I apologize for the extended (2 week?) down-time.  We’ve been in the process of moving, and I had no idea it would take this long.  More on those painful details later I guess.  As to the move, we are now in the process of getting settled in at a temporary (rental) house in El Dorado Hills, CA.  Not to be confused with the more glamorous parts of California, this is still a great place so far.  And, it’s CLOSE to lots of them there fancy places.  We’re a mere hour and a half drive from several great places like Lake Tahoe, San Francisco, and Napa/Sonoma.  No need to drive to Napa though, there are several (hundred) wineries right here in El Dorado County if that’s your thing.  The drive here was rather arduous, if pleasantly uneventful.  I cannot, in good faith, recommend driving 1,800 miles with a cat in the car though.  Poor little guy, he just sat in Donette’s lap and moaned.  For three days….  Ugh.  He’s adjusting well to the new house though, better than I expected.

Once we finally arrived at the house on the afternoon of the 21rst, we were relegated to living with what we could carry in the car with us, as the truck with our stuff wouldn’t arrive until Friday.  That consisted of a few towels, an air mattress, and some sheets.  Sort of like an indoors camping trip.  It was a longggg week.  Our stuff did finally arrive Friday though, and mostly (but not entirely) intact.  So far there haven’t been any big losses discovered.  There are a few outstanding issues:

1.  All our stuff couldn’t fit on the first truck, so it was loaded on an “overflow” truck.  No big deal.  When is that one coming?  Saturday?  Monday the 28th maybe?  Friday.  Not THIS Friday, Friday the 8th of November.  Ouch.  Had I known this to start with, there would have definitely been some adjustments made.  There are some must-have items on the second truck that are driving me nuts.  (At least we HOPE they are on the second truck.)

2.  They lost one of the “feet” off our dryer, and wouldn’t hook it up without it.  So, they ordered a replacement from LG.  No biggie.  Well, it still hasn’t come in, and we are coming up on two weeks without doing laundry.  Things are getting critical.  I’m quickly coming to the decision of propping it up with whatever I can find and hooking it up myself.  (Much like all the furniture I ended up having to reassemble myself because they lost all the parts from the disassembly.)  It might not have gone any better, but I definitely wish I would have selected the other moving company when I had the chance.

3.  Me and my new Uverse service aren’t getting along too well thus far.  I found my Surewest service in KC to be very flexible and accommodating to some of my more “unique” arrangements.  Uverse, not so much.  They force you into using their router, which naturally they make as difficult as possible to muck around with.  But, muck around I did of course, and lost our DVR services in the process.  I am pretty sure this router will become the bane of my very existence.  It’s about the size of a small refrigerator, and has four 10/100 ports, one of which is taken up by their odd external wireless access point.  All this would be fine if  this was, say, the year 2001.  My only hope is that I can somehow figure out how to daisy chain my personal routers off the back of it.  (That is, if they ever actually get here!!!!!)

That’s enough typing for now I suppose.  I broke down last night and plugged my webserver into that evil router of theirs, and eventually managed to navigate their cryptic menus enough to get it up and running for the time being.  I will be sure and keep everyone abreast of the status of my home network as more equipment arrives.