sore

[abka]

Even though I have been maintaining my cardio routine on-and-off this summer I hadn't done any strength training since late April/early May. Thursday I decided to resume and even though I started out with very light weights (about what I started with originally, not what I ended with in May) and didn't do too many reps by about Friday at 1pm every major muscle group was in pain.

Despite the soreness Denis and I went hiking on Saturday. We climbed to the summit of Mt. Greylock--the highest point in MA. It was a beautiful day and the hike took a few hours. At the top there is a lovely lookout area and a huge tower that was originally a lighthouse, but was placed on top of the mountain as a war memorial in the thirties. (You can drive to the top as well, but that would take out the fun of hiking.) It seemed a fitting way to spend our last official weekend together as Berkshire residents.

Then we rented In America, which I found delightful and Denis found boring (he left about 15 minutes in to play computer games.) Friday night we went and saw the Terminal, which was sweet and entertaining. Tom Hanks was great and I got a kick out of the fact that Catherine Zeta Jones's character is named Amelia.

Now we are both stressed with the demands of finding a place to live (very stressful if you are not in the area, I can't imagine moving overseas). Should we take something now, sight-unseen that looks promising, or wait until Denis moves down there so he can look, but then where will Denis stay while he's looking? Who's going to have the car when he moves down? How/when is the house going to get packed up, when are we going to move, what stuff should we get rid of, how will we know what to bring until we have an apartment, etc. We are thinking of getting cell phones, and I'm feeling some sticker shock from that too.

All these stupid questions that are stressful to negotiate and decide. Blech, I hate moving.

Comments

[toran.livejournal.com]

You and me both, sister.

[coffman.livejournal.com]

Now we are both stressed with the demands of finding a place to live (very stressful if you are not in the area, I can't imagine moving overseas)

Yeah, finding a place to live is gonna be a little bit difficult, especially since everything happens in such a rush prior to the start of the school year in a university town. When we were in Cambridge in the spring we were tipped off to the publication that most people list apartments in, so I've been perusing our old copy to get a kind of idea, need to figure out how to get a current copy. We're lucky in that I think we may be able to get some help from my coworkers in London - they may be able to check out some places for us and send us pictures or something like that. Which would absolutely rock. Barring that we're gonna have to do what Randy and Halley did when they moved out to the Bay Area - figure out a place to stay for a few days and just push until you find a place.

I hope that your DC apartment hunting goes smoothly! Any family or friends or friends of friends that Denis could stay with for a week if he went down there early to look at apartments?

We are thinking of getting cell phones, and I'm feeling some sticker shock from that too.

If you're looking to get the cell phones primarily for mobility and don't necessarily need to talk on them all that much, a good solution may be prepaid services, like Virgin Mobile (http://www.virginmobileusa.com/). With typical cell phone operators, you pay very little (or nothing) for a nice handset, but you must sign a 1 or 2 year contract at a specific monthly rate - $20 a month is the minimum, which gets you virtually no minutes, and $30/month is the starting point for normal plans. With prepaid operators, you pay $60-$100 for a middle of the road handset up front, which usually comes with a little initial talk time, but you pay for it like you would a calling card - you pay for a certain number of minutes at a time and then refill only when you run out of minutes. If you need to be reachable but aren't planning on chatting a lot, it can be a very economical way to own a cell phone, since you're not locked into any contracts and if you go through a period where you can't afford to pay cell phone bills, you can just switch off your phone and only check voice mail and you won't be paying a monthly fee, so you could go for several months without spending anything and then start talking again when you needed to and felt you could pay. It's much more flexible.

That being said, this is a poor choice if you're planning on making the cell phone your primary phone - the rates are not good so if you talk a lot each month you could end up paying more than a monthly plan would cost you.

[mrsjadephoenix.livejournal.com]

Uh oh, you got him started on cell phones. What have you done? ;-)

[abka.livejournal.com]

Originally the plan was not to get a landline and just to get two regular cell phones, but that seems twice as expensive as what we have now. We want to be able to get in touch with each other (when are you coming home, can you pick up some milk?) type of conversations. The only people we usually talk to for long extended periods are family--my mom and sister (they have been calling me with their cell phone minutes) and Denis's mother. Right now we've been using calling cards to call Denis's family that's been pretty reasonable, but can you use a calling card with a cell phone?

Maybe we should just get a regular phone and one cell phone, but that's just as much as two cell phones so I don't know if that makes sense. Then I thought we could just get one cell phone and share, but we still need to reach each other. My location will vary throughout the day. Denis will be in one place the majority of the day, but he is convinced that he will not be able to check personal email and that he will not have a phone at his office (because programmers don't need phones to do their jobs), I argue that I can't imagine an office where you work full time and don't have access to a phone (or email?). What do you think? Maybe we should get one regular cell phone and one prepaid phone? Or a regular phone and two prepaid phones? Basically I feel overwhelmed by the whole process and would love some advice.

[abka.livejournal.com]

Can't you also get free phone service through the web? Do you know anything about this?

bah

[denis77.livejournal.com]

Nothing is free anymore. :(

Mainly because they have to use phone line eventually (if you call a regular phone) and they have to pay for "leasing" that line for the duration of the call.

Thus, your internet phone costs money. :p

[coffman.livejournal.com]

Denis is quite right - there are free services (Skype, for instance) that let you make "phone calls" from PC to PC - but if it has to terminate through the normal phone system (i.e. you're calling a real phone from your PC) then they've got to pay so you've got to pay.

The other thing is that if you're looking at that as a way to keep in touch with Denis while he's on the job, it's unlikely to work - the ports that such services use are typically blocked on corporate networks.

That being said, I think it's really likely Denis will have access to both a phone and personal email while at work. I've never been in a computer job where I didn't have this - the only exception would be if you were working by the hour and on a client's premises or something. But if you're a developer working at a desk, my experience at several companies is that it didn't matter that I never talked on the phone during the course of my business, I was still given a phone at my desk. And I've always been able to check personal email too.

Now, whether those things are technically allowed by the company is a different matter - some are stricter than others about using company resources for personal matters. Places I've worked for generally haven't cared, as long as you weren't making long distance calls or totally disturbing work. They expect that people will need to contact spouses to tell them when they're coming home and that kind of thing.

And as I answered in another post of Denis's - calling cards with cell phones is not such a good deal, since you still pay for the minutes when you call a 1-800 number.

[mrsjadephoenix.livejournal.com]

I could understand no personal phone, but a *coding* job where you weren't allowed to check *e-mail*? Forcing geeks to sit at a computer all day without being hooked up to the internet? What kind of sadistic place is this? ;-)