While the actual “plumbing” part is easy, diagnosing a particular problem, I think, is a fucking bitch and a half. What we first thought was a venting problem, I’m now thinking is something more akin to the problems we were having around Christmastime, in that the main is actually blocked, and needs to be snaked. This is about the most unpleasant thing I could imagine, to be perfectly honest, given what the contents of the last drain snaking were. That, coupled with the fact that our toilet gasket needs replacing… well, I figure doing both in one shot is the way to go, but it’s going to be a very, very unpleasant experience. *sigh*

Regardless, my apologies to the plumbers of the world. Simple pipe repair, no problem. Plumbing as a profession… christ. I understand why they’re paid the big bucks, let’s just leave it at that.

… by and large, is pretty trivial. Sure, when you’ve gotta cut open walls and stuff to get to the pipes, it’s another matter entirely. But when the pipes are exposed, it’s pretty easy work. I still have some stuff to do on the bathtub drain, but that’s just because we figured a better way to run the pipe than we were before, and stopped with some work left, because more materials were needed. Fun fun. I think plumbers get paid the big bucks largely because of the urgency – when you’re calling a plumber, generally you can’t wait for the work to be done, and also, because every once in a while, you have to deal with something truly foul. Fortunately, the work today was a bathtub drain and not a toilet…

Bleah. Today just sucks. It’s really grey out, for starters, which just feels foreboding and kind of oppressive. We brought the Mini to the body shop today, and the guy was talking about whether the insurance company for the woman that hit it would consider it “totalled” or not, and it just strikes me as a sort of “fuck you” that the insurance company could potentially basically fuck me by arbitrarily deciding that a dent in the door and quarterpanel constitutes a “totalled” car, when it’s just cosmetic fixes that are necessary.

Then, it turned out that EA took out a RIDICULOUS amount in taxes from my bonus – more than 55%, and as a result, I came up short after loaning my parents some money, which made me overdraw. We transferred some money from Ei-Nyung’s account to mine, in order to cover it (she’s the best), but even though the person on the phone last night said it’d go through just fine, it didn’t, and I got screwed.

Then, I realized that of all the designers on the project I’m working on, I’m the *only one* who’s not at E3 doing something. The weekly design lunch came up, and I realized that no one else was here. Sort of a lonely, isolated feeling, but it just kinda stacks on the other two things to just make me feel really sort of isolated and miserable, and screwed.

Bleah. I know if I’d have just slept through today, I’d have had to deal with this crap tomorrow, but there’s just so much shit to deal with right now *outside* of work, with the house, with the lawn, with the busted drain (our drainpipe out of the upstairs bathtub, which was in a pretty temporary state, came loose, and I’ve gotta fix it this weekend)… it just feels like a bunch of crap, none of which ever fucking goes anywhere.

… it feels like everything’s just not going right. Like all the gears of your life are grinding a bit, and things just aren’t going smoothly. Nothing really big, but lots of little things. I’ve felt that way since sometime yesterday evening, and through a combination of stuff that’s gone substantially (though not irreperably) wrong, and lots of minor irritations, I’ve found myself in a really pissy mood, and pretty glum, to boot. Bleah.

Work on the house has resumed, once again. Small, this time, and done entirely by contractors, but two rooms are finally getting their walls torn out and redrywalled. It’s costing me $1400, some of which is being offset up front by Joe, but still money being spent. It’ll be nice, though, to have those rooms redone – the ceiling in one is literally a danger to anyone in it. I wish we could have redone the rest of the upstairs, but that’ll have to wait for a later time – probably after the wedding next year.

It’s really nice being back upstairs, though, and weirdly, now that we’re using both upstairs and downstairs as common space, the house has a *ridiculous* amount of space. Some of which is unusable, unfortunately, for what it’s intended for, but hell, there’s a lot of space nevertheless.

So, this weekend, one of the housemates moved out, and we moved out of the downstairs bedroom and up into the room she vacated. It’s much smaller than the downstairs bedroom (probably about half the size), but it is rectilinear, which makes it actually a little easier to use the space, which is good. Still, there was a *huge* closet downstairs, and even though the room we’re moving into has the second-largest closet in the house, it’s not quite enough to accomodate how we grew in to the last closet.

We ended up getting together four entire trash bags full of clothes we’re going to donate, either because they don’t fit right, we never wear them, or they’re just … ugly. I threw out another trashbag full of clothes with too many holes – socks and t-shirts, mostly. Pretty crazy to think that we’ve had that much stuff sitting around, not really doing anything. Also found, in our closet, was a box full of boxes. Nothing else, just boxes. With receipts for Christmas presents.

Fortunately, the tighter accomodations are forcing us to take inventory of what we have, and what we need, and reconcile the difference. Next week’s probably going to be all about the front lawn, since two of the rooms (hopefully) will be getting drywalled this week. Then, next weekend’s cleaning up the common spaces, and the following is the complete strip, pack and organization of the kitchen. Man. Should be crazy-assed.

