It’s a rare thing when it happens, but a pleasant thing. On the odd occasion, when investigating exactly how much money I’m supposed to be putting into how many hands and how soon, I come across a small detail left over from October’s move that I thought I’d rectified, only to have it slap me in the face with a big fat no you didn’t. This happened yesterday. Well, actually, it’s been happening fairly often, but mostly yesterday. I was logging in to get an account number for something that demanded I waste no time in forking over my life savings, and the savings of my future children, to satisfy a bill payment. Well okay so perhaps not quite that bad. And in doing so, I come to two very distinct realizations. I’m not actually *getting* a large portion of my bills the way I’m supposed to be getting them–specificly, online. And I’m not getting them that way because Canada Post’s website still believes I live in my old apartment in Ottawa. That, and because I’d neglected to add one or two of my new accounts to the list of accounts for which to send me online bills, but largely it’s the former. So here I am, sitting in the new apartment now for 2 months, and I’m still grasping for the finer details of some of my newer required expenses (rental fee for a hot water tank, anyone?), and our postal service, which tries its very best to at times equal the US postal service, still thinks I haven’t moved. One would think that to be the third thing I change over–next to my phone number and banking info, but apparently, that’s not how I think. Sometimes, I don’t necessarily need technology to have a minor fail moment. And sometimes, surprise of surprises, technology makes my potentially minor fail moments look slightly more like moronic WTF moments. Which, while aren’t much better, I’ll still take. But, for a rare first, a crown corporation, under direct regulation of the Government of Canada, actually managed to prevent me from completely breaking things rather than being the reasin things end up breaking. I take back most of the things I said about crown corporations. Not all, just most. And I’ll probably say them again before 2010’s over, but we’ll burn that bridge when we get there. Until then, I’ll let the small surprise of Canada Post not entirely being useless sink in a little. Okay, that’s better.

I keep threatening to do that post about what the hell happened to me since the last time I was actively blogging (Um, LJ-ing, perhaps?). Well, consider this my attempt at doing so. I’ll warn you in advance there will probably be things that get missed–it *has* been about 4 months, after all.

For starters, there were more than a few trips across the Canada/US border between myself and Jessica, who’s rarely updated LJ is over here for anyone who doesn’t already read her. Things in that department I don’t think can get much better. Well, beyond the elimination of the border but eh, that’s coming. Beyond that, I’ve been doing a lot more experimentation with Gentoo, my for the moment linux distribution of choice. I’d messed around very briefly with Debian and Ubuntu, but couldn’t get quite what I wanted out of those distributions. That, plus I rather like a challenge and Gentoo definitely provides that. I kept an old HP laptop around for the purposes of experimentation–and, actually, it was the same laptop I did most of my blogging on in the old days–so I can break it 6 ways from Sunday and not really be set back more than a couple hours’ tinkering. Works perfectly fine for me. In addition to that, I’ve been continuing to pound pavement in hopes of landing me a job. Not an easy thing to do when every day the unemployment line gets longer, but we manage. This in between trips to catch up with family, because… well, you know, they don’t tend to like it when you avoid them for long stretches at a time.

Then there was the move. I’d spent the last year and a half or so on employment insurance while I looked for work, thus enabling to keep my rather nice–even if I do say so myself–apartment in Ottawa’s west end. Not having found anything though, it became necessary for me to find somewhere else to call home lest I end up going very broke very quickly. So, on October 23rd, everything I own and a few things I forgot I owned got stuffed into one box or another, and carted an hour and a half away to this, a basement apartment who’s upstairs neighbour has perhaps one of the creakiest floors I’ve heard in my life. Now, I’m still looking for work, still finding time to do a little geeking, and still–at least, as of about 2 weeks from yesterday–making trips across the border when I have the time, money and transportation. Not a whole lot has changed, save for my mailing address–which I’m still finding things that didn’t get the notification of that change–and the fact some things in life just plain aren’t as convenient as they were a month ago. But, win some, lose some. That be life.

Once I have the space in this apartment, and everything I’ll immediately need to do so out of boxes and set up, I plan to get back into tweeking the laptop and making things work just that much better. And, with a little luck and a small miracle, it might result in me accidentally coming up on a skill or three I can put in a resume. Never hurts to say you can do something, particularly when that something didn’t require you shell out money you don’t have for a college/university education. Of course, if I don’t get that out of it, then maybe I’ll just have a computer I can use should I ever decide to wipe windows off this one. Either way, I can’t find a down side here.

Well, that’s the summer and part of spring in a nutshell. Not very exciting, just… chaotic, really. Semi-organized chaos, but still. And if this is any indication, the next couple months don’t plan to be any different. Which, surprisingly, is how I like it. Can’t very well go researching new and somewhat impressive things to buy if you don’t have time to, after all.