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Holy Crap! Guests are coming! I need to clean!

Sep 1st, 2010
by Adam.
2 comments

Other than the movers, the handyman, and the (unnecessary) plumber, the only person to have set foot in my apartment since my move-in day is… me.

In part it is because of my kitchen: I like to cook for my guests and until my kitchen cabinets are properly attached to the wall, I’m not really in grocery stock up mode – rather I am in keeping a relatively small supply of everyday staples around—like bread, pasta, tomato sauce, and the like.

I’m doing it this way because I know that in a couple weeks I will have to empty the cupboards out so that they can be properly rehung. I don’t really see the point in filling them with food because doing so will only cause the cabinets to fall off or, even worse, mean that I will have to empty the cabinets the day before the handyman appears.

However I’ve invited two guests this week: Snooker and Sweet No, who will grace my apartment, see where it is, offer up some useful advice, and then I will take them out to dinner as my way of thanking them for all their helpful advice and assistance.

But before they come over I am entering a cleaning frenzy. Sure I still have pictures to hang, but I also have dust under the bed (already!!!), and I have a few more stray boxes to put into storage: I’ve purchased a water-cooker, as the Germans call it, or an electric kettle; plus my land line telephone; and a mysterious package that was delivered to one of my neighbors whilst I was at work (I’d tell you what was in it, but that would ruin the surprise that I sort of have planned for later).

I didn’t help myself last night when I went to Ikea and picked up a lot of things for not so much money – Ikea has dropped the prices on a number of things that I needed, wanted, and didn’t know I wanted. I picked up some inexpensive wooden cutting boards, a thermos, plus the fitted sheets I need to replace the ones that are starting to become hole-ly.

Along the way I picked up a few supplies to make any future overnight guests comfortable, a candle, and some other useless knickknacks.

So this evening, while you’re enjoying a good book, remember that I’m at home—vacuuming, doing laundry, dusting, washing dishes, and trying to make my place look presentable for my guests.

Oh yeah, and since my landline turns on today, I’ll be calling the States to talk with my friends and family. I like having unlimited international calls.

Posted in: Diary, shopping.
Tagged: · · · ·

I’m rich!

Aug 31st, 2010
by Adam.
3 comments

Well, not really rich—but the good news, at least for me, is that my bank account is sufficiently above zero that I feel comfortable.

And I’ve done some shopping already:

  • DSL/Landline Service: I’ve ordered phone service for home, including DSL that is, in theory, 8 times faster than what I had in Weimar. It should be installed in about two weeks. As my old phone was not really fantastic, I bought a new one: the least expensive one in the shop, at 30€–I had to ask. More problematic was the DSL modem/router. T-Com wanted 150€ or 4€/month for a modem/router. That seemed a bit steep to me so I opted not to get one from T-COM. I might need to reconsider that decision.
  • iPhone4: I’ve put myself on the waiting list for an iPhone 4. Apparently T-Mobile is sold out. I have quite a wait ahead of me. I should have reserved one a couple weeks ago.
  • Grown-Up Stuff: Yeah, I bought some grown-up stuff. I feel like an adult. No details here.

Next on my shopping agenda is a trip to Ikea to buy a few more things that I need/want to complete the large purchases for the apartment. I need shelves for my kitchen and a low side-table for my living room. After that I think my furniture needs are essentially complete – oh yeah, and a cabinet for under my bathroom sink.

I also want to do something that I haven’t done since moving from the States—what that is I will keep private, for now.

It’s nice to be in the money.

I promise not to blow my wad all in one go.

Posted in: Diary.
Tagged: · ·

I ran out of Internet.

Aug 30th, 2010
by Adam.
3 comments

Sorry about my silence over the weekend, but Saturday morning I downloaded two podcasts, enjoyed listening to them, and then Saturday evening found out that I had run into my 3GB surfing wall.

I suppose that on the plus side it took me 6 more days to reach the wall in August than it did in July, which only means that I’ve managed to better control my own surfing: few Flickr uploads, little Flickr exploration. Only one or two YouTube videos. No porn.

