Housekeeping
I am now number 2 in google for the search term “darryn“. This is not disappointing, everything is still going according to plan.
For those of you who rely on my unreliable blogging for information: We have moved house. We moved over 3 weeks ago, to a 3 bedroom house in Dundas. If you know both Lane Cove and Dundas, you would be thinking that I have taken a step backward. In some ways, you are correct, but in many other ways my life has improved thanks to the move. The big reason is that I can now sleep. There is not a Pizza Hut one floor below my bedroom balcony (there aren’t even any shops within 1 km of my house). No Pizza Hut means no local P-Plater hang, means no revving and tooting horns, no doof-doof, no sleeplessness. My health has improved. I think Kirsten has had some difficulty sleeping here, but this is my blog, not hers.
My house is about 2½ times the size of my apartment. It has polished wood floors, only one room (the spare room) has any carpet. I like that. There are all of the necessities, such as air-conditioning and a dishwasher. The laundry is a room, not a cupboard in the lounge room. There is CABLE, which is why this website loads so fast. We have a beautiful large yard, which the cats think is absolute heaven; it is obvious that they are much happier here. My morning commute takes about 7 minutes, 8 minutes if there is heavy traffic. Tomorrow (NYE) I will ride my bike to work, should take me 15-20 minutes. We have 3 bins! A little one for rubbish, a big one for recycling and a big one for garden waste. In the apartment complex we shared a little bin with another apartment. We save $65 a week in rent. We have a kickass phone number.
With the good comes the bad, but I think that the balance is in favour of the good; not through any complex calculation, but because we all feel happier in this place. Anyway, the downside starts with: Location. We are in the suburbs, this is very clear. The nearest business of any kind is a service station, more than a kilometre away. Slightly further are the ‘Dundas Shops’, a pitiful collection of C-grade shops struggling for survival around the train station. There is nothing within easy walking distance. In Lane Cove there were possibly 100 shops within 150m of our apartment, the closest being about 80cm away. We could buy any ingredients for our dinner fresh on the night, or choose from all types of restaurants and takeaways. Here we can choose between Dominos delivery or Pizza Hut delivery. I pick Dominos, fuck Pizza Hut and their noisy drivers and failure to address their behaviour. The other negative with this house relates to electricity. The power supply is dirty (to say the least). Our lights change brightness many times per night, and sometimes the computers reboot by themselves. The spikes are the real problem, and one has easily wiped out any rent savings over the duration of the lease by destroying the motor in one of my hard disks. Said hard disk contains a lot of source code and all of my digital photos ever, and all of my documents since 1989. Not all of this data had been backed up. Realisation brought a particularly unpleasant emotion, a kind of loss with the understanding that it was my own fault. The drive is with a data recovery bureau now, who have opened it in a clean room and are painstakingly restoring the data onto a matching drive that I supplied. They tell me that this will cost $2000. Stop reading this and backup your data, right now. Don’t wait. My words do not adequately convey the terrible feeling of loss associated with a catastrophic hard disk failure and subsequent loss of data. Why are you still reading? Go and Back Up.
I still think that this residence is better than the last.