D-Day

Half-way through the process now and it all seems to be going well. The movers left around 4pm with about half the flat in their van. (Who knew the place had so much space?!) Rosie and I ran some essentials over to the new flat while Brett was at an audition in West Dulwich and then met up to give him a lift home. I need to be in work tomorrow morning so will be meeting up in the afternoon to help supervise the unloading in Grove Park.

Right now I want a shower before bed as feel grungy as f**k.

And So It Begins

Today is the day; up as usual and then into the organising of stuff so there’s some hope of finding it after it’s all been transported. Only panic so far has been work-related; the Helpdesk texted me at 9am to say '[Main File Server] offline. Won't reboot.' The network support team is stretched pretty thing today, what with me at home, Rob in Leeds and Rav on a course. Luckily Barry arrived in the nick of time and sorted it out before I had to go in myself.

The van arrived around 9:30 and after a brief tour and agreeing what was to stay tonight, they set to work packing up our lives.

I think we’re all feeling a bit like spare parts now; there’s not much for us to do but stay out of their way. I’m breaking down all the electricals so that we’ll have all the four-bars and extension leads we need in one place when we get there. Just now I’m waiting for the Mac to finish backing itself up to my file server before I power them both down and disassemble the office area.

Will be glad when it’s all over.

Moving Day T -1

I’ve taken a half-day off from work this morning to do some of the clearing up and organising ready for the movers tomorrow. I alternate between relief that someone else is going to be doing all the hard work and panic at the amount of organisation that we still need to do. Rowan is off all day today, so I keep reminding myself that between her and Brett and my part contribution, we’ll get it done.

Still there’s a lot to do – and it isn’t helped by having to go to a Chorus meeting tonight. Just what I need!

Moving House

It’s Sunday morning and there’s lots to do. We eventually got the lease signed on our new Grove Park flat on Friday and yesterday we went over there to complete the inventory and do a bit of cleaning. I took a day off work on Thursday primarily to make sure that all the utilities knew we were moving and were switched on at the new place. I also managed to prepare most of my own Change Of Addresses ready to send once we’d signed (which I actually still need to get around to!) As ever there’s something on the web to help you out; a site called IAmMoving.com came recommended by the Royal Mail site and includes a change of address generator; you select all the people you wish to notify from a series of lists, enter the relevant details and it will either (depending on what the recipient will accept) send the email for you or generate a letter to print out and send. It’s quite a clever idea and I like it – especially since I assume that, having set up the list and entered all my details, they’ll still be on file the next time we come to move.

On our way back from Grove Park yesterday afternoon we called in on Rod & Jess and had coffee and arranged lunch for today in Wimbledon. They’ve just bought a horse at the livery stables here, Jess is back at work full-time now and has had to mothball her online book business. Rod is working four days a week and enjoying the extra freedom it gives him.

Anyway, back to today, I think it needs to be about tidying up and organising things; we’ve booked movers to do all of the packing and actual moving of our stuff but I think everyone would benefit by us making sure that things that need to be together are together when we move. Books, papers, clothes, DVDs all need to be gathered up. I also need to back up the data on all our computers to protect against the almost disk failure(s) that will occur as the machines are moved…

…And it’s such a lovely day out there.

The Weekend Again

Another week gone. It went pretty much as expected.

Although a cock-up at Chorus on Wednesday meant a wasted trip up to Camden for me and also meant I was on the train to work on Thursday – a trip which ended up taking me an hour and a half!

Rob S is doing okay at work; he’s hit the ground running and is already getting stuff done. The future looks bright.

I’m feeling pretty down on the world though and don’t really know why, especially since it’s been a great weekend; Brett and I had dinner with Joe R on Friday night. We dined at Iguana next to the Royal Festival Hall and then had a drink at the National Film Theatre’s new lounge bar area. Joe and Brett ended up trying to out-geek each other over Sondheim lyrics…

Saturday afternoon I was at another photographic tuition session. Don’t think I’ve mentioned them before but they emerged through the Out Photographers Group I got involved with a while back. So far I’ve done two sessions, both on working in a studio with lighting. This one was about photographing the male nude and was equally interesting. A lot of the shots I took were crap, but I know why they didn’t come out well which is what learning is all about. A couple of the better ones are here.

