Today is the day we're supposed to get the keys to our house. Yea! Hopefully everything goes smoothly (I'm only 99% sure of the meeting time and we couldn't get hold of our realtor last night, though she could've called today while I've been gone and either left a message, or if J is home, talked to him).

Could you hear that high-pitched squeal I just emitted, right through your computer screen, from the sheer excitement overload? It's starting to get difficult not to start jumping up and down out of nowhere, every time I think about it. And I haven't been able to sleep before 1am all week (sooo tired!).

I just went to the page I have set up to tell me my home computer's current outside IP (actually the IP of the router, which is set up to forward port 80 requests), and according to it (this gets updated every 3 hours assuming a connection can be made, and writes a last-updated timestamp as well as the current IP) it was updated at 9am! Yet according to WorldZone's help forums, FTP and a bunch of other things were turned off! Apparently the physical server I'm on hasn't had it turned off yet, or it's already up (which I don't believe -- I'll have to email or IM my friend who hosts me and ask about it). Anyway, I guess all that babble about "you're probably reading this later than it was posted" was all for naught. Anyway, I guess I'll go 'head and update my resolutions while I'm at it.

We've been packing away like crazy. Jeremy's done with "just his" stuff except for a few scant things. I, on the other hand, have quite a few more boxes to fill, I think. I have all the stuff on top of my dresser (jewelry, jewelry boxes, receipts, movie ticket stubs, change, random figurines, etc.) for starters. Also, I've decided I was nuts saving out as many clothes as I did for just a mere week (I packed a TON of clothes, including out of my dresser) about a week ago) so I'm going to pick out clothes through Sunday or Monday, and pack the rest in paper bags. I figure, one pair of jeans (maybe the ones I'm wearing now -- I haven't worn them much, in favor of shorts whenever possible); one pair of "normal" shorts, one pair of shorts (like, workout shorts) to wear for packing and cleaning; however many normal t-shirts through then, including a solid one for the bank on Thursday and one or two to pack and clean in; underwear, bras, and a couple pairs of socks in case of rain -- don't want to wear sandals outside in the rain. Everything else -- the rest of my t-shirts, my khakis, my jeans and sweatpants, gobs of underwear and socks, shorts and tank tops -- will get packed.

Then I guess I'll pack the remaining few toiletries in the bathroom (an unwrapped decorative bath set, and most everything in the medicine cabinet). Then I'll finish packing stuff in the computer room, like all the stuff under my computer desk that I can't get to. Added to that will be a few things on this little foot-wide baker's rack in the corner of the dining room. Just about all that will be left after that will be a few random odds and ends, and the kitchen. I'm guessing that since we have squat for newspaper packing material, we'll be leaving that for when J's parents come, because a time or two that he's moved, his mom and grandma brought newspapers and packed his kitchen while everyone else carried out boxes and furniture. My mom also has lots of extra newspapers though, so we might be able to start before then if we can get a hold of those.

I took a couple pictures of our massive stacks of boxes last night, and we've added several since then. I'll take a couple more on the digital when I'm done tonight, then if I can I'll post those to show just how much crap we have. This will depend on when the server upgrades are finished to where FTP is reinstated (odds are you're probably reading this a day or two, or several, after it was written) and when that coincides with moving (if my computers and our digital camera are packed up when FTP and all that come back on, I won't know about it and (a) this post will be really late in showing, and (b) I won't be uploading any pictures till after the move).

I woke up this morning at 7am with the alarm, laid there for 5 minutes or so and almost fell back asleep (I was awake past 1am, and awake briefly again at 6:30 when Zephyr decided to wake me up to be sweet kitty). I went to the bathroom, then turned on the light. I had put up my towel on the rack and gotten ready for my shower, when I saw it. It was a wolf spider (or other hunting spider) the size of a half-dollar coin. J had found it Saturday in the bedroom crawling up one of my robes, but he'd gotten away down the footboard and under the bed. I'd wanted him to find it under there, but he knew that realistically that wasn't going to work. Surprisingly I'd managed to get in bed and fall asleep Saturday night, knowing it was probably lurking somewhere in the bedroom, possibly crawling around on the bed.

Anyway, this thing had found its way some time during the night from the bedroom to the bathroom, and was crawling steadily up the inside of the lace shower curtain. No way I was going to be able to get him. If he'd been on the inside of the plastic shower curtain, I might have been able to work up enough courage to knock him into the tub, followed by blasting on the hot water and hitting him with the shower head (which is one of those free-hanging shower heads) until he cooked to death. However, (a) I'm loathe to do that when the spider is too big to wash down the drain, and (b) he wasn't where I could knock him into the tub.

