Everything takes longer than we think it will. Our moving was no exception and neither was the cleaning. We took two more hours than expected and that didn’t include the trip to the landfill. It was my third trip to the landfill that day and, because it was a weekend, the landfill was busy. By the time we got all that completed, it was already 5:30.

We had reservations at a hotel in Deseret that was about 8 hours away. We didn’t have the heart. The hotel was really cool about switching the days. We decided that we were going to just get the heck out of the Zaulem area for Saturday night. We’d make a three day trip out of it. Kind of pathetic, but we were exhausted. It turned out to be the right move because the second leg of our trip, which took place yesterday, Took Longer Than Expected.

Too much to do in this hotel room in too little time. I wanted to take advantage of the hot tub. I wanted to watch the last available vestiges of cable TV available to me. But mostly I want to surf the Internet because it’s going to take the local ISP two weeks to get me hooked up. It’ll also take me a bit of time to get cable/satellite hooked up (if we go that route). I absolutely have to find some sort of way to make sure that I don’t get behind on Lost. Any romantic notions of being unplugged go away when I’m really looking at the prospect of being unplugged.

I am writing this from the hotel in Deseret near the Arapaho border. We lost an hour due to the time change. My body has adjusted remarkably well. I will have no trouble sleeping tonight.

My voyage was going to be spent listening to the audiobook for Bourne Ultimatum, the third of the series of novels that the movies are very, very, very, very loosely based after. It’s 20 hours and the drive is barely more than half that. So I decided, when I had a trip out to Western Shores to pick up a couch, that I would start listening early and maybe get it finished on the drive. I did one better, listening while I cleaned and waited in the landfill queues and finished it before my drive even began. It’s the only think that did not take longer than expected. So I’ve spent the trip listening to one of what was supposed to be two audiobooks. I’ll barely finish the one. You would think that given a finite amount of time in the car that I would be able to plow through the audiobooks at a predictable pace, but not really. I lost time when driving through areas that require concentration. I lost an hour or so because I was getting sleepy and couldn’t listen to an audiobook, drive, and stay awake at the same time.

I was getting sleepy because I had a blood-sugar crash, which is pretty rare for me. I ate a whole Chick-Stick. I didn’t even want it all that much, but I used a convenience store restroom and like to extend patronage to those places that allow the public to use their restrooms. It was the cheapest option. I did the same thing earlier tonight (3/7), getting a candy bar. Using convenience store restrooms is bad for my waistline.

One of my earliest crushes was to a girl named Clementine Giovanni. Clementine was a tall, slender girl that was really pretty for a fifth grader in the eyes of a fifth grader. She was the first girl I ever asked to “go with me” and, of course, the first girl to shoot me down.

Mom, ever-present and all-knowing, knew about all of this despite my never having told her. I know that she knows because she would tell other people about it. This girl that I had a crush on that {in Mom’s mocking tone} didn’t even know [I] was alive! Fortunately, she didn’t tell people of this until I was well good and past it. Even so, I felt the need to object.

“Mau-aummmm… she knew I was alive. She just didn’t care…”

That was an exaggeration. She knew I was alive and moreso than any of the other rejections I got before I ever got a yes, she was really nice about it. I made it kinda easy on her, slipping a note into her desk and accepting, without confrontation the little note that she wrote back. I didn’t even ask if she would go out with me when she was no longer going out with the guy she was going out with, even though that was a standard question at the time. Not sure we talked after that. Not sure we talked before that. I was that kind of nerd. The only girl I could easily talk to was one that I didn’t find very cute and girl classmates whose moms were friends with my mom. My Mom didn’t know Clementine’s parents very well, which of course made Mom’s ability to know everything all the more eerie.

The guy that she was going out with at the time was a dude named Grick. Grick actually confronted me about it, though not in a very confrontational way. I don’t think they lasted long. He was kind of a nerd himself. We would later be on friendly terms and probably would have been friends if we’d had any classes together. He was the closest thing I had to a friend on my junior high basketball team because we were collectively the non-jock jocks. Clementine herself went on to be quite popular, quite beautiful, and on drill team.

Clementine added me as a friend on Facebook not long after I joined up. She looks almost exactly the same now as she did in high school, which come to think of it is very close to how she looked in elementary school. She has one of those faces and a featureless figure. I was surprised to see that she wasn’t married because she struck me as the type to be married shortly after college. She’s engaged now. Anyway, part of me wants to print out a copy of the friend invitation and send it to Mom.

“See. I told you so!”

I am writing this post from a mostly empty room in a mostly empty house. We still have a lot of cleaning that we need to do, but the truck is finally packed. Clancy and I have collectively decided that this is the last time that we pack ourselves. I think I decided that last time, though the 18 months in between then and now I kinda sorta forgot why it was so important. When we moved out of Estacado, a bit part of the problem was a simple lack of preparation on our part. This time, both to avoid the problems of last time and because we had so much time, we were much more organized.

So by the time the truck rolled around, we were going to be good to go, right? Well, no. It turned into this weird sort of thing where every time we finished half of what need to be done, there was still half to go. We did half of what was needed and there was still half to go. Then we did half of what was left, which should have left only a quarter to go… but there was still half to go. Then we did the next half and instead of their being an eighth or a quarter left… there was still a half to go. For everything we accomplished, something new entered the calculation. Well, it wasn’t actually that because we had a list. Rather, it was that the stuff that we (or at least I) calculated as taking up a bulk of the time went by pretty quickly but that which we thought would be more quick ended up taking a lot longer. Invariably, it was the early stuff that fell into the first category and the late stuff in the second. Getting everything (or most of everything) on to the truck took no time flat. Getting it organized, on the other hand, took forever and a week. Twice as long as it has ever taken in the past, due to a number of factors including a moving truck not nearly as conducive to stacking stuff as the last moving truck and the fatigue that came with having already done so much. Adding 20% to the stuff we had to move ended up adding far more than 20% to the loading time.

