DeeAnn Talks TWOC at Ignite Portland 8

Though DeeAnn is unlikely to ever watch this video or acknowledge that she gave a great talk on Wednesday, you can still enjoy her presentation about our 2008 road trip:


http://youtube.com/watch?v=cZAez7fMNdg

And here are her slide images, which you may peruse at your leisure:


http://picasaweb.google.com/sparckl/IgnitePortland8

You can follow DeeAnn on Twitter as @DeeAnnSole. Her tweets may be infrequent, but always aim to be insightful.

~CKL

The End

Well, we've reached the end of the year, and now that we've had our first guest stay over (Karin, right after Christmas), I guess we're officially moved into our new home. So we're closing down this road trip blog.

You can continue to read occasional blog posts by Bayla, Jasper, and DeeAnn over at CKL's HotSheet. D has already posted about the snow which gave Portland its first "white Christmas" since 1937. I don't know what the cats will write about, but I'm sure it will be entertaining.

Here are some statistics from the road trip, which we compiled for our first annual holiday newsletter:

Days spent traveling with cats: 153
Number of locations visited: 25
Miles driven: 16,833
Average fuel efficiency of our Prius: 45 MPG
Number of Marriott Rewards Points earned: 120,181
Average amount spent per day: $234.83
Total posts to road trip blog: 164 166
Blog posts written by cats: 42

And here's an index to help you find your way around the blog posts for each destination we visited this summer, in chronological order:

1. San Diego, CA
2. Grand Canyon, etc.
3. Carlsbad Caverns
4. Fort Worth, TX
5. Space Center Houston
6. New Orleans, LA
7. Chicago, IL (Kendra's graduation, with stopover)
8. St. Louis, MO
9. Atlanta, GA
10. Orlando, FL (Space Shuttle launch)
11. Charlotte, NC
12. Altoona, PA (Sole family reunion)
13. Outer Banks, NC
14. Colonial Williamsburg, VA
15. Washington, DC
16. Niagara Falls
17. Cedar Point (roller coaster capital of the world)
18. Madison, WI
19. Minneapolis, MN
20. Rapid City, SD (Mount Rushmore, Badlands, Wall Drug, and more)
21. Denver, CO (Worldcon)
22. Las Vegas, NV
23. SF bay area (old home week)
24. Ashland, OR
25. Seattle, WA
26. Portland, OR--our new home!

Plus some non-location-specific topics:

• Posts by cats!
• D's Food & Cooking
• Viable Paradise XII (CKL)
• Maps
• Photos
• Videos (more coming soon to YouTube)
• Packing
• Planning
• stuff for sale
• The Postal Service, and I don't mean the band

Thanks for reading, everyone, and we hope to see you over at Snout.org.

~CKL

Movin' On Up

If you tried to visit SNOUT.ORG today, you may have noticed that it was throttled for a few hours. That's because I exceeded the 300 MB/day bandwidth limit on my account. I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later.

Not to worry, though; I was already in the process of moving to a new hosting plan which will cost me less per month and give me more storage space and no transfer limits. Once I've finished backing up all my files to my home computer, I'll contact my ISP and tell them to pull the trigger on the upgrade. Mail delivery and some web pages may be briefly broken for the next few days, but I expect the transition to go smoothly otherwise. (This blog and 512 Words or Fewer will not be affected.)

~CKL

The Unpacking Continues

Here you see all the DVDs (and LaserDiscs) in their new shelf. In the interest of saving more space, we've ordered some archival albums, like the little black number in the lower right corner, from Demco. Those librarians know a thing or two about storing mass quantities of media.

By the way, does anyone want a whole bunch of packaging from Region 2 Buffy and Angel DVD sets? Lots of pretty pictures, if you're into that sort of thing.

We've mail-ordered most of the rest of our furniture, and it should all arrive by Election Day. So even if--ghod forbid--Captain Caveman & the Buffybot win the White House, we can still be happy about our well-appointed new home.

~CKL

Address!

We cats are very helpful and informative! Here is the address of our new maxi-house:



Do you want to "telephone" the humans instead? Use this magic button:



I'm still getting used to this new place. There are lots of strange noises around here, but also SQUIRRELS! And OTHER CATS! I love looking out all the different windows.

We're in a maxi-house now.

The day before yesterday, she packed us into the car and took us for a drive. I thought we were going to yet another mini-house, but this place is much bigger.

This maxi-house is a lot like a mini-house. We're in a small part of the building. There are other humans (and a few other cats) in the building too. I can hear the humans next to the kitchen, everywhere above us, and thundering up and down the stairs by the bedroom. Mostly, the cats just respond when Jasper or I call out. There's one upstairs somewhere, and another one who gets to go outside. I ignore the dogs.

Also like the mini-houses, the car storage is nearby. I can see it sideways out the bedroom window, when I'm not watching squirrels and birds and humans on the path outside the window. The window is almost on the ground, but I like this view. We can see a lot. Jasper is very jealous of the cat that gets to go outside. He was chasing squirrels yesterday.

Unlike the mini-houses, however, our stuff is here. The little bit of it that was still at home when we left, anyway. Most of it is still in boxes, but I can walk around and sniff the boxes. Yesterday, I slept on the boxes for a while. It's good to be surrounded by my stuff again, even if I can't actually touch it.

