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Dec. 30th, 2012 04:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogI'm remiss on updating here, but it's been because things have been keeping me really busy. I should write about spending Christmas weekend with Lisa, which was awesome. But for the moment, I'm going to talk about the composition of the house I live in.
The shifting group of housemates is making things feel a little more like a commune or co-op, though most of them are still blood family. My brother No-LJ-James is moving in to the house today. Several of his roommates in the house he was sharing are going separate ways and he needs a place to stay while he finishes up law school and looks for a job.
Housemate Phil is somewhat unexpectedly moving to California to pursue a job opportunity with a friend of his, working at said friend's dad's motorcycle shop. It may be a short-term (like four month) thing, or it may be permanent. I guess we'll find out. But he needs to stay here until mid-January, so he's moved all of his things into the basement while James is moving into the space he vacated upstairs in the room next to mine. I feel pretty good about this as James will be quiet and more likely to be sleeping at night than Phil.
Also, Phil's friend he's going out to California with needs a place to stay until they leave so he doesn't have to pay another month of rent, so he'll likely be living in the basement along with Phil for a short span. And finally, we may have another non-family member moving in to the house once Phil moves out, possibly taking the space in the basement that Phil will be living in. But that's uncertain. So we'll be averaging six people in our one-bathroom house. We've made do with five for a while, so six will only make it 1.2 times as bad, right? *laughs*
James has two fish tanks; I've never moved one of those before, and I'm very glad they were small. I commented on that to him and he said really large fish tanks are a thing like pianos; you hire specialists. When he moved all of his fish to Michigan, he used a fish boarding service, which I was amused and pleased to learn of the existence of. Right now, there is a bucket in the living room with two goldfish, a plecostimus, and three axolotls swimming around while a filter stuck on the inside wall runs. They'll be moving back into their tanks as soon as James is done mopping and cleaning the floor or his new space.
So I've been doing a huge amount of cleaning and organizing upstairs, and my mother and I have been tackling the first floor and basement. I've tucked all the parts of my giant loft bed upstairs in the space under the eaves until I sell it, hopefully in February. We've thrown out lots of bags of garbage and several pieces of furniture. I made a trip to Goodwill with a carload of electronics. Seven or eight partial old computers, broken VCRs and DVD players, a couple boxes of old hard drives from when I used to work in IT, a CRT monitor (still not the last one in the house), seven remote controls none of which controlled anything we own, and so on.
Meanwhile, each household member seems to be getting sequentially sick. First it was housemate Phil, then brother Tim (at the same time as brother James who had not yet moved in at that point), then my dad, then my mother who is sick right now. Same symptoms; mostly not being able to keep any food down. I have not yet become sick and have decided that I simply will not.
My dad is recovering from surgery; he seems mostly fine at this point, though he still needs to keep his food up. My timing on overhauling the AV system and cleaning the living room to the point of usability again was well-timed; he's been spending a lot of time there watching movies via Netflix on the X-Box 360. In surround sound; whee! I have also been playing a few console games for the first time in a long time, including a lot of Tales of Vesperia and Katamari Damacy. It's really nice to have functional household common leisure space.
And last but not least, there's been a lot of board gaming. Particularly Lords of Waterdeep, which is fantastic. Last night, with friend Dwarf, my dad, and brother Tim, we played a game of Arkham Horror. It was the first time I'd played it in a long time, and the first time in much longer I played it without expansions. It was actually winnable that way! I've stayed away from that game due to frustrating experiences with Danae and her copy with multiple expansions, but now I kind of want to do some more of the simplified version. And I'd even think of playing with some of the small expansions without additional boards and see how those go.
Tonight, once James is done cleaning and mopping, he and I will unload his stuff from the truck and drop it off. Tomorrow morning, I'll run out to Aldi to pick up some stuff for the New Year's board game party. Then at noon, Serinthia arrives to watch Revenge of the Sith with me. I've never seen it due to my experiences with the first two parts of the prequel trilogy, but I'm assured that this is the best of them. In my opinion, that's not saying a lot, but it'll be fun watching it with a friend at the least!