I felt a twinge of guilt about it, but I went and woke up J. I put a hand on his shoulder, and whispered, "I found him. ... The spider." I told him where it was, and he finally got up, muttering that this isn't how he likes to wake up (I don't blame him). When we went in the bathroom, the spider had already crawled to the top of the lace curtain and started back down again. He grabbed some toilet paper and tried to grab it off the curtain (!!) but it got away and crawled with lightning speed over to the wall and stopped. J realized this wasn't going to work, and went in the kitchen. He came back with a nice flexible spatula. He then got really close with the spatula flexed toward its handle, then thwacked the spider. Somehow it avoided it at the last second and dropped some, and disappeared.

We spent a little bit looking for it, with me peering carefully from the doorway and J looking around, lifting away the shower curtain, moving the trashcan, etc. Finally J saw a leg sticking out, where the spider was sitting on the side edge of one of the shelves over the toilet. He moved a few things out of the way on top of the shelf (not much, since most of that stuff has been packed), and nudged it from underneath. It moved instantaneously, and J crushed him with the toilet paper in his other hand. He dropped him in the toilet, whizzed, then flushed.

I thanked him profusely and told him he was my hero, then took my shower. The whole time I was in the shower I kept thinking about how close I'd been sitting to the spider while peeing, how much closer I'd been to it when hanging up my towel. And I kept worrying that somewhere in there would be another spider, though this I knew was irrational and I pushed away every time it occurred. I was definitely spooked the rest of the time I spent in the shower.

Ugh, I'm such a wuss when it comes to spiders!

The server I'm on will be going through some updates shortly. At 7pm CDT all the ways to update websites will be offline (FTP, SSH, etc.). No idea when those will be back up, since they're not giving an ETA. An email will go out when they're done, but I'm not a member (only subhosted by one) so I won't be getting that, so I'll just be checking their support forums tomorrow or something so I can find this out. Granted, I don't update constantly anymore, so that probably won't matter, but if nothing else, my resolutions won't be updating until those services are back online.

In other news, hehe, we did lots of packing this weekend. We got out all the boxes from the back of the closet and put them together, and all but one is full, that one being a rather flimsy, oddshaped box that will be containing its original contents -- the torchiere lamp. We also got a bunch more boxes from Walmart, which we only filled a few as we got those really late at night. We filled the single big one with most of our sheets and towels; we filled 3 others with J's National Geographics plus a few other random things he had. We're hoping to get some bigger boxes from Shop 'n Save's liquor department Tuesday morning.

It's been ages since I did a Friday Five (November 2, 2002 to be precise), and this is a very interesting one to pick back up with.

1. When was the last time you cheated?
   On...? In respect to cheating on a work or school assignment, test, paper, etc., I never have.
2. When was the last time you stole?
   Never.
3. When was the last time you lied?
   White lie, like "Sure, that looks great on you...", or big lie? With the former I really couldn't say... stuff like that doesn't come up all that much, and it's not something I remember when it does. The latter, I'm not sure but I think it's been quite a while. Probably whenever the last time was when I told my parents I was going to be doing one thing, so I could actually go do something else. And hell, I'm 25 -- almost 26, now -- so that's been a while.
4. When was the last time you broke or vandalized another's property?
   Again, while it's been awfully tempting many, many times to key someone's car when they've parked like a total asshole, I have resisted it. I don't think I've ever even gone TPing, though if I did it would've been in high school.
5. When was the last time you hurt a loved one?
   Emotionally, or physically? I'm sure hearing me voice my cold feet back when he was getting ready to graduate (we weren't engaged yet and we were having a Talk about the future) must've hurt my now-husband to hear. Thankfully I'm long since over that (we've been married a year now; this was 3 1/2 years ago). Remembering stuff like that which is recent, when it's not earth-shattering, is hard because of that whole selective memory thing... you don't like to dwell on the fact that you hurt someone else (well, I don't anyway). Physically, I know I've accidentally hurt my husband numerous times by accident when wrestling with him, though I definitely can't pinpont an exact date so I can't say for sure "how long".

Hehehe, these read similarly to those "When are you going to stop beating your wife?" questions. Not really, but close. Very serious, but very soul-delving, which isn't a bad thing to do once in a while.

