Moving

Some of you may notice that this post is a bit later in the day than is usual for me.

It's because I'm moving.

My wife and I bought a house, and now we're in the process of packing up every single item we have ever owned, putting it into boxes, and then relocating those boxes an hour South to the new home.

We have a very full two-bedroom apartment.

We were going to have professional movers take care of it for us, but that fell through last-minute.

The good news is that we have until the end of July in our current place.

The bad news is that we have The Desk.  And by "The Desk," I mean a cold-war era United States Air Force desk.  The kind of desk you want to hide under in the event of a nuclear holocaust.  Because it would probably protect you.

I can't budge the desk from its current location by myself, so the odds of my being able to haul it out of its current room, down a flight of stairs, and into a waiting moving truck are ... well ... slim to none.

The good news is that we'll never have to move The Desk again. And it won't need to be moved up or down any stairs when we deliver it.

So now, instead of having professionals pack all of our stuff into boxes, we're doing it ourselves.

While working full-time.

We have a game gathering/open house on Wednesday. And we don't currently have any tables set up.

And a lot of the games are in the garage.

It's ... it's not easy.

Thankfully, we own this house.  If we play our cards right, we'll never have to move again.

Because moving sucks.

(There may not be a post next week, due to this entertainment.  Fair warning.) 

Sleep

As I write this, I have just turned off my PS3. And it was a lot more difficult than I'd expected it to be, because I have a new game:



Dungeon Twister releases for the PS3 on July 3rd. Because I'm good friends with the designer (of the board game, not of the video game), I managed to get a free copy.  Early.

On a weeknight.

Unfortunately, this means that I need to be up early tomorrow. So I have to get some sleep.

Which sucks.

We waste nearly half our lives asleep.  Have you ever really thought about that?

You know how there aren't enough hours in the day to do X? There probably would be, if we didn't spend so much time asleep.

I know that there are maintenance tasks that the body performs while we sleep. I know that sleep is closely tied to memory. I know that it's essential and important and blah blah blah blah blah.

But - and be honest here - if you could work for eight hours, spend eight hours with your significant other, and then spend eight hours playing games and hanging with friends, wouldn't you go for it? With little or no hesitation?

There are scientists out there working on pills that remove the need for sleep without all those nasty side-effects of sleep deprivation.  I keep seeing scattered reports that they're getting close.  That we're going to start winning the War with Sleep.  I wouldn't be surprised if the military isn't funding a good chunk of it.

Once they have it figured out, they can sign me up.

Seriously.

I'm tired of wasting so much time.

I want to be able to do more than just work and spend a few brief hours with Stephanie. I want to be able to stay out late at Phoenix Games or The Airlock and then come home and spend some time actually interacting with my wife instead of just snoring at her.

I want to destroy the distinction between morning people and evening people - because those won't exist anymore. We'll all just be people.  Or now people. Or we'll find new and exciting ways to divide ourselves up (my money is on this one, by the way).

But sleep and lack thereof won't be a valid excuse for anything anymore - we already don't treat it as one. Do you doubt me?  Try being late to work because you slept through your alarm. See how your boss reacts.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm busy writing when I should be sleeping.

After all, I need to be functional in the morning. And that still requires sleep.

Alcohol in Grocery Stores

Until very recently, Washington was one of those states in which you need to go to a dedicated liquor store in order to purchase hard alcohol. You could purchase beer and wine in grocery stores, but that's it.

Last November, we passed some voter-sponsored initiatives that put hard alcohol into grocery stores and closed all of the state-run liquor stores.  See, here in Washington, we can get damn near anything through, if we can get enough signatures on petitions.

My parents are teetotalers. They even use the word "Teetotaler" from time to time.

I'm not. I'm not stupid with booze - being brought up in a dry household will do that for you. But I do enjoy a drink every now and again.

But I don't think that hard alcohol should be found in liquor stores. If it weren't for the cooking uses of beer and wine, I'd be opposed to their presence in grocery stores, too.

It's not a matter of poor impulse control.  It's not because I don't trust grocery stores.

It's pricing and selection.

When the state ran the liquor stores, each manufacturer only needed to supply one customer. This meant that costs to ship to Washington State were low - if you only have to worry about delivering to one or two warehouses, you don't need a full fleet of trucks. If you only have one customer, it's a simple matter to handle invoicing and billing for the state. No big deal for the big names, but the smaller companies may have to double or triple their staff to keep up with the increased paperwork - and that means an increase in prices.