Let me tell you: It’s been a rough summer.

The good news is that once my August pay shows up (hopefully today, worst case scenario is tomorrow), I will go out on the town, ride in limousines, eat at 5-star restaurants, and party at the swankiest clubs in down.

Oh wait, I actually have more modest plans: get the iPhone 4, order VDSL service for home, and pay some bills.

Reality may not sound as thrilling, but it is, perhaps, more exciting.

Posted in: Diary.
Tagged: · ·

An Update on Socializing Adam

Aug 26th, 2010
by Adam.
13 comments

No doubt some of you have noticed that I’ve expanded my online presence in the last week to include two new websites: Tumblr and Facebook.

Of the two, I expect Tumblr to be far more interesting and useful. Although I have not yet used it extensively, Tumblr, for me, is a place to stick things that I like and want to share and take up more than 140 characters (those things go to Twitter), but for whatever reason aren’t really blog material.

Facebook remains a mystery to me, but I decided it was probably worth establishing a beach-head and reserving my name on the site in case it actually becomes useful one day. I’m not really clear how it can become useful, but more on that later.

My current web/social media portfolio looks like this:

  • This blog, That Queer Expatriate, is my main output for long form thoughts—a public diary of what I’m thinking about, doing, or whatever. It’s not changing. My general rule is that I only post to it once a day. Occasionally I might post two things in one day to it—but I try to do that rarely. I also do not feel compelled to post every day. Sometimes I’m just too tired to think. I also have the archive sub-site with stuff from my past.
  • My Twitter, which I wasn’t certain about at first, is now important. I love the challenge of putting thoughts on Twitter in less than 140 characters. I especially love doing it without using abbreviations. Sometimes I can spend 10 minutes rearranging a sentence and thinking of other ways to express an idea before I post a Tweet. My general rule is that I try not to Tweet more than once every 20 minutes—if not less often. I’ve stopped following some people because they tweeted too much and made it difficult for me to keep track of the tweets from people who tweet less often. In summary: I <3 Twitter.
  • My Tumblr, as I’ve established here, occupies a space between TQE and Twitter, and I don’t just mean alphabetically. It’s going to host things that I want to share with people but that I don’t think quite fit onto the blog for whatever reason. For now, it is a minor player.
  • My Flickr, is where I dump photographs that I take. If you look hard enough there are a few things on there that I did not create myself. I don’t think I’ve posted anything like that in a couple years. The vast majority of photos published on my blog are hosted at Flickr, unless I have copyright concerns that prevent that from happening.

I have a couple other social media type places that I frequent, but those aren’t really in the main stream, so I’ll leave those out for now.

Now about Facebook: Given the company’s poor track record when it comes to both privacy and usurping copyright, for now I have only established a beachhead on the site. The very first thing I did was go into the privacy settings and make everything invisible to the world. I think you can find me, see my blog’s URL, see a messed up photo of me, and that’s it.

Since I’ve never used Facebook, I honestly don’t know what the Wall is, I don’t know how it works, I don’t know how news gets shared, and I don’t know specifically how copyright works, I am going to take baby steps on the site. I also don’t understand the “friend of a friend of a friend of a friend” stuff so until I do, don’t expect much from me.

Because I’m taking baby steps, I want to talk about friends first: With a few very rare exceptions, there is no way I will accept friendship requests from anybody who I have not personally met. And by personally met, I mean being in the same room and talking to each other. And on a tangential front, for now I won’t recognize family members as they have other ways to communicate with me (or not communicate with me, as the case may be).

Facebook is, as far as I can tell, about maintaining weak ties. I’ve never really been that good about maintaining weak ties. I have a few (right now the number is two) really good exceptionally close friends who I really trust with everything in my life.  I also have a dozen, or so, really good friends who I trust with most things in my life, and then I have a circle of about 20-30 people who I call loose friends: people I like talking to and hanging out with and would do so more often if they weren’t so far away from Berlin. After that… well, then I’m crap.

