Category: Diary (Page 28 of 38)

The phones are still off this morning, but at some point during the day they come back to life.

Josh the man from Cox Communications came back and took some more readings and tried a few other tricks, but to no avail – we still have either Cable TV or internet connectivity through the cable modem, but not both. A further appointment has been made for a more experienced technician to come out on Tuesday morning.

Tonight I cooked a meal using the gas stove. This is the first time I’ve ever used gas to cook. Let me tell you something: I’m never going back. You can’t make me!

Gas cooking is cool.

We wake up this morning to find – no phones! All four of our phone lines are out. Thank goodness we still have cable modem access to the Internet…

Our CableTV connection appointment is rescheduled to this evening.

After going shopping in order to stock up the house, The Cable Guy shows up and we have cable TV!

…now our Cable Modem has stopped working. No Internet. Arghh! No phones either. Arghh!

Brett and the carpet guys come and “tack down” the carpet with fresh underlay.

Our window coverings have been manufactured. John Steadman comes and installs our blinds. Some of them don’t work. He takes them away with him.

Let’s see, who came to the house today at roughly the same time?

• Our washer and dryer arrive today, and get installed into the laundry room.
• The moving truck arrives and the guys start unloading our furniture – only not into the front bedroom or master bedroom! Other rooms get extra boxes. They ignore our labeling system and put the boxes anywhere they feel like. We think we have everything.
• The installer from Cox Broadband arrives to install our cable modem. We now have fast internet accesss, wheee!

We get up and take a shower. Uh-oh – the carpet is wet. Surely all this dampness wasn’t just run-off? No, the underlay is soaking. Um… there’s a leak in the shower drain somwhere?

After an urgent call is placed to the builder customer care number, we discover another problem. The front bedroom is also suffering from a very wet carpet. This was definitely not apparent the last time we were here for our walkthrough. Looking closely at the baseboard we could see extensive water damage, suggesting a slow leak of perhaps a week’s duration. The damage goes out the door and continues into the hallway.

There is a very real possibility that the Eagle Sentry contractors caused some accidental damage while they installed the network wiring in the walls. I unscrew one of the jack plates and could clearly see a steady drip coming from somewhere above – about one drip per second. Arghh. This could get very messy. Last thing we need is two different parties accusing each other of causing the problem, while our problem remains unfixed.

At this point, we get a phone call from Heidi at the plumbing subcontractors, saying that they’ve been contacted by the builders, and that someone could be with us tomorrow, and could we avoid using the shower until then?

I explain that we have encountered additional problems since talking to the builder customer care people, and at that point Heidi says that she’ll change the appointment so that someone can get here today.

Ruben the plumber arrives. He finds the problem with the shower – it’s a missing gasket, apparently – but he purses lips at the front bedroom. “This is bad”, he mutters. “You really needed us”. He takes out his drywall saw and cuts a whole in the wall a certain distance above the jack plate. The hole is right at a junction in the water pipe – and it’s leaking all right. Lisa and I sigh in relief – this is not caused by the wiring installation.

Ruben places a call in to their “water extraction” subcontractors, to arrange for some blowers to be set up to, well, extract the water. In other words, They blow a lot of air around to evaporate the water and dry the carpet. 

Brett the builder’s Development Manager shows up. Here’s the deal: They’ll replace the entire affected area of carpet, no trouble. Item of interest #1: Our particular carpet pattern isn’t in stock and won’t be milled until April 15. So what they will do is after the carpet is dry, they’ll replace the underlay, tack down the existing carpet – so we can move in as if normal – and then, when replacement carpet is available, they’ll move all our furniture out, and replace the carpet. Item of interest #2: Because the carpet is being re-milled, the “dye-out” will be different, and therefore, in order to make the carpet match, they will replace the carpet in all four bedrooms, the hall, and the living room. (The three bedrooms are a contiguous lay of carpet, as is the master bedroom and living room, y’see.)

Over my #$%^& dead body, I say. We’ll sign anything release you like, we don’t care if the color doesn’t match. You’ve laid the carpet three times already in this house, it’s PERFECT, we like the color, you’re not changing it in rooms that don’t need it. 

We have to work next week, explains Lisa. These rooms are our home offices, we have to be set up and working. Just replace the carpet in the front room and hallway, and the master bedroom suite. Leave our offices and living room alone. 

Brett explains that he only wants us to be happy, so I think he’ll go along with this plan. We’ll see if the carpet is different in color. It can’t be too much different, otherwise why the heck do people bother going to Dupont to see samples?

My knee was a bit stiff this morning.

After we packed the car with importancy items (like vacuum cleaner, cleaning utensils, bedding, laptops, telephones, important papers and a change of clothes) I sat out in the warm sun with an empty house behind me and waited for our landlords to show up so that we could give them the keys and get on the road. They finally showed up, inspected the house briefly, and we left them there, stopping at Starbucks for a breakfast of coffee and croissant, before getting on the freeway at around 9:15am, heading out across the Richmond Bridge, down 580, through the Altamont Pass and out of the Bay Area.

We drive for about three hours, and have Lunch at Red Robin somewhere off SH5 near Coalinga and Fresno. 

Lisa drives for a bit – my knee is really beginning to hurt. We take turns every few hours.

