All 3 kitties

All 3 kitties
Originally uploaded by gnibbles512

I was taking a nap on J's lap, 'cos it looked super comfy. Apparently the kitties decided I looked super comfy too, 'cos one after another, they all piled onto me. :D

At last

An office! With a door and everything! Only... the walls don't go all the way up to the ceiling, so aside from visual privacy, the overall privacy is still quite poor. Plus the doors don't lock anyway. But I shouldn't complain. I have all my crap that I need, plus a bonus door I can close, and bonus lights I can choose to turn on or off. Good enough! :)

The Tyranny of Stuff

Subject stolen from jadia

Our stuff finally arrived, after going AWOL for a solid month. Yep, all 7,000 lbs of it, sitting boxed up and stacked 4 high in our living room, kitchen, and bedroom. It arrived in an 18-wheeler, and took 3 dudes 4 hours to unload. If ever there were 18 wheels of pain, this would have been it. Happily, all our stuff does in fact fit into our new apartment (at least, by volume).

To make matters worse, the landlord and his plumber chose that same day to work on installing the dishwasher, and moving the drain pipe to make our washer/dryer sit better, so the kitchen looked like a bomb went off in it, and smelled alternately of burning metal, scorched wood, and solder.

We started unpacking today, and the bedroom is approaching completion. We have to wash the bed linens before we can actually sleep in that room... and probably buying some curtains would be nice too. There are three large windows in the bedroom, 1 facing east, 2 facing south, and all of them facing some combination of the street, and our neighbors. Oh well, at least we get fabulous light in that room. :)

We've successfully deployed 4 of 5 bookcases, but because they're all boxed in (haha, literally), we haven't been able to actually use them as crash space for unpacking. The 5th bookcase is leaning against the wall in its component parts, but at least it's in its final location.

The bicycles have found their ways to the porch. The motorcycles are locked up in the driveway, tucked well back from the street. Our car has 2 more days of out-of-state permit parking before we need to find some other place to stash it. We need to get it insured and registered, then we'll have more permanent resident parking.

Things appear to be moving right along. Hopefully we'll have a housewarming sometime before the end of the year. Last time we moved, it took about 4 months before the house was in good enough shape to throw a housewarming. Hopefully this time we'll be a bit faster about it.

Moving to the right coast

J and I have arrived in our new town.... We're in a bizarre state of limbo where I have to work, but have no office; and we can paint the walls in the new apartment, but can't move in. Intellectually, I know that this would happen, but from an emotive / instinctive level, I still find it oddly upsetting to be so rootless.

We are staying at a friend's house, and he has basically rented us a room for the time being. It won't be much longer now before we will be allowed to actually occupy our new place, except for the fact that all our furniture and other worldly possessions are... somewhere in a truck, toodling along across the country at a nice, leisurely pace (in short, I have no idea where it is).

Then there is the matter of my cats, which are bumping along in their individual kennels, riding in my car with J's dad and brother, somewhere in the vasty wildernesses. I miss them a lot, and I hope they make it across safely.

The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos)

I was utterly enthralled by the story, both the past and the present. We debated the events depicted in the film the whole ride home. The Secret in Their Eyes leaves you with countless implications, and lets you sift through them until you, like the main character, arrive at the inescapable truth (although ymmv).

In short, it's good. It's complicated. Go see it. :)

Avatar: The Last Airbender

M. Night Shyamalan EPIC FAIL.

I can't remember the last time I saw a movie this bad. I hope MST3K riff-tracks it soon, because that's the only way anyone can be reasonably expected to watch this horrible monstrosity.

The actors were atrocious, the CG removed from reality, the plot line divorced from all sense of plausibility.... Need I go on? Give this movie a pass if you value your hard-earned cash.

The only upside to this movie was that it got us out of 4th of July post-fireworks traffic.

Karate Kid

Having immigrated from Beijing to the US when I was roughly the age of the boy, I really empathized deeply with the character. Children can be so cruel.

Jackie Chan plays a creepy old dude pretty well. I wasn't entirely convinced by the car scene, but overall I thought the movie did a fair, faithful adaptation of the original.

Iron Man 2

Definitely not as exciting as the first one. Everything about it screamed gratuitous and overplayed. We guessed the driving plot point before even setting foot in the theater. :p

If you like obvious plot lines jazzed up with lots and lots of explosions, it'll be fun times, but don't expect to be intellectually stimulated. :)

Toy Story 3

To summarize: ♥ !!!

I think Pixar did a really nice job with the end-of-life portion of our toys. Okay, so the fire-and-brimstone portion was a bit gratuitous, but overall, I thought the movie was really sweet.

Go see it! :) Go see it with your friends, and bring that ratty old teddy bear you've held onto for too many years out of sheer sentimentality. Don't forget to give it a hug.

Tokaj is very special

The Tokaj wine country (Tokaj-Hegyalja) is sparsely dotted with little villages clustered near where several rivers branch and join. The wineries in this region are distributed throughout these villages. The villages are somewhere between 2mi to 6mi apart from each other, along fairly fast-traffic, sidewalk-free roads. It is very inconvenient to attempt to walk from one village to another.

There is no taxi.

Let me rephrase this. It is a somewhat dangerous proposition to try and walk between villages... but you can't pay someone to drive you between towns.

This is a baffling case of "you can't get there from here" which had us pretty steamed this morning. The hotel staff informed us of the lack of taxis in Tokaj. The tourism information office was minimally helpful in our endeavor to get from Tokaj up to Tarcal and Mezõzombor. In the end, we decided to cut 2 wineries from our day plan and just visit the one place that was in the next village via the train.

