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The movers came and moved all the rest of my boxes (and the remaining furniture) to the new place. They filled up one guest bedroom and half the living room with boxes.

I've done some unpacking, but not as much as I should've by now. Have unpacked much of the kitchen, and a couple bookcases' worth of books I haven't read yet. (Three or four of my bookcases are now in place in the living room, more or less.) Many many more boxes of books and papers left to go.

Tonight, I started on the project of putting the boxes that I'm not going to unpack anytime soon in the back of the guest bedroom, and pulling out the boxes that I do want to unpack. (The ones I'm not unpacking yet are mostly my father's books and a bunch of old papers, plus my APAs and comic books.) In theory, this process should eventually result in the living room not being full of boxes. But that'll be a while yet.

In the process of shifting boxes around tonight, I finally found my box of cleaning supplies. I had been convinced that it didn't have a lid; turns out it did have a lid, even though one of the bottles was too tall for the lid to close properly. Anyway, glad I don't have to go buy more bleach and dish detergent.

(Bleach because the washing machine has a heavy mildew smell that I can't get rid of; I'm told bleach should help.)

Also tonight, I had too much food for dinner again. This has been happening a lot lately; I'm having a harder time than usual stopping eating when I'm full. And am getting less exercise than usual. Have been riding my bike to work about half the time, but not as much as would be ideal (and as I hope to when things settle down more). So tonight I finally set up the Wii, and played Dance Dance Revolution for the first time in months. I sure do like that game. I also finally did a sound test: turned up the volume, then went outside and closed the door to see how audible it is outside. Turns out that with the volume uncomfortably high for indoors, the drumbeat is audible outside my living room door for at least ten feet or so, out to my neighbor's bedroom wall. But only barely, and only with the volume turned up too high. So I think I'm okay.

It's hard to break the habit of years of having a shared wall. I have to remind myself that I don't have to tiptoe around the house late at night. I don't entirely trust the sound isolation—I forget whether I mentioned this, but my new neighbor's piano is audible in most of my house when they play it full volume (presumably with windows or doors open). I haven't yet figured out whether this is a problem or not. It may be the sort of thing that's only actually distracting if I let myself get annoyed by it.

[There were several paragraphs here discussing movies and TV I've recently watched, but I later decided to move that to a separate entry to reduce the length of this overlong entry.]

Spent much of Friday putting together my Hugo ballot, especially reading the short fiction; sadly, I didn't finish reading the novellas. This year had such promise for my getting Hugo stuff done on time, but I ended up being even later than usual. Thanks, Cheryl, for the reminder of the then-impending due date!

Spent the rest of Friday attempting to set up my new computer, a spiffy new 13" MacBook Pro. Sadly, Migration Assistant failed utterly to copy my files from my old computer. It got about halfway through, then told me it had lost its network connection. When I re-ran M.A. later, it completely ignored everything in my home directory—just plain didn't bother to copy my files. I also tried telling it to restore from Time Capsule, but no dice (after a very long waiting-for-setup period). It let me select my home directory, and it claimed it had successfully copied it, but it didn't actually copy it.

So eventually I copied everything by hand in the Finder, which took a long time and resulted in some duplicate copies and such. I ended up creating a detailed list on each computer of all the files in my home directory, complete with modification dates and such, and doing a BBEdit file-compare between the two lists to make sure I hadn't missed anything. And then repeating that process when it turned out I had missed a lot. The whole process was very slow and tedious.

And I still haven't been able to back up my new computer, because my Time Capsule doesn't have enough space, so I'm manually deleting individual old backups of the old machine (there doesn't seem to be a way to tell Time Machine "this new computer is a continuation of the old one, so use the same backup set"—maybe if I had given the new computer the same name as the old one?), which takes a very very very long time. After each one took a couple hours, I thought it would be more efficient to do a bunch at once, so I deleted 17 backups; the deletion is still running, 48 hours later, and there's no way to tell how far it's gotten. Frustrating, but I guess par for the course for my interactions with computers lately.

Anyway, I do like the new computer. Zippy! I ended up naming it Paravel.

Seems like I had a lot of social interaction last week, which led to my mostly not leaving the house all this past weekend. A week and a half ago, there was a birthday party for Stacy (at a restaurant, featuring a live magic-and-dance show), and Jay and Holly and Avery came over this past Friday to see my new place, and there've been various phone calls, and, oh, I forget, all sorts of stuff. I ended up skipping a Fourth of July party that I had wanted to attend, both because I forgot it was happening 'til it was well underway, and because I needed social downtime.

Especially because this coming Saturday I'll be heading for NYC and, no doubt, lots of social interaction. Oh, and I decided to visit Chicago for Mary Anne's birthday the weekend after I get back from the East Coast, so I'll be out of town for eight out of nine consecutive weekends, starting this coming weekend. Fortunately, I'll be home for most of the intervening weeks between those weekends.

Another thing I've been spending time on lately is blog stuff—as you've seen, I posted several entries over the weekend, and wrote significant amounts of other entries that aren't ready for posting yet. I also ended up labeling a whole bunch of existing entries as belonging to the new "Favorite/Important Entries" category (which you can view by clicking the appropriate category link in my main blog page's sidebar)—a sort of compendium of entries I particularly like and entries that are particular personally important to me and entries that are particularly thorough discussions of some writing or political issue. But of course deciding which entries to put in that category took time, even though I only looked at a tiny fraction of my total number of entries so far (the category will likely grow over time).

In the interstices, there's been a fair bit of magazine stuff, mostly reading subs and doing administrative stuff. I've been neglecting editing, though; must do that tomorrow.

Also in the interstices has been some assorted house stuff: notably trying to get cable installed (Internet works, but TV doesn't yet) and discovering that my land line telephone hasn't been hooked up yet; don't know for sure yet whether that's the phone company's fault or my phone's fault.

The last thing that's been taking up a lot of my time the past couple days is that we discovered that if you step on a particular tile in my front entranceway (just inside my front door), water wells up from the grout. This is Not Good.

The handyman who's done work for me in the past, Breht (who I highly recommend, btw, if you need handyman stuff done anywhere near Palo Alto), came by on a Sunday afternoon on short notice; he went down into the crawlspace and looked around, but couldn't find any leaking pipes or anything. Late tonight, I finally figured out that my fridge is leaking. Ugh. Will try and get that fixed tomorrow, but will also need to get someone to come out and rip out some tiles and dry out the flooring. Feh. Likely to be expensive and time-consuming.

On the plus side, while he was here Breht also took notes for a dozen other little tasks around the new place, so when he finishes his current jobs, he'll come and fix some stuff. He already fixed the much-too-short timer on the outside-the-front-door light.