A Joshua Tree in 1994

Through the Mojave desert, just past Edwards Air Force Base, I had to ask Lisa to stop the car and let me take a picture, on the exact same spot that I took a picture on my first trip to the States in 1994, when we drove to San Francisco, going the opposite way after visiting Lisa’s dad in Las Vegas. It’s hard to describe, but there’s this Joshua tree by the road, and there’s these hills behind it, and I had this bet with myself that I’d be able to recognise the place and take another photo of it. 

The same tree in 2001

We arrived at Barstow in time for dinner, which for me was a chance to have breakfast. Best breakfast I ever had – or was it just hunger?

We arrived in Vegas around 9:30, finally driving into our garage at around 10:00pm. 

Sure enough, there was a UPS box waiting on doorstep. It was the package from Cakewalk software. I wonder how long it had sat there?

Frank the shipping company truck driver rang us three times during the course of the morning to get driving directions to our house in Terra Linda. He obviously wasn’t from the Bay Area, as he ended up taking the wrong bridge and driving through San Francisco. I didn’t think the instructions were that tricky, but I guess if you are driving a moving truck and you’re in the wrong lane and you don’t see signs in advance enough, then you’re pretty much committed to driving in a straight line.

At around 9:30 the packing company people showed up to pack our remaining items – basically artwork and fragile items that we would rather get packed by experienced packers in special boxes. They were impressed that we had in fact packed everything else up ourselves on time. Apparently it is common for them to find people still madly packing, having discovered that it doesn’t pay to be  optimistic about the amount of time needed to pack. They left a pile of documents for the trucking guys (they still hadn’t arrived yet) and left us contemplating our boxes.

About 11:00 AM the guys from United showed up in an enormous truck, much bigger than the one that our stuff arrived in two years ago. They couldn’t figure out how to turn around in our short cul-de-sac, and after going backwards and forwards a couple of times up and down the street, they backed out to the cross street and then see-sawed around and came in backwards. Frank and his assistant Justin were efficient and capable, labeling everything with their own sequence of inventory numbers, and expertly packing our belongings into the truck like a jigsaw puzzle. It took about 6 hours to get everything out of the house, assembled in stages in front of the house, then packed into the truck.

I can now say that I have seen all our possessions take up roughly 1000 cubic feet in a rectangular volume. 

While I was using a comb on teasing the carpet pile back to a semblance of normalcy from where our furniture had rested for a couple of years, I did something to my right knee. I was kneeling, with my legs kind of splayed out to one side (tush on floor instead of heels), leaning forward, when something went “pop” and I felt a twinge, kind of like pinging your funny bone. I got up and waggled my leg around a bit, trying to pop it back to normal or something, but it didn’t seem to want to go. It wasn’t painful or uncomfortable, so I didn’t worry too much about it, and continued refreshing the carpet pile – only never using that particular body position again.

This evening after we’d made our farewells to Frank and Justin (making sure they had directions to the house in Las Vegas), we went out for one last meal at our friendly neighborhood Chinese restaurant (Royal Mandarin) and came home again, making up a bed on the floor with blankets and rugs.

Lisa did a mammoth cleaning effort on the kitchen floor, and I vacuumed.

I had packed some of our DVDs in my laptop case and I surprised Lisa by bringing them out and we selected “The Matrix” to watch. Having a DVD drive in a laptop is kind of cool sometimes.

We fell asleep before we finished the movie.

…and that isn’t even counting the 76 un-numbered items like desks and chairs and artwork. I honestly don’t remember much about this day, except everything that wasn’t already in a box, went into a box. This included the TVs and kitchen stuff.

While we were packing, we had several cars pull up and examine the house from the outside, and one person actually knocked on the door and said she was sorry, she didn’t know there was anyone here. Evidently our wonderful landlords cannot wait to get new tenants. They could have waited a week before putting an ad in the paper, surely?

Today we intend to pack everything but the kitchen. Tomorrow the kitchen. Then the truck arrives on Monday. We will spend the night in the empty house, and drive to Vegas on Tuesay 3 April.

Today I was informed via an email that the upgrade to my music sequencing package (Cakewalk’s “Sonar”) has shipped and is expected to be delivered to our Las Vegas address on April 2. At this point, we expect to be there late on the evening of the 3rd. This is very ironic, considering that I did everything I could to ensure the package would arrive at a time and place where I expected to be. I anticipated that there would be a delay between ordering and delivery; I waited until the last possible day of the special price reduction deal before I ordered the upgrade; used the Nevada address on my order, etc. 

I tried contacting UPS and getting them to hold the package for me in Nevada, but they couldn’t do it until the package was actually at the Nevada depot – which as yet, it wasn’t. If I had time I intended to check the tracking web page regularly and call in a hold delivery request at the right point in the package’s journey.

Last day of work today, for a couple of weeks. Inevitably, we found out today that our department is to be reorg’d again.

Tonight we rented the Wonder Boys DVD, which was very good. This movie was released twice in the theatres here, and both times I get the feeling it didn’t do so well, despite great reviews. I can see why, it is a hard movie to promote, but nonetheless it is a lot of fun.

We had to go shopping for a few necessary food items, because we’d managed to eat all the food in the house a little earlier than we’d planned. Still three more days in this house to go!