The shifting group of housemates is making things feel a little more like a commune or co-op, though most of them are still blood family. My brother No-LJ-James is moving in to the house today. Several of his roommates in the house he was sharing are going separate ways and he needs a place to stay while he finishes up law school and looks for a job.
Housemate Phil is somewhat unexpectedly moving to California to pursue a job opportunity with a friend of his, working at said friend's dad's motorcycle shop. It may be a short-term (like four month) thing, or it may be permanent. I guess we'll find out. But he needs to stay here until mid-January, so he's moved all of his things into the basement while James is moving into the space he vacated upstairs in the room next to mine. I feel pretty good about this as James will be quiet and more likely to be sleeping at night than Phil.
Also, Phil's friend he's going out to California with needs a place to stay until they leave so he doesn't have to pay another month of rent, so he'll likely be living in the basement along with Phil for a short span. And finally, we may have another non-family member moving in to the house once Phil moves out, possibly taking the space in the basement that Phil will be living in. But that's uncertain. So we'll be averaging six people in our one-bathroom house. We've made do with five for a while, so six will only make it 1.2 times as bad, right? *laughs*
James has two fish tanks; I've never moved one of those before, and I'm very glad they were small. I commented on that to him and he said really large fish tanks are a thing like pianos; you hire specialists. When he moved all of his fish to Michigan, he used a fish boarding service, which I was amused and pleased to learn of the existence of. Right now, there is a bucket in the living room with two goldfish, a plecostimus, and three axolotls swimming around while a filter stuck on the inside wall runs. They'll be moving back into their tanks as soon as James is done mopping and cleaning the floor or his new space.
So I've been doing a huge amount of cleaning and organizing upstairs, and my mother and I have been tackling the first floor and basement. I've tucked all the parts of my giant loft bed upstairs in the space under the eaves until I sell it, hopefully in February. We've thrown out lots of bags of garbage and several pieces of furniture. I made a trip to Goodwill with a carload of electronics. Seven or eight partial old computers, broken VCRs and DVD players, a couple boxes of old hard drives from when I used to work in IT, a CRT monitor (still not the last one in the house), seven remote controls none of which controlled anything we own, and so on.
Meanwhile, each household member seems to be getting sequentially sick. First it was housemate Phil, then brother Tim (at the same time as brother James who had not yet moved in at that point), then my dad, then my mother who is sick right now. Same symptoms; mostly not being able to keep any food down. I have not yet become sick and have decided that I simply will not.
My dad is recovering from surgery; he seems mostly fine at this point, though he still needs to keep his food up. My timing on overhauling the AV system and cleaning the living room to the point of usability again was well-timed; he's been spending a lot of time there watching movies via Netflix on the X-Box 360. In surround sound; whee! I have also been playing a few console games for the first time in a long time, including a lot of Tales of Vesperia and Katamari Damacy. It's really nice to have functional household common leisure space.
And last but not least, there's been a lot of board gaming. Particularly Lords of Waterdeep, which is fantastic. Last night, with friend Dwarf, my dad, and brother Tim, we played a game of Arkham Horror. It was the first time I'd played it in a long time, and the first time in much longer I played it without expansions. It was actually winnable that way! I've stayed away from that game due to frustrating experiences with Danae and her copy with multiple expansions, but now I kind of want to do some more of the simplified version. And I'd even think of playing with some of the small expansions without additional boards and see how those go.
Tonight, once James is done cleaning and mopping, he and I will unload his stuff from the truck and drop it off. Tomorrow morning, I'll run out to Aldi to pick up some stuff for the New Year's board game party. Then at noon, Serinthia arrives to watch Revenge of the Sith with me. I've never seen it due to my experiences with the first two parts of the prequel trilogy, but I'm assured that this is the best of them. In my opinion, that's not saying a lot, but it'll be fun watching it with a friend at the least!
