Finally, a home..

Well, It’s empty but at least it’s mine (as long as I pay rent). This afternoon I paid the two months rent (plus commission) required for the first months rent of my new place. I was a bit wrong earlier with the google maps location. The actual location is here. Look at the clay tennis courts, and I am in the buildings to the left, across that street to the left. I stick my head out of the front window, look to my left and I can see the lake and people playing in the grass. Ahhhhh <sigh> It’s nice. The place is smaller then my last joint, no doubt, but i think I can make things fit. Some things I forgot to thing about that are going to bit me in the ass are lack of closets, complete lack of phone or cable plugs outside the living room and and plug locations. I should probably get a few European UPS’s since I think mine aren’t going to work here. And then of course it’s a guessing game with the power.

So, Things I’ve still got to do include stopping a few utilities in DC and then starting up the broadband access here. I’ve got to clean the construction dust from the shelves and appliances (everything is new) and I’ve got to look for a hardware store. I need to get some picture rails, overhead lights and some curtains or shades. I need to find a kitchen table (small) and a few rugs for the hardwood floors. These are the differences between an American apartment and a European one that isn’t fully decorated.

Lets see, this past weekend was Queen’s Day. I had a good time. There where a lot of people out selling things and once you got off the main street, most of it was garage sale stuff and not people that were trying to get rid of their extra business items. I met up with a coworker, his girlfriend and her friend. We wondered around the central part of Rotterdam looking at all the stuff for sale and then headed over to his place for a while, watched a movie (Jarhead - which BTW was pretty funny since the two ladies are Italian and one of them doesn’t pick up the english very quickly, so we stopped to explain things a few times throughout the movie. This also provided some interesting conversation in regards to their point of view of war vs ours.). After hanging out for a while me and the friend took a walk over to Kralingse and then had some drinks and talked for a while. It was a good time. Later that evening we met back up with my friend and his girl and we went to her place so she could cook dinner. Yummy. And Italian is so lovely to listen too.. It turned out to really be a pleasant day.

Sunday was a day of rest, reading, paying bills and making sure I got money and can continue to get by. It’s these first few months that are going to be rough. Breaking the lease on my apartment in DC cost me two months of rent, and then 2 months to get into this place.. plus movers, hotel, etc. My company has been a BIG help in all of this and assisting when I need help, so it’s really good. I am really happy to be working for this company. I just go to make sure I don’t over extend myself.

Other then that, things are groovy. Work is picking up and I finished installing my Ubuntu workstation/server and even got dokuwiki setup so I could start making notes on this new site. It’s really helpful to be able to copy off the HQ wiki and use that as a template. That REALLY helps. I also want to setup GLX and try to get that working. A lot of the people at the office seem pretty smart and know some interesting things, but then I look at the way they do things, like account deletions, file management and server control and I don’t know where they get their ideas. Also, they are all very pro MS and Dell. Their call. Their money. I just have to learn to deal.

As you can see, there are some pictures up. I want to use some better gallery software, but I haven’t given myself the time to find some. So right now I’ll just use the media capabilities of doku. yeah.