To say that me and Muse have been busy would be a grand understatement.
On Friday we closed on our new house. Of course there were difficulties and things not taken care of as needed so it took forever. Our closing went smoothly but the seller’s did not. Sucks to be them… they should have gotten a better agent. Ours is great. Since we had nothing in the new house though we went back and stayed at my Mom’s where we had been.
On Saturday our sea shipment from Hong Kong arrived. That actually went pretty smooth. One of our couches got ripped somewhere along the way though. That sucks. Right in the front middle. Good thing it’s insured. We had lots of family and friends over to help with all the miscellaneous things that needed to be done. It’s an exhausting process but it was OK. Our cats were returned to us finally so they got locked in a bedroom while people worked.
On Sunday… I don’t really remember Sunday. There may have been pancakes involved. I think we shopped until we couldn’t shop anymore. Just thinking about the amount of money that we have spent over the past few weeks makes my wallet hurt.
On Monday all hell broke loose. Muse had an early doctor’s appointment and would be back to the house later in the morning to meet with the movers. The movers were scheduled to arrive at 10:30am. I double confirmed that time. So I get a call on my mobile at 8:55am from the movers asking where we were and should they take the stuff back and re-schedule. I’m sitting at work at that point and Muse was already at the doctor’s office.
After a confused conversation, Muse ends up leaving the doctor’s to meet them. I get a call later that the movers are being uncooperative and that one of the cats is missing. I leave work early and race home. Tons of stuff gets moved in. A few more broken items. No one knows anything about the pool table being reassembled. More chaos. I end up working from home on a cellular modem which is fairly slow. Ugh.
Bottom line is that we are now moved in and we have lots of unpacking to do. Of course Muse is having contractions and can have the baby at any time at this point. So we shall see what gets done.
And of course in the midst of all that I’ve been furiously working on new comics. I made the decision to do five new comics for A Little Scary this week in celebration of Halloween. It was a good decision but I’ve been working my butt off to get it done. The first four comics are posted now. Tomorrow’s comic is done and waiting to post. But I would just read the first four if I were you. You really don’t want to see what’s in that last comic. Trust me.
Well, it looks like the web hosting move was fairly smooth. Much easier than I had thought it would be. I do think I forgot a few things on the old server and I didn’t note my old IP address… dumb. I’m hoping Yoshi still has that.
We had our fifth of six baby classes last night. They show the nastiest crap in the videos and pictures in that class. To hell with providing condoms or teaching sex education in our schools. Just show all of them these videos. They’ll never want to have babies. Ever.
Tomorrow evening we have our final walk-through of the house to see if everything that we requested has been completed before we close on Friday. Friday we put ourselves in enough debt to keep us shackled to St. Louis for the rest of our lives. Wonderful. Oh well, that’s the way it goes. Interest rates are higher now than when moved back to the States. The housing market sucks. To all of you who told us what a great time it would be to come back home because the car market and housing market were so great: YOU WERE WRONG. Unless of course you are in the market for a full size pickup truck and a “remodeler’s dream home”.
But hopefully we will be getting settled soon. Our sea shipment from Hong Kong will be delivered on Saturday and then our storage items will arrive on Monday morning. We need to get our utiliites sorted and get internet access in the house. It’s going to be crazy. And the baby is due any time now….
Just want to let everyone know that I’ll be switching over the DNS for the following web sites to match their new hosting server:
cybrpunk.com
A Little Scary
Cat and Muse
ShotSauce
My friend Yoshi is kicking me off his servers so I had to go get a new hosting package. The data looks like it’s all transferred as of yesterday but I can’t really test it till I get the domains pointing to the new locations.
The change will probably be kicked off overnight tonight. If anyone sees anything not working, please let me know.
UPDATE:
Looks like the DNS changes are underway. I had to repost today’s comic and this post. Yay! So far so good.
It’s been really quiet around here lately. Things will pick up again after we get moved in to our own house. Right now, Muse has her new notebook setup in a corner of my Mom’s office and my computer is setup on a bench in the basement. Neither is ideal or easy to get to like we are used to so things tend to slip. We really haven’t been doing a whole lot of interesting things either.
