As I wrote a few weeks back, we were moving home and now the move has been completed; although there has been some casualties along the journey. The first of which was my media center PC, my wife opened the tailgate of our SUV and it fell onto a hard concrete floor; smashing the case and damaging the hard disk and motherboard. The second thing is seasons six, seven and eight of Stargate Atlantis on DVD seems to have vanished. The third casualty is my back, after four days of moving, my back is in tatters; just as well I have quite a high pain threshold (and painkillers)!
The new house is 1400ft², has 4 bedrooms, one of which is my office, so I can work from home more comfortably; sitting on the floor at a coffee table is not the most comfortable way of working. The living room is huge, our 40in HDTV looks lost in the room, the sofa is more than 12ft away from the TV now. The kitchen is much larger than what we had previously, although we do miss the pantry, we have more cupboard space, but not so much more that it negates having a pantry, we’ll have to find an alternative solution for storage of food. The master bedroom has our new $3,000 bedroom set installed, although I am having trouble adjusting from a king size bed to a queen size; US queen size seems very similar in size to a UK double. But I am in less pain when I wake up, so I can compromise!
The house also has two bathrooms, both spacious with tub/shower combos; and a two car garage, just a shame that it doesn’t come with a garage door opener, getting out of the car to open the garage door on the freezing winter days isn’t fun! We also have the added cost of trash collection; which is $87 quarterly; oddly, we elected to have trash only as it was almost $15 more to recycle; where’s the incentive? you’d think it’d be cheaper if you recycled; I’m not going to pay extra to recycle and create more work for myself! Also we have to pay $42 to USPS to get a new lock & key on our mailbox as the previous tenants took the keys when they moved! The costs just keep mounting, we only have $1400 left of the almost $10,000 we had 10 days ago, easy come, easy go!
We did however get professional movers this time around; so I could sit back and watch someone else move my furniture, my wife however found it hard to sit and watch. I had been moving boxes to the new house for days so I was more than happy to let someone else do the legwork.
Finally, Cox Communications did their best to piss me off; they were lucky that their customer service department was closed else I would have canceled their service after the useless response I got from their tech support rep on Monday evening after our Internet connection was not switched on as organised a week earlier. The tech suggested that it was a problem inside my home; it turned out after a second call the next morning that the connection work order was not completed; so they rushed out a tech to connect me! The only reason I tried Cox again is because of the two week waiting list for an install for AT&T Fiber; I can’t afford to be without Internet for two weeks!