I’m not convinced that Facebook is the answer. I like calling friends, I like sending postcards, and I like emailing. I just don’t get what “facebooking” means.

Posted in: Meta/Computing.
Tagged: · · ·

Maybe I should visit North Dakota.

Aug 24th, 2010
by Adam.
7 comments

Posted in: Diary.
Tagged: · · ·

Welcome to my new Berlin bedroom.

Aug 23rd, 2010
by Adam.
6 comments

You’re invited to join me in the bedroom.

The Bedroom, at night.

Above my bed is my Tom Coverdale framed set: an autographed photo of the man in action and a piece of Assembly Hall floor, signed by the man.

Bedroom in the Morning

Light with ShadeNone of my rooms are completely dominated by Ikea, but if there is one that is, it’s my bedroom. The bed? Malm, by Ikea. The lamp on the side table? Ikea. The curtains? Ikea. The lampshade for the bulb hanging from my ceiling? Ikea.

Even the duvet, pillows, and duvet covers are Ikea. The fitted bottom sheet, however, is not—but seeing as I need new ones (my current ones are developing holes), this will change in the relative near future.

Wardrobe and Cabinet

Plush TowerIn the rest of the room, I have a wardrobe (ex-USA), a cabinet (ex-USA; for Weimar folk, this used to hold my dishes back when I lacked cabinet space in the attic) for t-shirts and other assorted things, and a wire tower of, well…

Stuffed animals and other knickknacks, starting, at the top, with the sun, by Murakami, which I picked up at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008.

Murakami Sun

Stuffed Animals And...

More stuffed animals

Stingray!

The bottom...Below are more stuffed animals and other things that I’ve picked up over the years, down to a Stingray that my parents gave me a long time ago to remember my first email address, Stingray@ the University of Wyoming. The levels below include a calendar of hunks and a spare duvet for guests.

Torchy! and Flight Certificate

While I’m lying in bed I can look up and see, on the left, a flight certificate that I completed a flight over Berlin on the DC-3 Candy Bomber (the one that crashed earlier this summer). On the right is an autographed photo from the famous Torchy / @Torchyboy.

I should actually say something more about Torchy. He’s a closeted guy out of England who has acquired a large following of fans and friends on his blog and on Twitter. He seems to do an amazing amount of stuff, although he’s currently unemployed. An avid amateur photographer, he’s also trained for and run in a marathon. He went to school in Bristol, so perhaps he’s Banksy, but I doubt it.

He also participates in #ShowPantsSaturday, where people take photographs of themselves in their pants and posts links to the photos on Twitter. Lest you are confused, I might note that the British definition of pants is slightly different from the American definition. British “pants” is equal to American “underwear” – and Torchy is a big fan of Calvin Kleins. He also looks really good in his Calvins.

And on that note, does anybody else remember how Marty McFly was called Calvin by his Mother?

Maybe I’m dating myself.

Posted in: Diary.
Tagged: · ·

If there’s one thing I can say about this summer, it’s unseasonable.

Aug 22nd, 2010
by Adam.
No comments yet
Napping in the Park

Hot.

This has been a summer of extremes and not so many average days. Back in July a decent cause of my sleepless nights was the fact that people were sleeping and partying in the park across the street from where I was living. It got to a point where I was hoping for rainy and/or cool weather at night.

During the hottest part of the hot spell, my new office suffered from a broken cooling system. The office doesn’t have air conditioning, but it has something called “cooling ceilings”—what that is, exactly, I don’t know, but it was broken and although my office was boiling hot, it wasn’t the hottest office I encountered: I walked past an office with an open door and felt the heat coming into the hallway. Arizona or the Sahara must have been inside.

Feet in the fountain

Free water to cool the feet!

Then, for about two weeks, as I vaguely recall, the weather was just right—including an almost perfectly perfect moving day: It wasn’t too hot and it wasn’t raining.

