hrj

So let's see what I've accomplished this weekend:

* Mowed the lawn (I seem to be able to get by with about once a month. I feel a bit weird mowing and edging the parking strip, which is nothing but weeds, but it's sort of on the "broken window" principle. I.e., keep it the nicest looking weeds I can, for now, and people will at least know I care about appearances.) Also finished mapping the current contents of the front yard. (The back yard will only take one more session, since there aren't that many plants there, even though the spaces is larger.)

* Organized the housecleaning supplies and installed a rack for the brooms and mops and whatnot. (Originally I had visions of an actual broom closet somewhere, somehow, but at the moment I'm settling for a rack attached to the end of the stash shelves, which is right next to the door to the garage, plus a cheap plastic bin for the supplies.)

* Installed a bolt-style lock on the garage door. (This is a sort of belt-and-suspenders thing for some peace of mind. Mostly for when I go away for the weekend.)

* Picked up supplies for the class I'm teaching next weekend for Erinwood A&S. (I'm play-testing a "heat management for open fire cooking" class for people who are interested in participating in "cooks play-dates" but are hesitant about their fire management skills.)

* Re-organized the book boxes in the garage. There were about four purposes here. 1) Pull out the boxes with music books and cookbooks and shelve them. 2) Pull out the boxes with the women's history/gender studies books to start tracking down images for my collegium class. 3) Re-organize the non-book boxes (old paperwork, journal offprints, in-process research, etc.) to make it easier to get at thing's I'm likely to need (like teaching supplies). 4) Map out the location of all the boxes so that it will be less work if I need to pull something to get a particular book or set of books out before the library gets set up. The other incidental benefit of this project is that I removed enough boxes to give me one box-width more of free space in the garage.

* Put away the box of misc. art supplies and the office supplies that live in the secretary desk.

* Did the preliminary sort through the 2 boxes of cassette tapes. Since I don't directly list to cassettes any more, my rule of thumb is that I'm only going to keep things that either have archival value (e.g., tapes that have me or my material on them) or ones that I'd be willing to go to the trouble of ripping if I can't find the album on CD. Since most of my folk music on cassette was originally dumped from CDs, the vast majority of what I may be getting rid of is filk and filk-oid music. I promised cryptocosm he gets first dibs on anything I'm discarding, after which I'll pursue other options.

* Very minor accomplishments: did laundry, cleared off stuff accumulated on dining room table (which I really really intend not to be a dumping ground), got more or less caught up on sleep. Still to do: data entry for various of the above (yard map, book box map, recent purchases to catalog), catch up on electronic correspondence.

When I decided to move to the suburbs, I made the commitment to myself that I would not be driving in to work -- not every day, not even most days, in fact, as rarely as possible. So one of my location criteria was close proximity to a BART station. And to make the commute even more practical and flexible, I decided to get a folding bike that I could take on BART during commute hours. Mind you, this wasn't absolutely essential, because there's no parking fee at North Concord BART and the Emery-Go-Round shuttle from Macarthur station gets me to about 3 blocks from work. (And it's quite possible that during the rainy winter season I'll leave the bike home.) But I really wanted to have the flexibility to run errands from work (to my PO box, to the credit union, shopping) and the idea of keeping a bike at work permanently didn't appeal to me.

So having done some preliminary research and consulted knowledgeable experts, I got a Brompton folding bike from a distributor in Palo Alto. It was, to put it bluntly, expensive. However it does live up to the hype. After several days of practice, the fold-down and unfolding are very fast and smooth. When folded up, the bike has a very small footprint. I'm still getting the hang of how to tuck one foot around it to hold it in place when I'm sitting down so that it won't fall over on the curves and decelerations. But on a very crowded train, I can simply stand straddling the bike and it takes up little more space than I would by myself. It's light enough to carry easily up and down stairs (but small enough to take on the escalator), although not light enough to take the stairs at a run to catch a close connection.

As a bike, the Brompton isn't something I'd ride long distances for recreation. The 16" wheels have a very different steering feel than a standard bike. There also isn't a lot of "spring" in the construction and you not only feel every bump, you feel every little stick you run over. (Of course, I'm used to my Trek, which has actual spring suspension on the front end.) The model I got has the hub-internal 3-speed gears and 2 derailleur gears on the crank, for a total of 6 combinations. My commute biking is all essentially flat and I stick mostly to the lower derailleur. The gearing on the 3-speed set doesn't allow for a lot of nuance, but the highest power gear is sufficient to tackle the hills going up to downtown Berkeley.

The commute itself is turning out to be relatively painless. Relatively. For the settling in period, I'm getting up at 6am with a goal of out-the-door at 6:30. That gets me to my desk around quarter of 8. I may adjust things to target an 8am arrival more closely. I don't really have a routine coming home yet, but at least twice last week I managed to get in my gym time before heading home. The routine also works well for picking up groceries at Berkeley Bowl before getting on the shuttle, although not much more than a backpack's worth.

