Looking For Furniture And Other Boring Tidbits

The apartment has been filled up pretty well this week. Right now we're looking at acquiring book shelves, a good desk and furniture for the bedroom beyond a bed. If anyone reads this, has some spare furniture lying around and knows of a good way to get it to the apartment here in Almere, don't mind contacting me about it :) After spending heaps of money on carpet, appliances and heavens know what else, we'd love to keep expenses low. This means more second hand items and the like.

With current items taken care of, I'd like to briefly summarize the moving itself. It all started on Tuesday the 21st when after my work I went to the apartment where we spent the night on a bare concrete floor with no internet and no appliances. Just a toilet and water. The next morning we got temporary (data capped) mobile internet via the provider XS4All, had the carpet man drop by to put in the carpet and took delivery of a washing machine and freezer/fridge combination.

On Thursday the 23rd the moving itself took place, with my mom taking care of matters at my old residence (her home) and my girlfriend and I handling things at her place. Loading things at my place went smoothly, at my girlfriend's place there were some issues, but in the end it all worked out. We ended that day in our apartment, surrounded by piles of boxes and furniture. After setting up the bed and putting the TV and couch into an agreeable position we left things until the next day, heading to city hall to register our new place of residence and handling changing our voting passes for the upcoming election to our new county.

This weekend we mostly spent setting up the apartment, unpacking boxes and setting up the new office from which I'm typing this blog post now. The apartment is in many ways very spacious and I haven't had this much space for an office, especially one for two people, at any time before. Only downer was having to buy new bolts and screws to put my desk together again. Also there's the issue of my girlfriend not having anything resembling a decent desk. I have an Ikea Jerker desk myself (160x80 cm version), and it'd be nice to have a matching desk.

At my job things are going well too. At this point I'm feeling the system analyst inside of me kicking in and I'm currently in the process of writing PHP-based scripts to automate a number of tasks which bottleneck the development process. My hope is that this will make things go even smoother and easier for everyone involved. I think that it'd be the role best suited for me, with a high amount of independence and a sense of responsibility and approval from my colleagues and higher-ups. Not just being a mindless drone doing repetitive work :)

Still a lot of work to do and expenses to be made, including the buying or leasing of my first car. It's tiresome but in many ways kinda fun. I'm still annoyed at the internet part, though. Supposedly 100/100 Mbit fiber will become available in a few weeks, or so XS4All said, but for all I know I'll be stuck on glacial 4 Mb/512 kb ADSL for the next year.


Maya