I don't know where he is. He left a few days ago and hasn't been back. Hopefully, he's gone off to fetch the rest of our stuff. I'm not hopeful, though. Other humans came and took it all away before we left on our tour of mini-houses. In my experience, whenever humans took stuff from our house, they never brought it back again.

Of all the stuff I've missed, I've missed my bed the most. But the bed here is my bed. I recognized it immediately, even if it was on top of some unfamiliar carpet, was missing the privacy dropcloth, and has different sheets. I've spent years sleeping under and on top of this bed. When I'm not exploring the maxi-house, eating, or sleeping on a box of my stuff, I'm enjoying my bed. It's good to have it back.

It's also good to see that she keeps going out and bringing back new stuff. Each time she does this, she puts away a little bit of our old stuff too. I've seen this behavior in humans before. It means that they plan to stay for a while.

Finally. I want my home back. This maxi-house isn't home yet, but if we stay here long enough, it will be.

Unpacking

Our friends did a lot of the packing when we moved out, so we didn't actually see these markings until months later. We have great friends. And a lot of DVDs.

View Album

Get your own

~CKL

A New Home

Tired. Should go to sleep, but instead am wasting time on Facebook and, now, blogging. There's running on adrenaline, and then there's running on fatigue. It's kind of like antimatter, a negative energy source, unpredictable.

Yesterday, signed the lease on our new apartment, lots of paperwork, walked through inspection, made a big checklist of move-in to-do items, researched local broadband options. If we can actually get 12Mbps DSL from Qwest, I'll be a happy camper. Fingers crossed, waiting for CSR to reply to my email and confirm pricing.

This morning, hired a U-Haul truck and movers to get our stuff out of storage. No visible damage in transit, yay. Finished moving all stuff in less than two hours--thanks Jeff and Justin! Had lunch at Thai Terrace, a great restaurant within walking distance, then measured things and headed off to the sensory-overload rat-maze that is Ikea. (Meatballs tasty, though.) Found some stuff we liked, but realized we didn't have all the needed measurements. Drove back to apartment--only ten minutes away, w00t--and measured some more.

Returned to Ikea and bought $520 worth of bookshelves that would have been too big to fit into the Prius. (We have a lot of books.) Unloaded boxes at apartment. Dropped off U-Haul truck after the place had closed; D's going to get up early tomorrow and officially return it. I'm going to sleep in so I don't go off to Viable Paradise with an excessive sleep debt.

Returned to hotel to find that maids had tidied our room despite "no service please" sign on door. Fortunately, cats do not seem traumatized.

Showered.

We won't be fully unpacked and settled for at least another couple of weeks, but we've gotten off to a good start. I think I'm going to like it here.



~CKL

Almost There

(If you read the title of this post and said to yourself, "Stay on target," go ahead and award yourself 31 geek points. You've earned it.)

We got the call tonight. Our application to rent an apartment, which we submitted on Saturday, has been approved! (Not that there was ever much doubt.) We're going in tomorrow morning to sign the lease and pick up our keys. D's already called U-Haul to rent a truck and movers to do the heavy lifting, so by Wednesday night we'll be well on our way to being fully moved in.

We gave away most of our furniture before leaving the bay area, so we'll be hitting thrift stores, garage sales, and Ikea over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, D made a mockup of the apartment in The Sims to try out some furnishing options. Because she's just that cool:







Yes, we do have a lot of books. And no, there isn't a fireplace; the chimney in the model is for the second floor, where she reproduced our current hotel room for size comparison. She's very thorough.

~CKL

End of the Road

Well, here we are, in Portland. (Actually Vancouver, Washington, but close enough.) Our first day of apartment-hunting went pretty well; we found two good places near the local Trader Joe's, which is one of our main criteria. They're not perfect, but we're not expecting that anyway. When you can get a 2-bedroom, 2-bath apartment in a nice part of town for less than $900 a month, how much can you really complain?

Tomorrow, we're going to run down some more of the listings we found on craigslist, and then see if we can find other sources that list places near downtown Vancouver. We will, at some point, actually make it to Portland proper, but so far it's looking like we can find bigger apartments at lower prices here in Vancouver--which is also in the state without income tax.


View Larger Map

We'd like to make a decision quickly, but not hastily. In the ideal situation, we would find a place that meets all our needs and most of our wants within the next few days, and get all our stuff moved in before I leave for Viable Paradise, so D and the cats can unpack at their leisure while I'm off writing and learning.

The more likely scenario is that we'll spend the next week gathering data, then make a decision after I get back from VP and be moved in by mid-October. That'll be good too. Sooner is better, because rent is cheaper than hotel, and we want to be well settled in our new home before the holidays.

~CKL

Indignities!

Our last two car trips have been horrible!

They weren't as long as some of the others, but Bayla was pretty upset about not going home when we were back in the bay area, and has recently decided that she's going to be carsick.

She threw up on me. TWICE! The first time I yelled and yelled, but the humans just ignored me.

I suppose you're going to say it's my own fault for crying wolf.

Well I wasn't crying wolf! I was crying VOMIT! It's a totally different meow. I can't help it if humans are completely tone-deaf. The second time, at least, they stopped the car and cleaned me up a little.

I've forgiven Bayla. She's old. Oooooooollllldddd. Like three times as old as me. I hope I don't get all crotchety and pukey when I'm that old.