Murphy's Law

This week, Seattle really started to feel like home. Calvin has been here since Tuesday, so it's been nice to come home every day and have the place not be empty. Work has been feeling like a normal routine as well since I'm getting really good at knowing where things are and even getting to do some real work. I'm having meetings with really cool people, and even made my first submission into the code base. Basically what that means is that hidden somewhere in the depths of all the code that makes up Microsoft Word for Mac is a small change that I made. It wasn't a very important change, and not even a "customer-facing" one (meaning nobody will really see the effects of it by using the product), but it means that every version of Word for Mac from this point on will have something that I did in it. That's something that I find pretty profound, and am very happy I have the opportunity to accomplish.

One of the best things about having Calvin here is that I no longer am just eating pasta with tomato sauce for dinner every night. The first night he cooked, we have sausage-stuffed peppers with garlic bread. In all, there was not a single part of that meal that I'm capable of doing, except for toasting the bread. We also now have a bunch of real food and cooking utensils, including real (i.e. not plastic) silverware. I'm constantly surprised how much it's the little things like those that can make a huge difference in how the place feels.

Saturday was a pretty eventful day for us. The plan was to do a bunch of furniture shopping, although we were mostly just browsing options so we can decide what we wanted to do for the living and dining rooms. Calvin had a big agenda though, since the only furniture he had up until that point was a mattress. We found a bunch of furniture stores and went around to see what they had. We're waiting on our third and final roommates to make final decisions, but we came out with a lot of good ideas. Towards the end of the day, we picked up a U-Haul and went to spend the afternoon at IKEA. We didn't have to return the van until Sunday, so we got to take our time and peruse. For a bit, I felt like I was doing something straight out of (500) Days of Summer:

I think we spent about 3 hours there altogether, including the time it took us to actually load the van with all our stuff. In all, we got 3 bookshelves, a DVD rack, a nice TV stand, Calvin's bed frame, a bunch of shelves, as well as some other small stuff. It was a lot, to say the least. That night the only thing we put together was the bed frame because we were entirely too exhausted after that to do anything else. We both slept well that night, except that I keep waking up earlier than I want in the morning. It seems that the later I go to sleep, the earlier I wake up. I don't really feel tired during the day, so I'm not really sure what the deal is.

Today (Sunday) was a productive day, but also a perfect example of Murphy's Law at work. Nothing that bad really happened, it was just one thing after another that made what we wanted to accomplish a littler more difficult.

We started off with putting together the TV stand. For some reason, it seemed like it was missing certain screws, although they didn't seem terribly necessary to the integrity of the thing. So despite my OCD, I decided to let it go and move on to one of my bookshelves. That setup went well for the most part, aside from accidentally stripping a small bit of the wood on one of the selves. The real trouble started went I went to put it again the wall. The bottom of the piece has a cut-out so that it can fit against the wall even with the molding on the bottom. Unfortunately, the molding in our apartment is just higher than the cut-out allows, so I tried to come up with an alternative. I could try to just leave it the way it is, but that means the top of it would lean back which I would not have been okay with. I could put some cardboard underneath the bottom to raise it above the molding, which seemed to make it look a little worse. Lastly, I could find a saw and increase the size of the cut-out to fit the molding. The first problem was that I didn't have a saw. Second was that to secure the bookshelf to the wall, I needed to put a screw in the wall which required me to have (1) the right screw which was not included, and (2) a drill, which I did not own, to make a pilot hole. I was gonna think about all that while I went to help Calvin assemble the TV stand. There, too, we realized we needed a circular saw attachment for a drill so we could wire everything the way we wanted.

We decided to set out for a local hardware store, and luckily there was one only 10 blocks down the street that was open for another couple hours. I got myself a drill, some accessories for it, a hand saw, and we got the screws we needed. Happy with the purchase, and that we headed home to finish everything we started. First, we stopped at a local food co-op to pick up some food for dinner. We've already eaten, and I'm not entirely sure what I ate (it contained pork), but it was delicious.

Excited to get everything ready, we went right to work. I found out the hard way that the saw attachment I got for my drill didn't fit, so that would be useless for now. So instead I had to use the drill-bits I got, which is something you're explicitly not supposed to do with them. Additionally, the stand we got for the TV was just too small to fit one of the speakers in the audio system (read: first world problems). One of the things Calvin got needed another part that wasn't included, which we of course did not get. We didn't have enough coaxial cable to reach where the TV was without jerryrigging something. In short, it was really just a bunch of small things that made it difficult for us to get things done.

In the end, we finally got a good amount of stuff done. Here are some pictures of the state of our living room at various points to give you an idea:

Boxes...

...boxes everywhere.

Our living/dining room. Note that Calvin has been using it as an office before he gets a desk.

We have a lot of packing materials that we're getting rid of a little bit at a time.

The TV stand is finally finished.

Yes, the TV glows in the back.

There's still plenty of work to be done, but we made decent progress this weekend. It will get even crazier next week when our last roommate gets here on Thursday since he'll also need furniture. That means next weekend will probably involve another IKEA run, and even more furniture construction. My hands are getting pretty calloused, but hopefully having power tools now will make that a little better.

Time to eat some toaster strudels. BYE.