SUB

I feel almost as if I'm back at Slight Upper Back. My new apartment appears to be on the second floor, but because the ground slopes back and their are garages below it is actually the third floor of the building. I also relived unpleasant memories of hauling many, many boxes up stairs! I have no plans to move again any time soon.

Everything from my storage unit has been unloaded!! I only have to get some things unpacked so that I can live over there and buy a few essentials before I move in completely. I haven't moved anything in from my room here at my sister's. I'm saving that for a day when I have some time. I'll take at least an hour after work each night this week (and several more on Wednesday when I don't work at bigg's) to straighten stuff up and move it around so I can pretend to have a normal life.

My essentials list is as follows: mattress (I have a bunk bed from my brother--now set up as two twins, but no matresses), shower curtain, trash can, broom (the floors are all hardwood, so no vacuum required right now! I don't have much furniture (bed, table w/ two chairs, easy chair, couch, child's desk)--the desk or table will fit my desktop and/or laptop. Eventually I need to get a real desk (preferably a computer desk). I plan to drop by Goodwill or the local St. Vincent de Paul to check out their furniture. Oh, and I do get a dresser! :-) I need a coffee table someday and something to put a TV on. I won't pay for TV for a while--I'll just watch some shows at my sister's place.

However, I will have a TV--it just can't get signals, but it should work with a DVD player. Chris was going to take it to college, but didn't get the roommate he wanted so he didn't have room for it. I'll use it until my finances are straightened out and I can figure out what I can afford. One thing I do want to figure out is internet access. The building doesn't have cable--so that isn't an option, all I have available is the phone company's DSL.

They offer bundled plans, but for those you have to have a local and long distance plan from them. Right now I pay my brother-in-law to have a phone on his plan. I'd like to keep that for a while. If I go over the allotted minutes I just have to pay $5.00 for a block of 100 minutes. I don't even use many non-free minutes. I call people out west on nights and weekends. But the real reason I don't want to cancel and go to a plan of my own is that I would have to pay a $150 early termination fee--I really don't want to do that now. Additionally, I need a cell phone so that I'm accessible for work, especially at the museum.

Hmm...the local phone would be good though, it would mean all incoming calls there would be free for me--better than having to pay on both ends when someone calls me and we chat for a while. ;-). Cincinnati Bell looks like it will charge me $16.95 a month for a phone (I assume that is normal service, free local and no long distance) and $20 a month for their ADSL (for the first twelve months--but that is far enough out that I'm okay with it if I can swing that for now--unless the rate goes up astronimically then). Oh, and I just checked, it wil be about $30 for a new set-up.

*shrugs* I'll figure it out soon. I need to determine what I need and what I can get by without for a short or long while. I can skim my brother-in-law's internet for a while, but I do not (long term) want to be tied down to accessing the internet by taking my laptop over to his house. That would be very inconvenient, especially to check e-mail before work (when I have to leave at 07:30) or when I just have a couple minutes. I want in-house internet that I can eventually upgrade to my own wireless network--or just some long cables, :-). But as I said I'll figure that out soon. Even working an extra night a week at bigg's would be worth having that internet connectivity.

Wow, I didn't intend for this post to be this long or detailed--I guess I'm just windy on the keyboard. Oh, speaking of that I tested my typing skills again at the temp agencies. I'm still testing at about 80 words per minute. I should try to practice to see if I can improve that. I'm sure that I could--but I don't know if I want to put forth the effort.

~Matt