I was just looking at my current credit card statement, and found a finance charge. What? I paid in full last time... the time before the statement before this one, I had switched checking accounts so I had put in the new one and deleted the old one. I love online payments, and I've done it that way ever since I discovered I could. I went to pay the bill in full, a few days before it was due, and was told I could only make up to $1000 with my "first payment" and that I'd have to wait 2 weeks (I think, might've been 3) to make another one the same way. They treated it the way my first account had been treated, basically: as though I'd never made an online payment before.

Okay, so I paid the grand, and waited until the next statement since (a) any other payment would be late anyway, thus I would still incur a finance charge, and (b) the next statement (the one before my current one) was available less than a week before the online payment suspension was to be lifted anyway. There was a finance charge, no biggie. Paid it in full -- way early this time, I might add -- and figured that was the end of things.

Nope, wrong! The way they do things, is thus: as long as you've always paid in full there is no finance charge. However, once you incur your first finance charge by carrying a balance, from then on you are forever subject to finance charges for new spending each and every month, unless you get the finance charge waived. How wacky is that? Even if you pay in full forever after the one time you don't, you're stuck. The good thing is, the lady on the phone got it waived for me, and said I would receive a credit for it on the next bill. The only thing I forgot to ask, is whether I should pay the full amount including the current finance charge, or whether I should pay the full amount sans finance charge. I'm worried that if I don't pay the extra few $ it'll start me on "not paid in full" finance charges all over again. The upside, of course, is that if I overpay that little amount, that means I'll just have that little amount less on the next statement. So I'm just gonna pay full with the finance charge, especially since it's< $5 (my interest rate, which was once up as high as 17 or 18%, is now sitting at 13.65%).

Just be warned: ALWAYS pay in full, and if you switch the checking account you're paying online with, make sure you make your next payment with an old-fashioned paper check so you can STILL pay it in full. Otherwise you might be stuck with finance charges ad infinitum unless you cancel the account and get a new one (with a lower limit and everything). By the way, this is a Citibank Platinum Mastercard, so as always, Your Mileage May Vary.

Apparently the yahoos doing construction near us busted a water main this morning. J sent me an IM after he got home from his remaining summer class asking for the apartment office's number. I gave it to him and asked why, and he said there was no water. The office told him about the water main break, but I guess didn't know when it'd be fixed.

So, I went hunting for the water company's number. I couldn't find them, but I did find the sewer company's webpage with their phone number, and they gave me the correct number. The lady there said that, at 11:30am, the time estimate for having it fixed was between 4 and 6 hours. Yikes!! Since we need to do dishes, that meant not thawing anything to cook and going out instead.

As it turns out, the water is back on now (a half hour before their minimum estimate). BUT, it came out rather gross. He said it took 6 flushes to get the water in the toilet to be more or less clear, and running the water in the sink for 3 minutes to get it running more or less clear. And it's still not back to normal. Heh, dishes are waiting till tomorrow.

We'll be moving in less than two weeks. Technically, we get to move in after 5:30pm July 23. However, I don't see that we'd be able to do much at that point. (I still need to find out how we're going to make the final switch, i.e. get keys, trade over gas/electric, etc.) So things are easier on our kitties, they're going to first get to see the place on July 24 while it's still empty. We'll let them explore (while keeping an eye on them so they can't hide somewhere, hehe), then take them home. Then, they get to stay in the apartment until we get totally moved in. Only then will they get to make the move. That way, they'll see this new place they already saw, with all our (and their) familiar-smelling stuff in it. That's the theory, anyway...

On Friday we'll be moving a bunch of stuff, including late afternoon or evening when we get to move some big stuff with J's parents' truck. Saturday we'll move everything else if we can (with additional help from both my sister and a friend of ours). I guess Sunday will be rearranging any furniture we didn't already get situated, and unpacking important stuff (dishes, clothes, etc.). Then the next week or so will be the rest of unpacking, buying stuff we found a sudden need for, and cleaning the apartment so we can turn in the keys. Now that I think about it, I wonder if I could get one of the apartment managers (preferably Tracy) to go through a cursory inspection with us once we think we're done cleaning and fixing anything, to see if there's anything she thinks we missed that might take away from our deposit. Hmm...