That Most Recently list over on the right side of the page hasn’t updated at all because there’s really nothing to update. I no longer have a long commute where I sit on boats and buses for three hours a day so I haven’t read anything. My PS2 and XBox360 aren’t hooked up so I can’t really play those. I never seem to have time to play with my NDS or PSP right now. We haven’t watched any movies and I don’t have speakers on my computer to listen to any new music. Stagnant. Hopefully that will all change soon. Even with a baby.
We are scheduled to close on the house we are buying on Friday October 24th and hope to be getting our shipments from the movers that weekend. I say ‘hope’ because after several phone messages and e-mail, I can’t seem to get through to my contact at Graebel. I’ll be trying again today but I wish it didn’t have to be so annoying. This is not customer service….
Well, good thing I didn’t actually shut down my computer yet. I woke up this morning to the sounds of water leaking in and getting the clothes I set aside for the next few days as wet as possible. Nice. Hello Typhoon Signal 8, how are you this morning? You blow? Why yes you do.
Just a bit ago, the winds at Ngong Ping (just over the mountain from my home) were blowing at 158 kilometers per hour. For the easy reference of other Americans, that is 98 miles per hour. Wind. 98 miles per hour. That blows.
So now I’m sitting here with nothing to do because everything is packed or at least disconnected. The movers aren’t coming because Hong Kong shuts down completely during a Signal 8 and I have no food in the house or a way to cook it if I did. The milk is spoiled too. This is turning out to be a most excellent experience.
The movers are scheduled to arrive at 9:30am tomorrow morning to pack everything up and haul it away for shipping. Muse’s computer is all broken down already and mine’s next. I had to look up some phone numbers and back up all my data before the big move and that took some time.
I’ve got two giant suitcases to check in at the airport and one tiny suitcase to use as my carry-on. The carry-on case pretty much is completely filled with my XBox 360 and Playstation 2 and one of my external hard drives for backups. That and some towels and t-shirts for padding. It’s the only way to be sure.
Tired. I was up till 1:30am last night packing and had to get up early to go to work early. I was falling asleep in a vendor presentation this afternoon. Considering they were presenting to me, that was probably kind of rude. I’ll probably be up again late tonight as it’s almost midnight. Then the circus starts tomorrow morning.
I won’t be in front of a PC again till I reach the office on Thursday morning. I’ll try and give another update then.
I’ve got less than four days till I leave Hong Kong. There’s way too much stress and way too many things not going smoothly at all. Things are going the opposite of smoothly. They are anti-smooth. This is one of those cases where having lots of money would fix things. Thus the stress.
The training of my replacement is going well but his arrival delays have introduced even more stress to the situation. I feel like I’m talking non-stop and gushing information but I’m worried how much he’s absorbing. So far, he’s still not getting the names in the office right. I hope he’s only bad with remembering names. Otherwise it could be a long couple of years.
Regardless, I’m still plugging along. I’m trying to get a buffer of comics done for A Little Scary so I can stay on schedule during the move. The Monday comic is up and Thursday’s is ready to roll but I need to create at least one more to make it through the move.
Well it’s Friday and the work day is almost done. I may get to the weekend faster than my friends in the States but I also get Monday faster too. It’s a win-lose situation.
I’ve spent part of the day packing up my personal items from my office to be shipped back to the St. Louis office. My technical books and toys and decorations and paperwork and toys. I have lots of toys. It’s been kind of a sad day.
Which led to my activities at lunch time. I skipped lunch to stay in my office like I often do and I drug out some writing. I opened up a story that I had started back in February and edited/added about 500 words during my break. Oddly enough, even though I went from 1,040 words to almost 1,500 words… the story didn’t get progressed at all. I have an idea of where I think I want to go with it now. Before I had just written the setup and had no idea what was going on or where it would end. Now I think I’ve gotten that part ready. I just have to remember it long enough to get it written.
But my point was that I was kind of sad about packing and that sparked me into writing. I’m wondering if I only write when I’m sad? I don’t think so though. I blazed through the first four days of zombie stories and I don’t remember being sad then. So I’m probably just jumping to conclusions. Which, for those of you who know me, is very unlike me. Yeah.
