ever, even in the most expensive pizza places in Holland Village (the hip, bohemian part of Singapore that’s driven out all the bohemians who can no longer afford to live there) enjoyed a pizza that tasted this damn good.

The day ended with the wife accidently cutting her leg with a paper cutter (don’t ask) and the laser printer being lifted to its new home and being tested out. Two things were abundantly clear upon trying that sucker out. It is a NOISY son of a bitch, creaking and whirring and probably making everyone else in the house wonder what the hell kind of train we were driving in our living room, and it’s power hungry. Printing pictures and documents out on this thing results in super clear, super vibrant images that look magazine quality. But when this happens, the lights in the living room actually flicker and dim as the printer chugs away at its duties. I’m curious, and yet at the same time afraid, of finding out exactly what the power consumption demands of this thing are…

Hopefully tomorrow we will finally have a microwave. And possibly even a vacuum cleaner. And we STILL DON’T HAVE OUR STUFF FROM SINGAPORE. Man, this is starting to get annoying…