Dealing with my hangups

Lots of progress on the move today, starting small with putting the few things back on the walls which were taken down from the old apartment. Calendars, a canvas print of mom's wedding picture and a Thai hill tribes necklace. Something new which is on the back wall of the office is a photo taken by MZig of me polka-ing with Guenevere in a 1974 production of Camelot. It had been taped to the wall by the fireplace in the ancestral homestead and apparenly my little sister salvaged it along with the myriad family photos around it when the folks sold the house. She had it re-matted (dad's masking tape destroyed the original matte), framed and shipped to me.



Then I unboxed all the photo binders and slide carousels and put them back in the bookcase they came from. Without going into more boring detail, there are no more boxes in the apartment to unpack except half a dozen in the office - books to go back on the bookcase. Two boxes are music books and sheet music.
That was this afternoon.

This morning started with a trip to the PO, I had a couple of packages to mail, and I wanted to check if the box from Thailand was there waiting for me. Turns out the local PO is closed for everything except pickup on Saturdays, they checked and there was no box for me. They keep international packages a month, which means it has not arrived yet. Whew. I'll have to wait till Monday to mail the packages.

Next was dropping off the car at the audio shop to have them pull the piece of crap Clarion unit and install a Pioneer. This would take 3 hours, so I hopped on a bus and rode it all the way to the end of the line. It passes through downtown San Jose, ending at a transit center near the southern border. I had been on most of those streets before, but coming from different directions, so it was an education to see what was there. The new city hall is a total WTF. Huge waste of real estate, big empty plaza and something which looks like an astronomy observatory art centerpiece. Pretty, but a huge waste of funds. Found a pocket of police corruption - six massage parlors in a row.

Took the next bus back, got off at Santana Row, walked a couple of blocks to one of my favorite bakeries and had an artichoke heart salad and a chocolate croissant. And later got four goodies to go. Excellent Napoleon, except for the raspberries. Walked back to the bus stop, got to the corner just in time to see my bus driving away. 15 minute wait for the next one, not too bad. But who knew the sun would come out? It was supposed to be cloudy and cool all day, but now it's 75° and I'm in a black t-shirt.

Car was done long before I got there, they did a great job, and this unit works the way I expect it to. Much much more intuitive than the Clarion, so much so that I spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to skip to the next song on the iPod, before I noticed the >> and << buttons under the volume control. The Clarion had a kludgy touch screen button.

Home, it was easy to punch in my current location as the home location on the GPS, and there's a one-button "take me home" feature. The map was easy to read even in the sunlight.

While I was unpacking I watched some football, and saw the blown call which cost Stanford their win. Huskies were lame against a not trying very hard USC team. LSU fought to a win after a listless 50 minutes. Yankees lost in extra innings after a miracle 9th inning comeback. Yay!

I thought that after I got all the boxes off of the couch two days ago Domino would go back to napping there, but it took me sitting on the couch today to get her to re-adopt it. She is very comfortable in this place and will park anywhere.

After the books are in the bookcase, there is a HUGE project yet to do. I need to pull almost everything out of the storage room, set up the big rack in the livingroom, and unpack all the phono records and vintage family photos onto it, as well as my framed & mounted photos. Don't want any of that where it's not climate controlled.

Ordered a copy of the OBC recording of Brigadoon from Amazon.

Both going and coming was a bit awkward because the fire station on the corner was having some sort of party, which featured giving rides in the fire trucks. There was a line around the block, and the garage area was filled with people sitting at tables like it was party time. Visitors were using the apartment parking lot to drop off their kids, which was rude, and dangerous. looking at the firefighter web site, it was one of these:

October 13 - Firefighter Pancake Breakfast

October 13 - Compost Workshop

October 13-14 - Extra Dumping Weekend

Or maybe all three.

No plans for tomorrow except unpack more, watch football, program the presets in the new car unit and maybe go to SJ and catch the matinée of The Merry Widow which a couple of my friends are in. But probably not. Hate matinées.