Poor Mobius is confused, though – he’s not used to the upstairs, as he’s been largely restricted to the downstairs, ’cause the roommate who left didn’t like him around, upstairs. Thankfully, everyone in the house now is cool with him wherever, and so he has free run of the up and down stairs (except bedrooms that aren’t ours). I think he’s upset that his familiar space (our downstairs bedroom) has been totally stripped and moved, and the rest of the downstairs is so full of assorted crap that his familiar places (the couches) are almost totally … occupied by other stuff.

So, gotta clear out some space for him to relax in, and hope that he makes the transition ok. He’s been through starker transitions, so this shouldn’t be too bad.

The last week or two have been pretty hectic, work-wise, and now that the build has stabilized, and I’m bug-free (for the time being), I can take a breather, and figure out what the heck is going on. This week is really intensely busy, both because I’ve got crazy amounts of work, and because two friends are in from out of town. And, we’ve got to do work on our lawn (see Ei-Nyung’s post from a few days ago), on top of moving from one room to another, and dealing with someone working on the house again, and a new housemate moving in as the other one leaves.

It’s been pretty much a rollercoaster week, and it’ll be well into next week before I think I can actually settle in. I think I’ll have a couple days off at the end of next week, but I really wish I had those days now, when my friends are in town. Alas!

On top of being event-hectic, I’ve simply put off a lot of stuff I should have done earlier, like paying bills and the like. It’s weird how much my brain shuts off the outside world when things get over a certain level of hecticness, but unfortunately, things like bill payments don’t really wait for you to relax. Money’s been pretty strange recently, just because of the housemate transition, home insurance, and assorted expenses that piled up recently. I’m trying to cut down on extraneous purchases, and have done so pretty reasonably, but every once in a while, $100 or so disappears in an instant. Frustrating, to be sure. I feel like I’m trying to save, but am constantly pushed to the limit by something or another. In part, undoubtedly, there are frivolous purchases, which must stop, but in another part, it’s just that owning a home is fucking expensive.

*sigh*

Not to mention that bonuses this year are projected to be extremely short, because EA fucked up their earnings projections. I don’t understand why bonuses would be based on *projected* earnings, and whether you’ve missed them, because fundamentally, the development budgets are not. They are, sort of, but it’s so vague that as far as I can tell, the margin of error is greater than the percentage of the budget the bonus pool constitutes. So essentially, some chump in marketing goes crazy with the numbers, as they’re encouraged to, and the developer gets kicked in the nuts because the projections were insane, given the game’s budget and schedule.

That, combined with the stock price tank due to the missed earnings, and I should go shake down the idiot that produced those numbers to the tune of about six thousand bucks. Man, what a help having *that* money would have been.

Ah, well.

Get home from work at 1:30am, go to sleep, wake up at 8:30, take an Allegra. Wait ’till 10, garden until 1pm, rest for a bit, get lunch, help JT move some stuff in, go to work to fix an emergency thing, go to dinner at the Caudill’s, come home, play some Forza, take Mobi to the vet to fix a broken dew claw at 2am. Fun fun.

*beat*

The Memento references are because while letting the game build, there’s about an hour where I’m essentially unable to do anything, except write documentation. So, while doing that, I listened to/peripherally watched Memento again today, and holy hot damn, this is one of my favorite movies. It’s just utterly superb in every way, in every little detail.

My top five movies, in some sort of order:

1.) Memento
2.) The Iron Giant
3.) Blade Runner
4.) The Incredibles
5.) Hero

I’m sure there are a gazillion other movies I love to pieces that swap in and out of the top five, but the two switch for the top spot are definitely Memento and The Iron Giant.

If you haven’t seen either of them, I’d highly recommend checking ’em out.

A fifteen hour day at work. Including the commute, seventeen. Got the bulk of my work for E3 checked in, and ready to go into the testing pipe, so I’m actually quite happy. Almost energized, but for the anonymous note we got in the mail today.

Anonymous note, you say? Yes, indeed. And you can imagine it’s not good. Someone threatening to call Oakland Blight Control on us because of our front yard. Yeah, it’s overgrown, yeah, the grass is six feet tall. Why? Because I’m so allergic to grass that if I spend about half an hour in it, for the rest of the day, I’m sneezing like crazy. But, it looks disorderly, so I can understand where the letter-writer’s coming from, sort of. They took a really obnoxious, threatening tone, which I thought was inappropriate, particularly given that no one’s ever said anything about our yard, and it’s not the worst on the block by much.

But the weirdest thing of all was that we *are* working on it, and have been for the last couple weeks. We’re making progress, and it’s only NOW that this jackass decides to send us threatening letters. Whee! Did they not see the one section that’s been entirely pulled up, and is ready for planting? Did they not see that about a fifth of the grass in the front yard has been pulled up? Sure, it’s gonna get uglier before it gets better, but the thing is that it’s *OBVIOUS* that progress is being made. So it’s just fucking stupid that someone would write a threatening, anonymous note about our yard, when it’s plain as day that finally, something has actually started happening.

So, they take something that’s provided us with some real sense of satisfaction and progress, and turn it into something negative. At the end of a fifteen hour day at work, that even turned out pretty good, it definitely ruins a day. And a sense of camaraderie with the neighbors, that makes me want to egg the shit out of the houses of the two people I think it probably is. Mind you, one of them would have their house unjustly vandalized, but fuck ’em, they’re both assholes anyway.

Bastards.