The kitchen, featuring Tali's hideaway.

The damn moving companies lost my toolboxes. And it isn't like I had great tools in there or anything -- a few rasps, a multimeter, a cheapo soldering iron and supplies -- but what I had was tuned perfectly for arcade projects. I finally got my soldering setup like I wanted it.

The biggest loss, though, is the entire set of Japanese controls I had specially ordered:

• A Sanwa JLF-TP-8Y joystick (the identical stick used in the Versus City cabinets in Japan),
• Fourteen Sanwa arcade buttons to match Tekken and Virtua Fighter configurations,
• A custom 8-way joystick restrictor plate to provide smoother circular motion, and
• A 5-way harness for wiring the stick up.

You can't buy this stuff in the US; you have to get lucky enough to find somebody who is placing a bulk order with the Japanese manufacturer and get in with them on that order. I searched for nearly a year for this stuff.

And now it's gone. Daaaaaaaaaaammiiiiiiiiiiittt...

...That someone else in the building is providing. Turns out Earthlink doesn't provide any DSL service in our building, and the best they can do is satellite access. That's only about half the speed of a decent DSL connection. So we said no to that, and dropped our service down to dial-up. Cotemporal with this was my manager's revelation that the company would no longer ante up for broadband for me at home.

So what to do, gentle readers? What to do? I'll tell you what we did. We turned on our laptops one night at home, scanned for any open networks, found one, and never looked back.

Yeah, so we're swiping broadband from some unwitting soul who probably wonders why his or her access is so slow these days. We don't even know who it is; we only know that broadband access is like e-manna - each day we have but to try to venture out onto the net and access is there. Hee hee!

So I love it here. I love living in the middle of everything, just a short walk to Starbucks and great places to eat. There's a great running store just down the road, which has taken the trouble to mark routes through the town with mile markers and everything. We have a Panera down the street, two grocery stores within walking distance, and the best ice cream in Chicagoland less than a 10-minute walk away.

I love coming home at night, and toodling around town. I commute 30 minutes a day, which is about 200% better than the Chicago average, and slightly better than what it was in Chapel Hill. I even have a bicycle I scoot around on. I look at our place and I see opportunity and promise.

Shel looks at it, and she sees a prison.

We had a long talk last night -- and it wasn't it fun. It boils down to how our life affects each of us differently:

• The Car. See, I have the car all day, at work. Shelley can walk places, but she feels trapped without the car. It's not that she has to have it for anything in specific, but the fact that she doesn't have it tends to make her feel closed in. I can offer to get to work some other way any given day, but that doesn't take away the general state of affairs.
• The Money Pit. No, our place isn't really a hole at all. But it is in need of some significant improvements: replastering the ceilings and walls, repainting in all the rooms, taking the mirrors off of the walls in the bedroom, pantry, and kitchen, replacing the sconces in the dining room and living room, and stripping the trim on all the moulding and baseboards. We are talking mucho dinero: much more than we likely will have at our disposal anytime soon. But I still look at the place and say, "we will make this ours. Look out!" Shel, OTOH, looks around and sees so much that needs work, and no dough to do it, and it fills her with despair.
• Launch Pad or Padlocked? I get to go to work all day, and I come home to the place. Shel's here all day, and can't go far. I don't have to live with the limitations of our home all the time. Shel does, and it's really hard on her. My little entwife needs to be able to bring order to the place, and the chaos is unrelenting.

So that's kinda where things stand. I'm trying to learn to listen to her when she expresses these things, without being impatient or otherwise buttheaded. And worst of all, I can't really fix it.

Is currently cooking on a low fire. Blueberry pancakes for dinner. And why? Because there isn't much else, and they are a great comfort food.

Food here is really pricey. I'm doing some comparison shopping at several chains: Jewel/Osco (the local grocery chain), Whole Foods (or, as my co-worker EM terms it, "Whole Paycheck"), and Wild Oats, a bigger, better version of Whole Foods, with better prices. There's also a Trader Joe's here, which has some great bargains despite a comparatively limited selection.

...was the distance I covered on foot, in my training for the Chicago Marathon. Yesterday I ran 19 miles. It took a long time. I'm sore.

And this week is even nastier. 50 miles total, with a 10-miler on Saturday and a 20-miler on Sunday. I have to find some new routes; running laps on an 8-mile course just ain't the way to go.

Spent part of the weekend organizing our storage and closet space, and in building shelves for our kitchen closet/pantry.

I'm tired. I'm going to sleep early tonight. I wanted to watch Kill Bill Vol. 2 again tonight -- which I heartily recommend -- but I just don't think I can keep my head up for it.

Talked to EWS today, and she survived Hurricane Charlie with no damage, it seems. Great news, as she's just moved to Tampa and a smackdown like that would be brutal for a new homeowner such as herself. Went and saw her and A in Tampa a couple of weeks ago (during the Saint Leo training) -- we hung out in Ybor City and ate well.

Or trying to. We're up to our eyeballs in cardboard at the moment.

One thing is certain: I love this place. I love being able to walk to a grocery store, to a drug store, to a Starbucks, to a movie theatre, to a park, to any number of restaurants, and to what may be the best ice cream joint there is: Petersen's Ice Cream, which will soon get a blogpost of its own. Three words: eighteen percent milkfat. Eeeeeeeeeeyummy!

Hooked up music last night, which was a dramatic improvement. Sure made my little audiofilly happy.

Today we finally got the phone up and running. Those of you who have been trying to call on our home line, you can actually get through now.

I spent all day yesterday organizing our storage area and building shelves in the pantry closet. Now, it's a matter of figuring out how best to unbox and throw things into place.

The temperature here has been delightful. I gather that the 60-degree days we've been having are unseasonably cool for Chicago; I see a lot of glum natives walking around, grumbling about it. Coming from 95 degrees and 95 percent humidity in NC, though, this place is paradise.

More blogging and pictures on the way -- just haven't had a moment to step back and reflect, you know?

So I'm training faculty at Saint Leo University this week. Now, Saint Leo is a small university (1000 or so traditional on-ground students) located about 30 miles north of Tampa. Here's the weird bit -- it's nestled in a little town called Saint Leo, Florida.

Coincidence, you say?

Well, get this: the town and school names are unnervingly like the name of the Benedictine Abbey there, which is, in a surprise twist, called Saint Leo Abbey. Now, I'm the last guy to jump to conclusions, as a rule, but when I saw that the Abbey was named as such, I began to be suspicious. Hey, I saw The Name of the Rose; I wasn't born yesterday, gentle readers! And if there's one lesson I took from that movie, it's that monks are devious. You know, I'll bet this is somehow a papist plot.

But let's leave my detective skills aside for a bit. I've been driving back and forth from Tampa each day to the school, because my sister EWS just moved to Tampa, and I wanted to be able to hang with her when possible. That, and the chances that rural Florida would have a hotel with broadband internet access were about nil.

At any rate, at some point this morning I got a leak in my tire, and the way I found this out was that a guy from down the hall came to our computer lab this morning to say that my car now had a flat. How did he know it was my car, you ask? Well, the guy comes in and says:

"Excuse me, but does anyone in here drive a tan car?"
(No one jumps to answer.)
He continues: "It looks like it could be a rental car..."
My ears perk up. "Might be mine," I offer.
"Drink a lot of Starbucks?" he asks with a smirk.
"Er, yeah, I guess..."

Some people have no sense of decorum. Just because I hadn't gotten around to cleaning out the trash from this morning's coffee stop, he says I drink a lot of Starbucks. Whatever, dude.