Moving sucks

I would just like to announce to the world my opinion in general that moving house sucks.  Moving house into a house you just built really sucks.  Moving fish tanks also sucks.  I mean really, really sucks.  It did go off pretty much perfectly though, thanks to planning, logistics and three >12hour days.

I theoretically got to sleep in until 7am today, as opposed to the 5am starts of the last 2 days.  Theoretically.  Both cats took poorly to being incarcerated for the whole day yesterday, and the Siamese recovered nicely last night and showed it by wanting to play at 4am.  Seriously, the little bitch thinks it's fun to get under the covers on one side of the bed, burrow down to your feet, slide across and bite the other set of toes, then escape before the victim can wake up.  Repeat.  Conduct find-and-kill mission for cat at 4:15 fucking am.  Very, very am.

On the plus side, everything appears to work.  The hot water is hot, the heating and cooling could (in order) cook and refrigerate your dinner, the pathways and driveway are all in and the landscaping starts tomorrow.  Hopefully, in another week NO BARE DIRT, and the remaining hassles are to get the final fence gates done, buy a new barbecue (and get a plumber out to fit the gas point with a QD), and buy an outdoor setting.

I also have an 18 metre archery range from 2 metres inside the garage door, for the first time in 4 years I have decent TV reception across all channels, and the internet is OK too, despite being Dnopgib.

I also just scored a nice 4:1 DVI/USB KVM switch for $70 which will geatly simplify my office mess.  RDC is all well and good, but I swear computers can smell lack of physical connectivity like a dog smells fear; as soon as it knows you will have to haul out a spare monitor and connect everything up to discover why RDC doesn't work, bang - lockup.  I like my new KVM. :)

I hired a van from rent-a-piece-of-shit today to move the fish tank and shed, scored a fairly tired Ford Econovan with an 8 foot bed.  I have driven worse vehicles.  Twice.  Ever.  Impossible to shift from second to third, and I don't care WHAT you try - jerk, gently pressure, ride the clutch, double declutch, use bad language, ram the bastard - not going to happen.  The only solution I found was to rev the freckle out of it in 2nd cog, double clutch to 4th, then shift back to 3rd.  Very popular on the highways.  The difference between 4th and 5th was theoretical at best, 1st was good for about 10 feet then 2nd was a slow lug through a gutless powerband, and the cab was so narrow it was damn near impossible to turn right as there's elbow room to crank the decidedly NON power steering.  Highlight of the day was dropping the thing back, and discovering on the way that like a ute these things weight next to nothing in the back end, so with a touch of handbrake you can power drift them around the corner off the Westall Road Bypass onto Dandenong Road.  It certainly clears the commuters out of the way.

My DVD-HDD PVR died the other day, so I have replaced it with a Panasonic unit that makes toast, ties to my WiFi network (via 802.11n thank you), does streaming IPTV, Bluray, and will stream damn near anything off my NAS as well.  I only hooked it up an hour ago to make sure the BCO worked in the media room, full report later.

I plan to spend the next four days pottering, arguing over where to store stuff in what cupboard, making sense of my garage, and possibly constructing a garden shed if prevailing winds suggest it's not a suicide mission.

Right now I plan to lower the blood content of my alcohol stream and go to bed.