New house and moving in

Moving out of Alla's place was not a big deal. Well, almost...

All I had was my baggage, but I did acquire one piece of furniture --- a queen mattress that Alla agreed to sell me for $50. While not free, the mattress is nearly new and it is posturepedic so it's very comfortable and good for back/posture. Transportation of such 20 mm thick, spring construction mattress was a puzzle until Jono and Alla (separately) told me the way to do it. "Put it on the roof of your car" they said. OK. So I got Brendan and Tina to help me with man power and their car, which is a four door sedan so it has a larger roof top. Borrowed a thin rope that Blayne luckily had. After wrestling with the rope trying to untie the knots we started tying it to the roof. Not exactly straight forward, but I think we did secure it in such a way that it wouldn't (shouldn't?) slide forward or backward. I drove the car, tried to be slow and smooth. But the wind! Yes, the wind was at times lifting the mattress at the front. We all had at least one arm holding it through the open windows. At several points I thought that we were either going to lose the mattress or lose traction with the road and become a flying carpet! We made it of course --- 2-3 miles is not that long of a drive, although it did seem a little longer than usual with the mattress about to take off from your roof...

My room is slightly smaller (I approximate it to be 3.5 x 3.5 m) than at the first place, but it's large enough for me. The great thing is that I inherited a table, for which I bought some "Ikea" kit set of draws, from the previous owner of the room. He also left me a table lamp, nice computer chair with arm rests, and a little shelf to go in the closet to put shoes/clothes in it. The house is pretty well insulated. I saw a lot of roof insulation in the garage and there are double glazed windows everywhere. As soon as you open my window that looks onto the neighbouring property, you can hear their pool motor distinctly. So double glazing is pretty great for noise dampening. Personally I always wanted to own an energy efficient/quite/dry super comfortable house. This one comes close on some accounts.

There is a cat in the house. I have written something about it before so I might repeat myself. The cat was adopted from a cat shelter about half a year ago by all the flatmates. The colour is white. The noise is semi continuous loud and nagging. The name, Frosty. He meows particularly in the morning. So alarm becomes almost obsolete with this cat around. I think the reason he meows so much is that there was some traumatising experiences prior to adoption. Perhaps on the streets or in the animal shelter itself. So now he cries until you pat him and generally be near him. Sometimes you even have to stand near him while he eats. In the evenings he would often lie near you in peace. Generally attention seeking cat is how I would sum him up. We did let him out a couple of times, but he is usually confined to the home. That could be another reason for his outcries --- he is all alone during the day when we are out. Oh, and he's a little fat so he is on relatively strict diet now --- dry cat food small bowl portion in the morning and evening only. I think what happened was he was very thin when they adopted him and probably over fed him slightly.

Hooray, there is finally TV. Here, at least for now, they have cable TV with quite a few channels. I think 200 but a lot of them are not included in the package, so perhaps only 100 channels. No Fox news and not sure about Fox and comedy central. But there's still a lot of comedy series that you can watch and the other day I watched the end of one of my favourite Jacki Chan movies. But for now I haven't been watching TV really. No time. Still, it's good that I have the option to watch when I come home. In the previous flat TV reception didn't exist at all.

For a whole week we didn't have Internet in the house. They previously had DSL, but nobody was using the land line. So when Christian moved out they turned off old Internet and signed up for Cable. After a series of problems and us trying to get it going in turn we finally got it going. Personally I'd give myself a little medal for getting it online when everybody else gave up. There were two things to get online, cable modem --- so the Internet itself, and the wireless router that we connected to the modem to enable all of us to use Internet wirelessly... Anyway, that's all sorted now. In the busy times, the speed test results (you can test your own Internet connection on www.speedtest.net) are ~1.2 Mbps down, ~350 Kbps up, ~100 ms ping time in < 50 mile radius. So it's not super fast, but it's fast enough to stream any online videos and that's what German guys do all the time. They watch German news broadcasts, or at least one of them does. For reference at IBM I get ~15 Mbps up and down with only 15 ms latency! See http://www.speedtest.net/result/114037800.png

As a consequence of not having a telephone land line I now HAVE to use Skype. So get skype on your PC and we can talk. My skype id is alex.koudrin I can use skypeout to call regular phones, but it costs me 3.9 cents for connection setup and 2.1 cents/minute for each call. Additionally the quality to phones is generally lower. But for those who don't have regular or good internet that's the only option and it's not really that expensive really.