Month: September 2021

Settling In

Things are finally starting to get settled in the new house. What with the Billy landing on my foot unexpectedly, we’ve set up my office space upstairs and I’ve worked from there the past week. Day by day, Tracy and I are unpacking this or that, and taking care of putting things more in place.

An interesting thing I hadn’t thought of much is how items settle into their final place just by virtue of being used. I get sugar from the sugar pot, put it back on the kitchen counter, and that’s where it ends up being: a place where I naturally end up looking for it and end up putting it. Little by little, the house is getting more use and as a result feels more homely.

Today, we got a hedgehog house in, in the hopes of moving the hedgehog mother and two children that have been camping out in a vase in the garden. The vase is right in the middle of our backyard, and we hope by offering them a much nicer place to stay that they’ll be motivated to move there. While we can’t plant anything right now, we are looking forward to preparing the space for spring, so that we can plant prepared.

All in all, things are looking up for the house.

Attack of the Billy

Yesterday, when trying to assemle one of the classic Billy bookcases, I injured my foot. I had assembled the frame, as usual, and needed to get that folded wooden panelling on the back. Normally, the idea is to slide that into the frame from the bottom to then nail it in place; however, in this case, the room was too small to also accomodate sliding that frame into place. Fortunately, you can also fiddle the back into place from the side just fine. However, when trying to get that done, I felt I needed to put the Billy on its side so I could slide the second half into position better. In a moment that was a little too quick for me to know exactly what happened, the Billy frame hit something, slid out of my hands, and landed straight on the top of my left foot.

Fortunately, Tracy was right there to help with my now-swiftly-swelling foot, as we kept it elevated and iced. This morning, fortunately, it’s not as swollen or bruised as it could have been, and it’s mostly just sore enough to make walking or standing achy and painful. Still, things could have been worse, so I consider myself quite lucky. Most likely, all I’ll have to contend with is working from home for the next couple of days, as wearing a shoe on that foot isn’t an option right now.

Internet Access Once More

Yesterday, the ISP’s network engineer dropped by to work on the lines to the house. Last year, when we went through the same when we moved into our old apartment, the whole process took about a month. Somebody came by to check out the line, discovered that parts were missing, another appointment had to be made, the sidewalk dug up, new lines laid, first guy came back, and so on, and so forth. This time, fortunately, it was done in about an hour. A simple matter of threading a line through a pre-existing hole, hooking up an adapter for ethernet, and then connecting the modem.

So, once more, we finally have Internet access. Sadly, it’s only DSL, though. Apparently, there are fibreoptic lines in Franeker, but only for the new construction in the south of the town. We’ll need to find out if there’s any petition we can sign on to to try and get fibreoptic over where we live. Either way, beggars can’t be choosers, and we’re here with Internet access. The next step for this project is to measure up the house and work out where we’ll be laying the ethernet cabling, but that’s also somewhat dependent on where we’ll end up finally putting all the PCs. For now, though, we can try to work out general access for each floor.

At least right now, we’ve hooked our Raspberry Pi back up so we can have our self-hosted cloud solutions back. Our larger server will come later (with the added project of moving all our cloud services from the Pi to the server box). There’s so much still to do, but every day is a step closer to what we want our house to be.

More unpacking

Even though we moved last only a year ago, I’d forgotten how much work moving is. This weekend, we cleared more things from the living room, and cleared a bunch of boxes. We’ve set up Tracy’s working space, so she can start again next week. My working space will be more temporary for the week, as I will have to stick to moving my laptops around. The office, sadly, is still a large collection of boxes right now, as we’ve set Tracy up in the living room.

It was more urgent to set up Tracy’s workspace, as she needs a solid computer setup to do her revisions. Sure, you can do that with only a laptop if needed, but the laptop we have for her is quite bad, and working with only one screen is quite tricky (she has to reference a lot to properly revise texts). I, on the other hand, have an office at work for me and the Secretary of my committee, so I can work from there just fine. It’s only my recreation at home that would suffer from not having a full set-up, as I’d be limited in the types of PC games I can play, and drawing, designing, and so on is just easier on my desktop setup.

Tomorrow, I’ll be working from home for the first time in this house, as we’ll be waiting for the installer to drop by. We’ve already had some issues with them (our ISP assured us that they did this type of installation, whereas they denied that and cancelled our appointment on Friday), so I want to be on-hand to deal with whatever issues we run into. It’ll certainly be a challenge, because the mobile connection we have hasn’t been good enough for full audio/video streming so far. Potentially, I’ll try to host a hotspot from my work phone to see if having parallel connections will do us better. Fortunately, my employer is pretty darned good about all these types of benefits, and don’t particularly complain unless people really go crazy on these systems.

Being without a lot of this type of recreational activity has made me appreciate it more, though. While it’s been great cycling around, taking quiet time in the garden, enjoying exploring our new town, I have certainly missed some other forms of entertainment as well. One thing I wasn’t expecting is how enthusiastic I’ve been getting for playing some TTRPGs; it’s been quite a long while since I’ve been excited about playing and particularly running something. For a while, the feeling of social obligation overshadowed the enjoyment I got from playing RPGs, but it’s starting to come back to me, and that’s really nice.

Update

Last week, Tracy and I moved to our new house in Franeker, a little place in the north of the Netherlands. We’re still surrounded by boxes, tired, achy, but happy that we’re now actual homeowners. That has, however, had quite some consequences on our life right now beyond us feeling exhausted and achy.

We have, at the moment, no Internet access, sadly. Well, that’s not quite accurate; it’s better to say we have no fast internet access. Apparently, the previous owner never had much truck with fancy modern advances like telecommunication. The only thing we have here is some coax-cabling, which I haven’t seen outside of radio communication purposes since the late ’90s. So, we’re having to get our ISP out here to install an access point for the modem to connect to. We’re also going to be dropping from 1gig up/down fibreoptic cabling to a 100 up/30 down DSL line. Yikes. In the meantime, our ISP has given us one free mobile access weekly pass, as our mobile subscription is with them as well. It’s a fairly decent connection with which we can browse the web reasonably. We can even stream some video, though I’ve noticed that telecommunication is really spotty to the point of it being completely impractical (the usual constant gaps and breaks in communication, freezes, and so on).

As a result, both RPG sessions that were to happen in this week were unable to work out. I was to play in the first session of Nobilis yesterday, but had to bow out; the group started without me, which makes perfect sense—delaying sessions often lead to a swift end of an RPG campaign. It’s a pity to have to miss that first session, as so much crucial group building happens right there, but there was no feasible way to properly join in at this moment. Even if we did have the internet, I have no real space to put down my laptop right now to join in without also bothering Tracy immensely.

The second RPG that was preventing from starting up was my Burning Wheel game. We were to have had the first session two weeks ago, as I figured to make a start before the move. Sadly, one of the players had a death in the family, so naturally we pushed it all forward until they felt ready to play again. They expect to be ready for it in a few weeks, so we’ll hold off until then. Particularly since they also had trouble participating in Session 0 (they’re visually impaired, so the table referencing that is needed for character creation in Burning Wheel wasn’t practical for them), I do want to make sure they’re there for the first session.