I'm dreading all the packing and moving, but I cannot wait until we're moved in and have everything set up. Switching our phone over is gonna suck... I guess we'll just have them move it on Friday and any time we're at the apartment we'll just make sure one of us has a cellphone in case we need a phone. (There's no way in hell I want to pay for having two phone services at a time!) Same with DSL -- have them move it on Friday. (That's easy though, since we definitely won't need that in the apartment as soon as we've moved out!)

I'm rolling out a new forum for myself. I imported all the old entries (finally!) from my old one (thanks to having access to those tables in addition to my own) into a phpBB2 board. I actually had moved them over to some tables of my own (I was going to rewrite my own, but it started to be a rather daunting task). That made it a lot easier to move them into the phpBB2 constructs.

Here is the new board. You don't have to register to post, but you get to do a lot more nifty things (post editing, avatar, etc.) if you do. Be warned: I'm using an only slightly modified theme I got for it. While it's definitely blue, I'm probably going to work on my own in the coming weeks or months to get a feel for how it's done (there are a LOT of required template files, image files, etc.). I've decided I'm also going to use PHPBB2 for the new iteration of das brunogekritzel (web forum for the webcomic Bruno) since I'm scrapping my forum project. So I need to get familiar with the templates so I can create a theme that will be very similar to (just more extensive than) the existing one.

Been such a long time since I posted it's ridiculous!

First, our anniversary was trés cool. We stayed at Elysian Fields Inn mere blocks northeast of the French Quarter. We did lots of walking, napping, eating, relaxing, and taking pictures. If/when I can get the better pictures cropped for the web and up I'll post a link.

Second, it's been really busy. First I was playing catch-up with my Resolutions (catching up two weeks' worth takes a while) while also dealing with the server being down and not being able to. It was down while I was trying to do some of my updates before we left, then it was down a couple tiems after we got back, for hours and hours at a time.

Third, we went out of town again (not quite as far) with J's family to Kansas. We picked his aunt up at the airport Thursday night, then went to his parents' in Jeff City. Had dinner there, then got up early the next morning to leave. Stopped in KC to visit his sister, take her to lunch (Arthur Bryant's barbecue, yum! -- if you're ever in KC look 'em up!), etc. She decided not to come w/ us and drive out the next day. We then left for the Ft. Riley area (middle of Kansas somewhere) and checked into our rooms in Manhattan (small town, not THE Manhattan of course! ). After that, we drove to J's cousin's house near the fort, got to meet his cousin and his wife, and another cousin (2nd cousin) and her husband and their two kids. We also got to see his great aunt and meet her husband, and see his 2nd cousin's mom and dad (J's uncle, I think). Lotsa people. We hung out there (largely inside, while the kids & a couple adults played in an inflatable 3' pool out back), then had dinner, hung out some more, then went to see some fireworks. We finished up the night by Watching

The next day, we went back to his cousin's house for a couple hours, then drove to Salina to meet his cousins on his stepdad's side, one of whom I'd never met. They were running late (had driven from CA) so we stopped in... um... can't remember the name, but it was on the way to Salina, and visited the Greyhound museum. Weird... Then we met them in Salina, managed to find one place that wasn't fast food to eat (it was now about 3pm or so and this was lunch). We had a good time, good conversation, and all too soon lunch was over. After that, we went back to the house, had dinner (in spite of it being so close to our lunchtime), then talked and hung out a short while before going back to Jeff City.

We got back around 1:30am, and basically collapsed. J and I got to sleep in quite a bit, then we had breakfast for lunch. We left around 3 to take his aunt back to the airport and went straight to my parents' for dinner.

So... we've kept busy. I think this weekend will be nothing but packing and relaxing. You see, as of two weeks from tomorrow we can start moving into our new house. Yea!!! I figure it's better to start packing things here & there (non-essentials) now so we don't have to do it all last minute. Tonight is going to be putting clothes away, and also packing other clothes in suitcases (our two bigger, small ones for now). My parents said they could lend us their bigass suitcases for other stuff like clothes & sheets, etc., so hopefully we can pick up some of those soon (our huge one is already full).

J's parents are planning on coming out Friday afternoon to help us move, and finishing helping on Saturday. I'm definitely taking Friday off; I'm also considering taking Thursday as well, so we have time for last-minute packing as well as moving smaller stuff in our cars. I imagine we'll still be moving stuff Sunday, but maybe not.

WE'RE MOVING WE'RE MOVING WE'RE MOVING WE'RE MOVING!!!!!!!!