And that's before we talk about the taxes. Don't get me started on the taxes. Really.

When the state ran the liquor stores, if I wanted something that they didn't have, it was easy to special order it. The state had a list of beverage manufacturers, because they were licensed with the state.

While many grocery stores can still special order product, it's more difficult - especially if you want something more obscure. Because the grocery store has to query the state to make sure it's legal to sell (x). And they need to jump through hoops to get the SKU set up in their system so they can order it.

Take Absinthe, for example.  There are a number of legal varieties of the stuff out there.  Do you know how many I can get in my local grocery stores?

Zero. Zilch. Zip. Nada. None.

Why not?  There is a public perception that the stuff is illegal, so they're hesitant to order it in. Then, once all the hoops are jumped through, it's a low-profit item for them - if they have to order case quantities (which wouldn't surprise me), and I only want one bottle, then they are stuck with the rest of the case. And it may or may not sell. Meaning they end up paying storage on it until either I come back for another bottle (in eight months or a year or more) or they write it off.

So now I can't get Absinthe. Which is a shame, because I actually like it. Occasionally.

If we had specialty liquor stores (state-run or not), then the availability thing wouldn't be as big of an issue.

And we do have a few - but they are inevitably within a block or so of a big chain grocery store that buys alcoholic beverages by the truckload.

Can you guess who will have the better prices?

Can you guess who is likely to stick around longer?

I feel bad for all the new small business owners that paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the old stock and locations of the state-run liquor stores.

And yes, I know. There are specialty Beer and Wine stores in the area. There have been for years. And I don't know how they have survived - but they are (by now) run by businessmen who know what they're doing, and who are used to a relatively stable market.  I suspect that a small handful of specialty liquor stores will survive, but the majority of them are going to close, probably within six months or a year.

Long-term, I think that the voters in this state shot themselves in the foot.

And I really don't like that.

Change

I don't carry cash.

I have a checkbook and a debit card, and have had for years.

Because I used to carry cash.  Everywhere.

When I was in Junior High and High School, my parents would give me enough money on Monday to buy my lunches for the week. And so I would - only probably not like they had planned.

I spent as little as possible, you see.  I determined fairly early on how little I needed to keep going.  So I would have a pepperoni stick and a soft pretzel with cheese. Every day.

I'm a bit of a creature of habit.

It was much less, I think, than my parents expected me to eat for lunch. But that's beside the point.

These purchases didn't add up to an even dollar amount.  If I remember correctly, it was $1.15 for my lunch.

The first day, I'd have $20.  The second day, I'd have three fives, three ones, and eighty-five cents in change.  The third day, I'd have three fives, one one, and a dollar seventy in change.

Every week, my change would add up and add up until it got in the way.  Because it was faster to grab two ones than it was to count out the change.

I'm a man.  We keep things in our pockets. Because we can. 


Side note: Apparently women can't.  Pockets in women's jeans really suck. I suspect that it's one reason they carry purses.

in high school, I kept at least one pen and one mechanical pencil in my pockets.  And a small notebook.  Generally, I also had one or more dice in my pockets, too.  It was useful, because you never knew when you would stumble into a pick-up game of ... um ... Dungeons & Dragons. Not that I ever did.

Either way, I had limited pocket space.

By the end of the week, I would be very annoyed, because I would have pockets full of change, and no room for my pen. Or some of my dice would have escaped and were now lost forever. And my pants would weigh more and more as the week went on, which also annoyed me.

So I stopped carrying cash regularly.  I understand that cash is an essential at times. I realize I should probably keep around $20 in my wallet for emergencies - but I just don't want to run the risk of filling up with change, again.

Because it's too easy to overlook until it's taken over.

Unexplained Gaps In A Regular Posting Schedule

I'm following a number of blogs. More than is probably actually healthy for me to follow, truth be told. But I've gotten used to certain patterns.

When a blog misses a scheduled post, it throws me for a bit of a loop.

Some of the blogs I follow are more important to me than others, and, if one of those misses its update, my whole day can be thrown out of whack.

I hate it.

Even worse is when the blog returns with no explanation. They were gone, and now they're back. No explanation, no apology.  Just a weird gap in their publishing calendar that may never be explained.