Various house-sale errands meant that I did drive to work twice last week, providing a comparison. So a bike/transit commute of ca. 1:15 compares with a drive time of 0:45, given the same departure time from Concord. (With no unusual Traffic Events on the route. Those could bump it up considerably.) But taking transit means that I get in about 45 minutes each way of reading e-mail and other online material or even books. I remember reading books. I actually read an entire novel in the last two weeks. And the online time is something I'd be doing anyway, so in effect (assuming I don't simply expand my online time) I'm "saving" half an hour a day over driving. Although not over a non-commute life. I'm still settling into a routine at the moment. One of these days I'll even get caught up on my sleep.

I decided to take yesterday off from house-closing work and actually have a "vacation" day during my vacation. Since I'd totally ruined my hands with the cleaning on Wednesday, I decided to splurge and went on yelp.com to find a well-recommended local place for a mani-pedi. The recommendations were dead on: for the "deluxe" version I got a total of about an hour and a half of soaking, clipping, filing, massaging, and whatnot. Next, I headed to a bike shop in Palo Alto that advertised not only the ability to try out the Brompton folding bikes, but the possibility of buying one of their in-stock models off the shelf. It was a bit of an extravagance, but I'm totally committed to not driving in to work except on special logistical occasions, so in the long run I'll consider it worth while. That left me several hours before I needed to be at the Peachwoods Grill for Seth's birthday dinner, so I took a scenic drive along Skyline and looping through Big Basin park. Dinner was a perfect steak and fine company (then an hour and a half drive home).

Today it's back to Oakland to finish up some details. And it occurs to me that if I'm going to bike/BART in to work on Monday, I need to swing by the office to pick up my bike helmet. I parked my old bike at work and left the gear in my desk on the assumption that it would take me a while to pick up a BART-able bike and that it would be useful to keep the bike at work for errands. Hmm, or maybe I should swing by work on Sunday when I could actually pop the bike in the back of the car as well (can't do that today) since I won't need it there. Also: on Sunday there's no chance that I might get shanghaied into doing actual work.

I'm planning to day-trip Beltane on Saturday. I've been seeing all sorts of descriptions of people's contributions for the Saluminati gathering and have been contemplating whether I should try to find some sort of compatible side-snack to bring (like some palate-cleansing fruit) or whether I can get away with taking a pass based on the thread-worn "in the middle of moving" excuse and show up to nosh anyway.

Time for another non-locked post about the moving progress. (As I've mentioned before, for several reasons I'm keeping most of the move-related posts locked. I'll go back to my more open habits after this is all over.)

The house sale itself is progressing but there isn't much for me to do on that point. I assume there are wheels spinning frantically in other places, attended to by other people. My packing process is in overdrive. Most of the major categories of non-furniture have been boxed up, although there's still a lot of assorted miscellanea. I think the next step on that end is to specifically sort out the stuff that I'll want available in the between-houses period (which will be of unknown length, but probably not more than a couple months, tops). I'm aiming for a very minimalist approach: a big suitcase of modern clothing, a small one of SCA stuff, the cat and her gear, essential electronics, a handful of books, a sewing project. Then it's time to do a room-by-room sweep for the remaining stuff to be boxed. Furniture needs to be prepped for storage, measured (to estimate what size pod-container I'll need), and in some cases disassembled.

I think I'm keeping the stress and sleep-disruption reasonably under control. I should probably try to make it to the gym at least a couple times a week to help with the stress (although based on how tired I am, I think box-lifting is serving quite well as a substitute exercise). That's been going by the wayside simply because there's so much to do. I've put my boss on notice that I may want to take a week's vacation when it comes down to the wire, although I may not need the whole week if I'm enough ahead of the game. (And it occurs to me that after I've bought the new house, I'll be needing some days off to get utilities and whatnot set up, so I can't blow my whole accrual now.)

The "window shopping" looking at house listings in Concord is starting to get routine. I have a fairly solid idea of what sorts of things are going to be available, which was the main purpose of the window-shopping. But there's no point in getting specifically interested in particular properties yet. It's interesting to have become so familiar with the properties that show up on the on-line searches. (Of course, not all available properties are going to be on those lists.)

Gah, brain has checked out for the night. Becoming incoherent.

I have a realtor. For realio trulio this time. When he comes back next week to look at the other units, he'll bring a representation contract for us to sign. I told him my context and rough game plan and he suggested a few tweaks and rearranged some of the to-dos. I listed my financial resources and goals and he opined that my "would make me very happy" ending balance not only was eminently doable but was probably not ambitious enough. His advice and projections were realistic and appropriately sprinkled with caveats. I think we'll deal well together. So now I ramp up the prep work and set the various "start of clock" items in motion. More details after I talk to the tenants.

Amusingly enough, after the e-mail correspondence with "Robin" I had it fixed in my head that the realtor was a woman. Wrong. And it isn't like I haven't known male Robins before.