I can now say this to the world at large.

I have a new job, starting June 8. I'm still with the same company, but I'm making the move up a level (yay promotion, and yay more money) and into a different department.

The drive will be slightly longer, but not intolerably so, and for most, if not all, of the drive, I'll be going against the main flow of rush hour traffic.

The only thing I'm not entirely sure of, is whether I'll have to stick more to actual business casual and less to jeans and a t-shirt. I do have enough in my wardrobe to get me through the first few days or so in business casual without repeating myself; if I find that I'll need to maintain that I'll have to do a little shopping. However, I may be able to find out ahead of time if I get asked over to attend a meeting or two before my official start date (both my current and new managers have discussed this as a possibility and are all squared away on that), meet all my coworkers, check out the cube I'll be going to, etc. etc. If I get a better feel for it before the actual date, then I'll probably hit up some stores during the typical Memorial Day clothing sales and see what I can put together. I'll probably still show up in the morning with my hair damp though.

I'm a little anxious since I have a bunch of shit to wrap up in my current job, plus there'll be lots of ropes to learn at my new job as I get settled in. However, in spite of thinking I'd not shown enough confidence in the interview and figuring I wouldn't get the job, I did get the offer, so I have to remember that.

We did get our basement dried out, but we have some issues in the aftermath. Carpet's toast; more specifically, the pad underneath is toast. The linoleum in the bathroom, which had some ugly mildew staining anyway, came away in places, so that's done for. The bathroom cabinet was self-made apparently, and of untreated fuckin' wood, so that's as good an excuse as any to get rid of it (if you know what you're doing, the drawers shouldn't be crooked, ferchrissakes). The wallpaper felt a bit... weird along one wall, and it's ugly, so it's gotta go, won't miss it. Some of the baseboard, painted in an ugly color anyway, came away. I'm gonna call the insurance company and see what, if anything, they'll pay out. I'm obviously not gonna ask about the entire bathroom, 'cause really the wallpaper's probably actually fine and I just hate it, baseboard for a little bathroom is so very trivial, etc. The linoleum even needed replacing due to mildew stain ugliness, and is a small area. So really, I'm mainly going to ask about the carpet & pad replacement (gonna use linoleum behind and immediately around the bar this time, though).

Worse, though, is a situation we didn't know about until we moved everything back last night (by that point, we'd diluted-bleached the carpet to get rid of the mildew, let it dry, then febreezed all over). J and my dad had moved a bunch of stuff into that hallway. One of the couches was up on some spare random bits of lumber, there was a bunch of random shit (most of which "came with the house", except the minifridge and some boxes) under the stairs that got moved, blah blah blah. Well, the bathroom door was open, and most of the random shit was leaning against the rest of the wall the door was open against. We moved everything back to its normal locations, and found that for about a foot high along that wall, there's a nice black colony of mold. Urgh. Nastay. So we're gonna see what we can do to get rid of it this afternoon. It even got a bit on the bathroom door frame and the baseboard just below that. Not sure if we should try to kill it, or if it could have grown all the way through the drywall thus meaning drywall replacement, or what. If it needs replacing, I might ask the insurance company about that as well.

I also got my first iris blooms, and I hope to put pictures of those up soon. They're awesome. Plus the mountain bells, in spite of the fact the plants are hardly anything yet, look like they are budding and gonna bloom already, which is cool. The lily of the valley plants seem to be doing OK, plus the one hosta that's coming back. I'm worried about my begonias and cylamen though. The cyclamen doesn't seem to have been dug up, but it hasn't started coming up yet, and only one or two of the begonias (both in the hanging potters in back, and the ones in front of the house) are just now starting. I dunno if that's normal, or bad. The squirrels keep digging up the begonia bulbs in front, but they haven't tried it yet since we got all that rain. Now that our second, much briefer bout of rain (just yesterday) seems to be over, I need to go back out and douse the area again with stinky crap to keep them away.

If you attended any of the four University of Missouri schools in 2004, you probably want to read this article.

I graduated in 2000, so if they are accurate on the attendance data of those affected, then my info shouldn't be included. However, I don't know how much I'd trust that assumption. I also suspect it's going to take them a lot longer to contact everyone, than it did for my company when the laptops in December '05 and '06 went missing, even though there are quite a bit fewer people they have to contact. So if you attended even within a couple years of 2004, you may want to contact them a few weeks from now to verify your information was not in the hacked database. I say a few weeks, because they're going to be swamped with calls as it is, so waiting for the hub-bub to die down is a good idea. Might also not be a bad idea to keep tabs on the story in case they find out there was more data compromised than they are currently reporting.

So, we're having water come in our basement. It's been nearly a full day since it stopped raining here, and yet it's still coming in from the water table.

Yesterday afternoon and evening we had 2 shop vacs going (ours and my parents') on the 70s shag, and while I'm definitely thankful we had that rather than a less absorbent carpet (yay for saving our stuff by slowing down how fast the water crossed the carpet) it's not easy getting it out again, especially while it keeps coming in.

We have a rough idea what started it coming in, and where, but as for stopping it, and whether we can get to where it's coming in to stop it doing it, I have doubts about. I called the company a friend of mine used to assess his basement; they're an engineering company that doesn't sell the fixes, so they are beholden to their reputation rather than "hey, you'll have to use our expensive patented way of patching up your concrete that only we can do!!!" They're gonna call us back to make an appointment.

In the meantime, all we can do is go back to work on it. There's a lot of it again, because we had to sleep, and we got lots of it 'cause of being tired from the week and from being sore from all the work yesterday. We're going to have to rip up the linoleum and baseboard in the bathroom, and probably replace the sink 'cause the cabinet was made of untreated wood (wtf makes a wooden cabinet in a bathroom with untreated wood?). I'm quite happy to use that opportunity to rip out the ugly ass wallpaper in there and get rid of the ugly teal half line around that matches the baseboard. We'll also have to replace the shag. Even if the carpet itself maybe is worth saving, the pad underneath is fucked. It's not worth the effort, honestly. If we're lucky, the bar, which also was made of untreated wood (dry bar, carpet, so not entirely dumb) will be OK. It's pretty huge, and only got wet up about an inch of it, so it might be OK. Mostly we were able to save stuff by putting it all the way at the far end of the carpet away from everything, or over on the tiled hallway past where the water was running to the drain.