May 12, 2008

• construction and light bulbs

  I sleep too much these days. I always have really. But lately it's pretty annoying. I keep sleeping in two to three hour bouts at a time. I then wake up for a couple hours then go back to sleep. I've completely lost the art of getting a good night's sleep. I don't know why. I just can't sleep for 6-8 hours at once. It's impossible for me now.  I end up sleeping much more than that in the end, but it's small sleep sessions followed by periods where I'm tired but unable to sleep. I hate this feeling. I wonder if poor eating habits has anything to do with it?

  So I paid movers to move most of my stuff out here. Well actually my new job paid for most of it when they reimbursed me which was quite nice of them.  But I am psychotic.  When the movers came and delivered all my stuff a fit of madness hit me and as they started to work on putting together my stuff I said to them: "Oh don't worry about it. I'll do it myself!" 

  I guess I was thinking that I'd give them a holiday or something. Do something nice for these random movers. I hated that feeling of sitting around watching them while they were working their asses off hauling my stuff around. I know I was paying them for it, but it felt wrong anyway.  And plus I thought the activity of constructing stuff would do me good.  And I wasn't worried too much, after all I had put all this stuff together all by myself the very first time after I got them too.

  The mover guy looks at me and says incredulously:  "You think putting all this stuff together will be easy?!?"

  I laughed and said: "No. I don't think it will be easy. I think it will be fun!"

  The movers thanked me profusely as they left. Probably the easiest job they ever had. And I gave them a nice tip anyway. I was happy to get them out of my apartment so I could start to get busy with the work of putting this stuff together.

  Well guess what? 

  It's not fun.

  OK, at first it was fun. Or at least not bad. When I was putting together the easy stuff, like my chair and the lamps and the table.  But now has come the monster of a project. The Futon. It's not a little simple futon. It's a big monstrous futon. And I see the pieces lying on the ground staring at me. I remember now that it was quite a nightmare putting this beast together on my own last time. The thought of the repeat experience does not fill me with joyful anticipation. I am dreading it. It's just one of those tasks that is just unbelievably annoying to do by yourself. It'd be a pretty trivial two man job, but for one person, or at least for one not so skilled in the arts of construction as myself, it is a royal pain in the ass. Sometimes I like challenging myself with absurd tasks like this. Sometimes I just get sick of it.

  The other annoyance with construction of these things is that I took them all together myself too way back when I moved from Elkton to Bethesda and stuck it all in storage. And back then I wasn't too bright too cuz I put all the bolts and screws and other tiny pieces in one giant bag together. Meaning that as I've constructed I've spent an insanely long amount of time just going through this bag trying to figure out which pieces belong to which item. Admittedly I was in a super hurry back then, but man that was a dumb thing to do.

  I've still got two bookshelves, two desks and a futon to put together, and until I do that I can't finish unpack the numerous boxes I've got stacked up again my wall.  It'll probably be weeks before I am truly settled in here.

  And all I keep doing is sleeping...

  Well that and watching anime and studying to learn PERL for work and spending way waaay too much time chatting with friends online and doing my xanga thing. The phone fiascos also sucked up a sick amount of time (more on that later). Sigh. I've said this before but I'll say it again, if I had three days for every one that everyone else had, everything would be perfect. 
   
  Let me randomly talk about something else I do that is psychotic much like the builder thing.  Every time I've moved into an apartment so far I've replaced every single light bulb with a Compact Florescent Lightbulb. And every time I've left an apartment so far I've left the light bulbs.  I do this because they are better and I feel that the next residents of the apartment should have the benefit of the CFL bulbs. This helps save the environment! Or so I imagine.

  Of course it's quite possible tha the maintenance people just go in and return all the lighbulbs to the original lighbulbs to be "fair".  I hope not, but I'm almost certain that's what they do. But even then, maybe they take the new bulbs and take them home and use them in their own houses. Still a plus for the environment. Or they give them to friends. Or they use them for hallway lights and stuff. I've noticed in a lot of these apartment complexes many but not all of hte hallway lights have been replaced by CFL bulbs. Maybe that's how they do it, by scavanging CFL bulbs from people like me who leave the bulbs when they depart. 

  Still, there's a small chance, that they just throw them away.  That would be bad. Very bad. It's worse than not getting the benefit of the switch, it's actually environmentally negative since they contain mercury.

  Because of that thought, when I left my last apartment I left a note for the maintenance people. It said   "FREE STUFF!" Oh yeah, that's cuz I couldn't fit all my stuff in my car so there was abunch of junk I just left for them to have. IT also explained the value of compact florescent lightbulbs and said that they should use them as they see fit. I'm pretty sure most everybody knows about CFL bulbs now, but still, it seemed like a good idea. Just in case.

  Of course from my own financial perspective replacing all the bulbs with CFL bulbs over and over again makes it so that I do not gain any of the economic advantage of using CFL bulbs. You have to use them for a long time before the saving in electricity start to exceed the cost of the bulbs. But I still wouldn't feel good about myself if I just took my bulbs and let the next people suffer with non CFL bulbs wasting energy. It seems wrong. Likewise I brought bulbs for my parents to replace throughout their house. And if you are a friend of mine and you aren't using CFL bulbs and are reading this, let me know! I'll buy you CFL bulbs too. It's high time we wiped out the ancient incandescent regime! Increased efficiency is a cheaper and more effective means of reducing dependency on fossil fuels than converting to alternative fuels. And besides, twisty bulbs just look cooler anyway.

  I told my boss I like to get up early and go to work early like around 7 or 8 am. That's sort of true. I do like to wake up early and I feel my brain works much better in the morning.  He said that's fine and he's flexible with my hours so I can get there early and leave early which is awesome.

  But it's past 7 and I'm not at work. I'm here blogging. I probably won't get to work until 9 again. Nor have I yet gotten to work before 8:30. Heh. My boss is going to think I'm a liar. Oh well.

  Day two of random rambling complete

  • 7:09 am
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