The last week was strange. I know that for a couple of days it was cool enough that I regretted wearing short-sleeved shirts. It was also rather wet out—sort of like living in Indiana, but without the heat. It finally peaked (perhaps the wrong word), Friday morning when I wore a hoodie to the office.

However by the end of the afternoon, when I headed home, I decided to roll it up and shove it in my bag because it was too hot to wear it.

The weekend has been teetering on being too hot. Hot enough that I decided to wash my heavy kitchen rug, knowing full well it would dry in less than 24 hours. It did, unlike a load of laundry earlier this week that took at least a day and a half to dry.

I took advantage of the fine weather today to head to a nearby park where I rolled out my towel, pulled out a book, and made hay while the sun shined.

Posted in: Diary.
Tagged: · · ·

On Settling Down.

Aug 21st, 2010
by Adam.
4 comments

I’m happy to report that things are falling into place in the apartment.

It’s making that magic transformation from a generic abode into something more home-like.

Faggots (British Style)

Eat faggots.

Today I mopped the kitchen and bathroom floors and started to put things in my living room into what should be their final resting spots. My box of faggots is on the top shelf along with my Grütze container.

After examining my budget, I found a few spare Euro that I turned into picture frames. Three more pictures framed, three more to go. The last three are problematic because the images are either non-standard sizes or lack straight-edges.

I bought the picture frames at Ikea where I also took the opportunity to look at what I want to buy next month, once I have money. I need something to hold a few electronics and, in the long run, spice jars and some place to put the spice jars. A small kitchen-shelving tower would also be nice.

As for photos of the apartment, I’ve decide to do them one room at a time, much like I did for my Weimar apartment. The bedroom will be up first as it is closest to being complete. Actually I think it is complete unless I decide to hang some more pictures on the wall.

Happy End

After the end: happy.

The bathroom is almost completely done as well. I only want a small cupboard for under the sink to hold my spare rolls of toilet paper and other sundries. (I proudly use, by the way, Happy End toilet paper.)

The living room is essentially done save for pictures on the wall and slipcovers.

The slipcovers aren’t actually a minor issue—I’m hoping that slipcovers aren’t outrageously expensive. I probably have to have them custom made because my sofas are from the States. At some point I looked at American slipcovers on the web and made some measurements. It seems that my loveseats are something like four inches too wide for standard loveseat measurements, but way too small for 3-person couches. I also have two ottomans that need slipcovers.

The couches actually look pretty awful against the white walls and light of my new apartment. The dinginess was not noticeable in Weimar, plus I think the couches picked up some dirt in transport and storage.

The kitchen has a ways to go. I need the cabinets rehung in order to prevent them from falling off the wall. Currently I have a tentative appointment to fix the problem in early October. At that time I’ll also have spice jar racks hung and whatever else I decide to have done to the kitchen done. It’s going to be an awkward month not having complete use of my kitchen cabinets, but I can still cook at home—I just won’t be stocking up on dried goods beyond what I need for a week or so at a time.

Finally the hallway still needs a light fixture installed—I’ll buy that right before the handyman comes. I’m also planning on hanging two or three pictures in the hallway, plus a bulletin board.

Posted in: Diary.
Tagged: ·

Not that I’m counting, or anything….

Aug 18th, 2010
by Adam.
6 comments

Posted in: Diary.

My Photos As Art

Aug 17th, 2010
by Adam.
3 comments

I got in the mail a pretty awesome “Gutschein” for PosterXXL.de.

This leads to me to ask two pertinent questions.

First, do any of my German readers have experience with PosterXXL.de? Is the service good? The output worth the price?

Hermannplatz

No, I would not put this on my wall.

Second, and for all my readers, assuming the answer to the first question is “PosterXXL.de is great, you should use them,” think about the photos that I’ve put on my blog or that you’ve seen in my Flickr stream—are there any that you remember and think that would work well as art worth hanging on my wall?

My Flickr stream is here—all photos are tagged, and, let me caution you, there are 5,834 (as of today) photos to look at.

Posted in: Little Things.
Tagged: ·

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