Put a Price on Sleep

First of all, welcome to my new house:

Yeah, front porch... and you can't see it, but there's a swing on the right. It's pretty cool. It swings and whatnot. Two people could sit on it. It generally has a pretty good view. You can see storm clouds rolling in from the West. The view right now, however, is mostly taken up by this:

There's a construction site down the way. It's full of disgruntled workers that seem to be in a permanent state of semi-on-strike. That's where they wake up super early in the morning and make tons of noise, but still manage to find time to stand on the side of the road with signs that don't explain what they want. While your "Honk for worker's rights!" sign appeals to my desire for a daily recognizable but abstract sense of justice, I don't feel strongly about your cause because I don't know what it is.

So, instead of supporting the workers who make lots of noise really early in the morning despite their confusingly intermittent strike, I decided to fix the main problem with the house. The problem is as follows: three bedrooms, three graduate students, but one of the bedrooms is in the back of the house, which is my room and was probably part of an addition at some point in the house's 105-year history. There are two doors to my bedroom. One is through another bedroom and the other is to the outside (and leads out onto a covered back-patio area). The problem is with the door to the outside. It led out to the patio, but with a two-and-a-half foot drop.

Woodworking project:

Win. Awesome. End of story.

Well, not quite end of story. I enlisted some help from Tyler. So, he deserves proper credit for helping with fixing the stairs into the concrete and reducing wobbliness. Also, I should varnish or paint it.

Some things money can rent

Sort of dull account of moving (not too long though...)

So, I moved. It was a good move. I mean, it was a good decision. Also, the move went okay. I got a lot of help from my new roommate and his family, who moved him here from Chatham, Ontario in a mini-van that they offered to use to assist me with my move. I'd say about half of my possessions made it into or onto that van during the move. So, I couldn't be more grateful.

A lot of my friends here were very busy around moving time. So, I did most of the work on my own. I was somehow surprised at how long it takes to move yourself. I've always had at least one person helping with any moving I've done in the past and it makes the whole process more than twice as hard and frustrating to do it on your own.

When the move was done, my room at the new place looked like this:

It was remarkable that I even managed to fit all that in the room. While it is a good-sized room, this amounts to 80-90% of my non-kitchen possessions from my old apartment. It was weird trying to figure out how to get a 1-bedroom-apartment lifestyle into a shared house.

Yes, that's right! A house. I live in a house. With the wonderful difference in housing markets from Chicago to South, it is possible to live in not-an-apartment. I haven't lived in a house since 2005 and it feels good. Hopefully, I won't have to move next summer.

I sold my old twin bed to new-roommate Gary and got this new (new-to-me) queen size from the St. Vincent DePaul Society warehouse, which is where much of my furniture has been purchased. Then, I got the sweet gray-scale, low quality, mostly polyester, Meijer bedding:

There are pillowcases that match the comforter, but extra pillows for aesthetic purposes... not really a high priority.

So, for now, Gary, Semyon and I live in this 3-bedroom house. In British terms, it's a bungalow, I believe, but it has a basement. So, I don't know what to call that, but it works out pretty well. There's a lot more space to do things like wood-working side projects and whatnot. Also, more place for people to stay if anyone should desire to visit.

More on the latest wood-working project soon...