At the start of the session we had lunch with the people who’d been there in the morning doing a straightforward shoot and one of them was Michael C from the Chorus. We chatted some and talked about sharing the costs of a studio session in future. We also talked a bit about me photographing the Chorus in action during their show at Cadogan Hall in July which sounds like great fun.

Rosie messaged me as the session was coming to an end to ask if we wanted to head down to Greenwich for a barbeque with Ruth and Chris who’d been over last weekend. We also had an offer of dinner at Ping’s place, as he is recently back from Malaysia and wanted to catch up.

In the end we headed over to Notting Hill for dinner. It was actually Simon R from the Chorus who was cooking as he and his husband Matt V have been staying in Ping’s house until their own house purchase completes. Ping had also invited the chap he’s been seeing for a while, Uwe, a German guy who runs a business in Vauxhall. He turned out to be lovely too; very engaging conversation. So the evening was a great success; the food was good and tasty, the company was convivial. I got to show off my photos and take a few more and then it was a single tube trip back home again. Marvellous.

Today has been less energetic. I spent a while this morning struggling with Brett’s Mac trying to make it let me write to the portable hard drive I keep my photography on. It used to work fine but for some reason now will only let me read from it. Very frustrating and I think that’s what darkened my mood. Other than that it’s been a day of surfing the web (am liking Facebook more and more as a proper social website, designed for keeping up with your existing friends rather than finding new ones) and watching TV (we now need to buy West Wing Season Six, as we’ve just finished Season Five…)

Wasted Day

We’d planned to go to the local Merton Hall where they were having a country fair this weekend but we slept late and then it started raining heavily, so we abandoned the idea. Haven’t done much more than be a couch potato this weekend and, apart from yesterday feel it’s been a rather wasted time.

Tomorrow I’m back at work. Rob S starts as my Assistant Manager this week and I am a little worried that I am pinning too much hope on him being able to come in and take a lot of work off my shoulders. Maybe I’m just feeling down because of the weekend’s inaction.

Sunday with Ruth and Chris

Saturday was fairly domestic; laundry and washing-up being done, then some shopping. I spent the afternoon and evening upgrading my laptop to Windows Vista; I want to see how it works with our systems at work as suppliers are beginning to supply machines with it installed by default and I need to decide which will cause us the least pain – giving people the Vista laptops as they arrive or retrofitting XP to those machines.

The upgrade experience went fairly smoothly, although it took the best part of three hours to complete; two hours to do the actual OS upgrade and a further hour of mucking about to get my VPN client to work and try and get the Windows Server 2003 Admin Pack reinstalled and working. (I’m still not actually sure about that last one!)

While waiting for the upgrade to complete we watched the latest West-End reality competition show (Any Dream Will Do) and I read some more one of my old favourites; The Riftwar Saga. It’s rather disappointing though; when I was a teenager reading it for the first time it was a stunningly good story, but now that I’ve (finally) read The Lord of the Rings so many of the stories I enjoyed as a teenager are clearly derivative. Admittedly I only started re-reading Riftwar because I couldn’t find the first two books of the contemporary Empire series…

Today Rosie had invited two of her friends, Ruth & Chris, over for brunch. While I had not been desperately enthusiastic to begin with, once I got out of bed I kind of got into the swing of things as we prepared the food. It turned out that they were very pleasant company; they were happy to make themselves at home and I didn’t feel like we had to be on our best behaviour or entertain them at all. We had a pleasant meal, chatted some and then played Risk for most of the afternoon.

We ordered Chinese for dinner and settled down to watch a couple of DVDs, Primer and DeLovely. Primer was a real head-fuck with, according to Wikipedia, no less than nine interacting timelines to deal with. I managed to follow a lot of it, but still had to read the plot explanation online before I totally understood what was going on. DeLovely was just a pleasant movie with some great tunes.

Ruth and Chris headed off shortly after the movies finished; a lovely day.