The hope was that since we were giving ourselves more time that we could be more relaxed about it. The result was not only that we were not more relaxed, but we were stressed for that much longer.

It’s a funny thing about leaving a place. I was not thrilled about leaving Estacado because I really liked it there and though I was looking forward to Cascadia I could have spent the rest of my life in Santomas or Almeida, Estacado. So I wasn’t in a hurry. Until I was so tired of the moving process that I just wanted to be gone, gone, gone. The same applies doubly this time around. There are so many things that I love about the Zaulem Sound area and that I’m going to miss in Callie and Arapaho. I believe that I will find new treasures and delights in Arapaho, but what’s going to be missing is a little more apparent and I know that it may take me a while to find it. But I am so tired of packing and moving and this whole damn process that I cannot wait to see the “Welcome to Cascadia” sign in the rearview mirror and when I see the “Welcome to Arapaho” sign I will indeed feel welcome.

We put off the leave date for Saturday so that we can do a little recuperating while cleaning. We also want to visit an area attraction that we never got to go to while we were living here. The drive should take two days or so. Since it falls on a weekend, it shouldn’t affect Hit Coffee much except that I will be unplugging the Internet at some point later today and it will take a little bit of time to get it up and running in Callie. I have been relying on Sheila and Web to keep HC flowing and will continue to do so for at least another week.

According to the ISPs and other folks, Net Neutrality is a threat to future Internet service because as the networks get bogged down there won’t be any way to distinguish between valuable and non-valuable transmissions. According to Silicon Alley, we’re going to hit major bandwidth shortages sooner rather than later on cell phone networks. If true, will this provide an opening for service differentiation on cell phones that can then be ported to regular Internet?

Nobody cleans their fridge anymore and the fridge-makers are trying to compensate.

There are concerns that recidivism rates will climb as ex-cons are unable to find work in the current economy. It’s better if they can find work on getting out, though I have to admit that they are a lower priority than the others. There is an argument, I suppose, that they should be made a higher priority because they’re more likely to misbehave if unemployed, but on a visceral level alone getting people to the front of the line because they committed crimes is just a no-go.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, less women (or men, for that matter) majoring in stupid studies is a good thing. On the other hand, before we get too carried away trying to get women into geek careers, how about we find jobs for the men already there?

It’s not easy to make a whole lot of sense of this. Of the various things I had to offer in a relationship, knowing my way around technology was not among them. Nor did it seem was my reluctance to shave as often as my facial hair declares I should. Nor my extra poundage.

A while back I wrote on the subject of height differences and the effect that has on romantic success. The long and short of it is that tall women believe that they are discriminated against because guys are intimidated. Guys argue that tall women are disadvantaged because they cull their dating pool to only include guys that are taller than they. I took the position that there is probably some merit to both, but that the bigger issue is that women want guys taller than they are (or at least roughly the same height) and therefore the fewer guys taller than they are, the fewer options they will consider.

The discussion was launched on an article from The Frisky. Well, another article from The Frisky and a poll suggest that the guys are more right than wrong. They took a poll and nearly three out of four respondents said that they would only date a guy taller, the same height, or only slightly shorter than they are.

The only caveat to this is that if you polled only tall women, you might get different results. It’s easy for 5’5″ women to say that they will only date taller guys than them because they’re only excluding pretty short guys. I don’t know how long a 6’1″ woman has to go lonely before deciding that there are more important factors in height, but I doubt it’s an indefinite drought. On the other hand, a 6’1″ woman is more likely to be self-conscious about her height than a 5’5″ woman and so height may be a bigger deal.

Either way, three out of four is a much higher number than I would have expected on a self-reporting survey. At the least, I would have guessed that more women did it either subconsciously or would deny it even in an anonymous poll. We have to accept the poll, though, because Internet polls are always accurate.

The IIHS makes the case for tighter speed limits in Q&A form.

Crime keeps getting better, but we keep thinking it’s getting worse . Given the vested interest that everybody from government (We need new laws! Elect me!) to corporations (Buy our security system!) to media (If it bleeds, it leads!), I suppose it’s no bit surprise.

This is just wrong. Not just because I hate, hate, hate “LOL” but also because we shouldn’t teach young people to type one way and then force them to learn another. Trial by fire, I say.

Steve Jobs says that adding Adobe Flash to the iPad would reduce battery life by 85%. If true, that says more about the iPad than it does about Adobe Flash.

My father got a MagicJack and likes it a great deal. Here’s a mostly winning review. It’s something to consider if we can get an Arapaho area code. Then again, everybody there speaks in 4-digit phone numbers.

Some dude in South Africa bought a ticket with the winning numbers just a little bit too late.

Deaf hardware store cleaner Stanley Philander had the numbers that won the record $12 million rollover (91 million rand) lottery in South Africa on Friday.

Problem was, he bought it after the numbers were selected, which means, that if those numbers just happen to come up again in next weeks drawing, Stanley is golden. Not quite as golden as if he had won this week, however. {…}

Let’s face it, not only is poor Stanley in the midst of a huge letdown at the moment, but that ticket of his is useless. The chances of the same numbers being drawn in back to back lotteries are astronomical.

The chances are, of course, just the same as any other set of six numbers!

On the other hand, if they did pick the exact same numbers back to back, Stanley probably still wouldn’t see any of that money until a lengthy investigation had concluded.