Moving

Yesterday I moved. It was a short move, in terms of distance between old and new locations (about 1 mile.) I moved to a bigger house: 4 bedrooms vs. 3 bedrooms. We moved to our old house last March. We found out we were having our second baby about a month later, and right then I knew that eventually I would want to move to a bigger place. Eventually turned out to be about 15 months. Our old house had a pool, which was nice for us but not good for kids. The new house has no pool, but a very big backyard -- which is great for kids. It's funny how your priorities change over time. It also has air conditioning, which the old house did not. The recent California heat wave has made me really appreciate air conditioning.

Of course the worst thing about moving is ... moving. We planned things out in great detail, but of course nothing works as you plan it. I shouldn't say that. Our moves arrived when they were supposed to and moved everything to the new house in about 15 minutes less time than we had allotted for it. Everything was downhill from there.

Our stuff on our old lawn, ready to be moved

First, our new refrigerator didn't arrive when it was supposed to. In fact, it didn't arrive until today. Apparently the delivery person who was to deliver it yesterday was involved in an accident, and his boss had already taken off when started calling asking where the hell refrigerator was. So we had to buy a small refrigerator to put a few vital things in to store over night. We still wound up throwing away some food, which is aggravating.

Next we had problems with our washing machine. For some reason the belt on it keeps coming loose after awhile. I guess we will have to get a repairman to look at it. It's a Maytag, so memories of all those old Maytag commercials came to mind. You know the ones where the repairman is moping around lonely because nobody ever has problems with their Maytags thus nobody ever needs his services. Well we're gonna need him now...

Next the Comcast cable guy came over. He got the cable working -- sort of. We had brought over cable boxes and our cable modem from our old house. We hooked it up to our main TV. Most channels were ok, but the high-def ones were not. They were not in HD, and too big for the screen. The repairman made the typical customer service responses, suggesting something was wrong with my TV. Then he thought something was wrong with the connection cables from the cable box to my TV. So he put new ones in, and that had no effect. I suggested that maybe something was wrong with the cable box. So he brought in a new one, and it worked great.

I wasn't done with the cable guy yet. Next we had to get the cable modem working. I had it hooked up directly to my computer. We tried to go online and instead got some special Comcast page that indicated that my computer was connected to their network but could connect to the internet. To fix this problem, the repairman had to download some program from Comcast to my computer! He didn't even ask me if this was ok. Anyways, he installed the program, ran some operations and of course it did not work. The program indicated that my cable modem still belonged to my old account. Apparently Comcast could not just my location, they had to give me a new account. I guess there is some relation of (user, location) -> account. So my modem would only for my old account, not my new one. The guy tried to call somebody at the local Comcast center. That person apparently was inexperienced and incompetent. So the guy called a friend of his at a national center. This person was able to transfer the modem to my account, and everything worked. Of course I un-installed the Comcast software immediately after the guy left..

So now we're moved. We got the refrigerator today. We still need to get the washing machine fixed, but we're making progress!

technorati tags:moving, comcast, san jose

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