Anyway, hopefully I will get Chapter One of that story finished up pretty soon and unleash it on everyone here. Or I may wait till I get a few chapters written so I don’t leave everyone hanging like I did with the zombie stories. I will finish those zombie stories some day. At least the ones I have outlined already. I just haven’t been inspired on those like I was before. Not sure what was different then but I wish I could duplicate it. That was awesome.
For those of you interested in my previous writings, click on the Writing category on the right side of the page.
I believe Muse has already let the kitteh out of the bag, so to speak, but we will be coming home to St. Louis this year. Muse will be leaving Hong Kong before me to get the pets all sorted and safe. I was the first to arrive between us and I’ll be the last to leave. I suppose I should take some comfort in that I’ll get to live here in Hong Kong for just a bit longer but I also remember the loneliness of my first month here. But that was a long time ago now and I’m no longer a stranger in a strange land with no idea of what to do/where to go/what to eat. I no longer need to subsist on ham sandwiches and cans of soup. Although I may just because.
Now, when the time comes, I’ll probably spend my free time leisurely walking the street markets and shopping malls without the worry of wasting Muse’s time or needing to feed or walk the dogs. Maybe I’ll go directly from the office to a local bar with people from work and see what the night life is like before I leave. Maybe I’ll go for a hike without worrying about time constraints or anything but my own ability. Or maybe I’ll just sit in front of the computer and play World of Warcraft all night. It’s hard to say.
Actually when I say we will be coming home this year that makes it sound like something that will be happening at some far point in the future. But really it’s nothing like that. Muse may be leaving in a month or less. I won’t be here any longer than mid-August. It’s scary close to those dates already. By the end of August we will be back in the United States of America and trying to figure out life once more. This time with a baby on the way.
When we moved we did so on short notice and also threw in our wedding because it wasn’t a stressful enough experience. Now with a baby coming, I see now that we just really like to complicate things. I can offer no other explanation. We sold our house and our cars and most of the rest of the stuff we didn’t ship to Hong Kong. So add in another layer of sphincter-clenching in that we have a baby coming and we need to buy a house and at least one car but really we need two and baby stuff and furniture and Oh My Gawd what are we insane?
Yes. Yes we are. Nice to meet you.
For those of you with the time and inclination, Lifehacker has a fun Top 10 Harmless Geek Pranks to use on your unsuspecting users, friends and family. Of course, if you plan on doing any of these at your place of work, please keep in mind the mentality and patience of your co-workers and your management. No point in getting fired over a dumb prank.
I’m a big fan of pranks myself and would love to try some of these out. But like I said, I just don’t have the time. I got a call from my boss in St. Louis and was told that they were cutting my contract here in Hong Kong a bit short. It seems I’ve done such a good job here that they now want me to take over the IT for the European region and do for it the same as I have for the Asia-Pacific region. That’s a great thing of course and I’m glad they have such faith in me but I have my doubts of course. Europeans are a much different breed of people than Asians.
So needless to say things are going to be a bit crazy for the next few months. We need to figure out how to arrange getting our things moved from Hong Kong to London and make sure the pets are all taken care of. Finding a place to live should be even more difficult than it was in Hong Kong I imagine. Hopefully we can find a place near a pub. With good internet access of course.
Not only that but I’ll have to interview for my replacement here and do training and everything else that’s involved. The guy who’s leaving the lead position in London now seems to have stopped caring for how things were done quite a while ago, so it sounds like it may be in even worse shape their than it was here when I first moved. All in all, a good challenge of course but I don’t imagine it will be easy by any means. Add to this that I’m an American and I imagine that some of the existing staff will probably rebel a bit as well.
So more news to come as I have it and hopefully it will be a smooth transition (yeah right). I’m trying to get a trip there to check things out in person before hand to see what I’ve gotten myself into. They’ll probably agree to that since they did the same before I came to Hong Kong. Oh well, at least London is a bit close to the States as far as time difference goes! Wish me luck….
comics, General, Rant | cybrpunk | 
October 30, 2008 1:14 pm | 
Comments (2) 
