Author: Michael

It’s so pathetic.

I’ve known I have a computer game addiction for a long time. It’s games in general, not any specific game. I just can’t stop playing, especially when it’s a truly well designed game. Civilization III was the last one. I could play that for an entire weekend.

It’s one of the reasons I never play computer games. Well, almost never.

But Civ wasn’t as bad as World of Warcraft. Jason introduced me to it just after I moved to my new place. Unlike Civ III, it has no end. You just keep playing. Forever. And ever. And ever.

Hiking, cooking, unpacking, blogging, work, photography, phone calls to family and friends. WoW has taken a massive toll on the last month+.

I couldn’t stop. I tried using parental controls, but I had the password, so that didn’t work. I couldn’t make myself stop. So, I cancelled my subscription. It ends on Tuesday. I’ll log in tomorrow night to check on my auctions, then uninstall. It’ll be done. I hope.

Not that it was all a horrible waste of time. Finn loved watching me play, and Ellie and I created a Princess character together. I bonded with Jason and Duncan (though Duncan better understood the addiction). And it was fun to learn a bit about the gaming culture that’s out there.

Unfortunately, Timurlane won’t go away. Blizzard will keep my level 32 undead warrior indefinitely, in case I’m ever weak again and re-subscribe.

I couldn’t quite log off this evening, of course, knowing it was my last day to play. I cleared my quest log today, but wanted to wander around in Tirisfal Glades for a bit. Just to look at the gorgeous graphics. And swat a few critters. I spotted a lvl 9 Shaman, and decided to twink him a bit. He asked if I was bored. I said yeah. He asked if Timurlane was my first character. I said yeah. Can’t recall how the rest went, but the last comment he made was "I can’t even count the number of times I’ve ‘quit’ playing."

Not a good sign.

But, what can I say. "/wrists." It has to be a command in the game. Seriously. /wrists.

/cry

Not my dinner, mind you. I didn’t leave work until 9:40pm last night. No, it was my downstairs neighbor’s dinner. The entire apartment reeked. Needless to say it, but I will anyway: the hall closet smelled like the dinner was burned right in there.

There’s still a chain-smoking boogeyman in there. I’ve moved all my coats to the storage locker–my biking jacket smelled when I pulled it out this weekend. I haven’t found a place for the other cloth goods in there. But I will.

This weekend, I used an expanding foam to fill the hard-to-spackle holes, re-caulked all the seams, and spackeled the remaining holes. No dice. It still smokes. I have all but convinced myself that, if I lifted up the floorboards, I’d be able to hear/see a ceiling fan in my downstairs neighbor’s ceiling.

I think two weekends from now, I wil buy the floor leveling compound from Home Depot and seal over the hardwood floor. Either that, or get my own ceiling fan. Except I’ll put it in the floor and have it blow the smoke back down.

Grumpy, grumpy, grumpy. It’ll be nice to have Chanel and the kids up this weekend. It’s hard to be grumpy around Finn and Ellie. I can pull it off, of course, but it is harder.

Seriously. Every time I open the hall closet, it smells like someone’s been locked in there, chain smoking.

It’s the downstairs neighbor, of course. Their smoke rises through all the holes in the floors and wall of my hall closet. I have unpacked all but three boxes (excluding office/desk stuff–I no longer have a desk, so I just put that all in storage until I get one). Most everything is put away, too, so I emptied out that closet and started going after the seams and cracks with joint compound and, when I couldn’t get a putty knife in–caulk.

One big hole stuck between two pipes was a problem. Everything kept falling through the hole. So I rolled up some newspaper and stuffed it down there. That held the first layer of caulk up. I’ll fill in the rest with joint compound.

We’ll see how it smells tomorrow when I get home.

As my friend Dennis said in the note with his apartment warming gift (a giftcard to Home Depot): "Welcome to homeownership, where the fun never ends."

Yup. Only two boxes were buried more deeply than the one with my sheets. I had to move 39 boxes–nearly all filled with books and binders and paper.

The move went swimmingly. The packers were done after just three hours Monday morning, and I treated myself to a massage that afternoon. My muscles needed the relaxation. This morning, the movers arrived, and by 1 p.m., my apartment was empty. By 3:30 pm, all of my worldly possessions were in my new home.

By 7 p.m., Angie and I had completed a walk-through of my old apartment. My experience at 1217 18th did not prepare me for a walk-through of a relatively new building. I didn’t bother to point out the minor carpet stains when I moved in, and despite scouring the grease traps, they weren’t clean enough. I was used to gaping holes in the walls, brown tap water, broken windows, exposed wiring, utterly filthy floors, doors that didn’t close. Who cares about an ink stain? *sigh* I think it helped that my landlord was also my real estate agent.

And so I returned home, planning to grab some sushi and a beer, stare at my boxes, unpack my bathroom sundries and linens, and go to bed by 9 p.m. to nurse the cold I contracted last week at work. Probably from my boss.

But it’s 10 p.m., and somewhere…

Somewhere in my new home is a box carefully labeled "sheets, pillows, comforter–unpack first." Thankfully, the movers used all of my books as a base layer in the truck, so those boxes were the last to be unloaded. Dozens of painfully heavy boxes of books thus surround all the other boxes stacked up in the corner.

Somewhere, in a box, buried at the back of my living room, are pillows and an alarm clock and sheets and my bedside lamp. Somewhere behind all the books.

Somewhere are the bits I need to sleep comfortably in my bed.

It’s ready. I mean, I still have to freshen the trim in all of the rooms, I need a towel rack, the hall closet desperately needs some work, the bedroom window is cracked, there’s no lighting in the living room…

But it’s ready for me to move in. The painting is done. It took all day yesterday to prepare the living room walls and put on two coats of the base color. I was actually quite concerned after the base coat went on: it was this very feminine peach color (photo right). Not at all what I was hoping for. True, it did warm the room so drastically compared to the cold gray/blue the prior owners chose. But peach?

I thought about running back to Home Depot first thing Sunday morning to get some new color scheme, but I thought I might as well give the color wash that Tiffany and I decided would work well (Tiffany is a coworker at Microsoft who actually has some style).

I was also worried about the color wash technique because it required three different shades of paint. The extra $20 for another gallon made no difference. I was worried it would take forever to apply three different colors to the wall. I was also worried about how quickly the glaze dries. The whole idea of the color wash is to blend the two darker colors, while at the same time re-exposing the lighter base coat. The glaze dries so quickly, I had portions of the rag and sponge techniques that came out odd because I paused in the middle. The color wash was so much more complicated.

Or so I thought. It was actually easier and faster than the rag and sponge techniques. And the results are so beautiful. I love it. I love it I love it I love it.

I also managed to freshen up both closets. I put in black-and-white vinyl tiles on top of the scratched and the ugly dark gray/blue paint some prior fool of an owner had laid down over the hardwood floors. Actually, at some point there was carpet. Carpet without any padding underneath it. The tacks were still in the floor of the closet.

I also painted over the medium blue/gray paint in one of the two closets. In the process, I ripped out four pieces of wood that had probably been used for drawers or shelving some long time ago. Of course, when I ripped out the last piece of wood, I ripped out a good chunk of the plaster on the wall as well. I used up almost all of my joint compound filling that gaping hole.