We ended up walking 5 miles total anyway, what with getting to the train station, getting to the wine cellar from the train station, getting back to the train, and then getting home from the train. For comparison, we could have walked the whole way -- dodging cars and tripping over grassy nubs -- a total distance of 13.5 miles.

3G in Hungary

When we left for Hungary, we were still waiting to hear back from a bank about whether or not they would accept our offer on a property they were selling. This meant that the first thing on our minds when we landed on Friday afternoon was, "How do we get 3G on our cell phones in Hungary?"

We found a T-Mobile store that looked promising at the Mammut shopping center in nearby Moskva Square. We punched a few options on a monitor, and the machine spat out a little slip of paper with a number on it. After twiddling our thumbs for a good long while and speculating whether the person who'd get to help us would speak English, our number was finally called.

Between wildly ineffectual gesticulations and increasingly broken English, we managed to purchase sim cards with pre-paid internet and local (Hungarian calls only) minutes. More than once, I whispered to J, "I'm confused. Do you have any idea what he's trying to sell us?"

Finally we got to the point where we shoved our new sim cards into the phones. I unlocked my screen expectantly and..... lo and behold, I had no internet. I nudged J and showed him the error. After futzing about with his phone, he concluded that he too suffered a tragic lack of internet.

Another bout of gesticulations and fragmented English ensued, the result of which, I gathered later, was that we had to set up our phones for Hungarian 3G. This, the person at the desk helpfully pointed out, was an easy task, but the service desk which did this only opened on Monday. Oh, he added, even more helpfully, but if we went to this other mall over there tomorrow morning, maybe they could do it right away.

Following his instructions, we arrived at the Westend City Center mall on Saturday morning. After wandering for a good 20 minutes with increasing confusion and ire, we finally found a directory that could tell us clearly where in the seven hells they hid the T-Mobile store. (Actually, it was what they called the "T-Pont" -- the store labeled "T-Mobile" didn't do that sort of thing, apparently.)

We went through the same rigamarole -- punch the buttons on the monitor, grab the number the machine spat out, twiddle our thumbs, and waddle up to the correct number of desk when called -- only to be told ... the exact same thing. Yes, it was easy to set up, but the service desk isn't open on the weekends. Come back Monday.

By this time, we'd heard back from our agent that the bank had gone with a different offer on their property -- with a caveat. The new deadline for hearing back about the state of affairs was Tuesday, so we had a bit of a reprieve. We'd get this thing set up on Monday, we told ourselves. Or maybe Tuesday.

Finally, on Tuesday, we find some time to go, yet again, to that T-Pont. The first person who helped us was only able to navigate the Hungarian version of the monitor menus, but that got us into the right lines at the service desk. Once the service desk got around to our number -- pretty quickly this time -- it really was a short and easy process. The procedure was comically marred by our inability to remember the code that unlocked our sim cards, so that when the service guy rebooted J's phone, we ended up doing a big ol' song and dance to reset his code. On the bright side, we can finally use the 3G we'd paid for 4 days ago.

Moral of this story? Forget 3G in Hungary. You don't need it! But if you really must insist, try to go early on a weekday (MON-THU, just to be safe).

Etyek Wine Cellar Festival

When we planned this trip to Hungary, one of the primary reasons for going on such an awkward day (Thursday) was to catch the Etyek Wine Cellar Festival. Between one thing and another, we weren't sure which day we could make it, so we figured we'd wing it and see how things worked out.

On Saturday, we finished all our errands fairly early, so we decided that we'd go check out this festival after all. It had started raining lightly in Budapest, so we hauled out our umbrellas and trudged down to the train station to buy our tickets. The wait for the bus wasn't bad, and we soon hopped on for the ~1hr ride.

As we neared Etyek, I woke up from my nap to see two girls tugging newly purchased rain boots out of their shopping bags and onto their feet. Upon arrival, I understood why. Etyek was a little town planted on the side of a hill, with more mud and grass than pavement. The rain had gotten heavier. Little rivulets wandered down the paved areas, and pooled in the mud and grass.

None of the wine cellars were prepared for this weather. The few tents that had been set up were obviously not water-proof rain tents. We arrived cold and shivering at the first wine-tasting station, where people huddled with varying enthusiasm under umbrellas and over wine glasses. My stomach leaped for joy at the delicious smells of the enormous frying pans set up outside one of the restaurant lodges. J and I looked at each other, and immediately bought two heaping platters of piping hot food.

I felt revivified after lunch, and we went through a number of wine cellars with mixed success. We quickly spent the 20 wine tickets we had bought, and J had to buy another 40. We trekked through the pouring rain and the slick, squishy mud to taste all sorts of wines - red wines, white wines, dry wines, sweet wines.

As we were slogging from one station to the next, the local band struck up a tune in the distance. At first we were too far to hear it well. As we neared the stage, the band began to play... a Star Wars medley. We clutched our umbrellas and stared at them in bemusement for a good minute before trudging off for more wine.

We're going to Hungary!

Hilarious misadventures to follow soon, I'm sure! I'll also be keeping track of our exciting culinary exploits over at Toast to Moon and Shadow.

New recipes!

New recipes (garden pasta, hot chocolate) and restaurant review (Hachi Ju Hachi) at Toast to Moon and Shadow. Delicious!

Dance!

I've uploaded a video of the choreography that we're learning at the moment. The song is Studio Ayoub's "Tabla Sukkarah". It's a lot of fun. :)

A Blag of Blogs

I went on a blogging spree and created this and three other blogs.

• Dances with Sun Beams is a haphazard collection of thoughts about the many joys of dancing.
• Toast to Moon and Shadow is where I'll be musing about food and drink, and also places to go to satisfy my cravings.
• Storytime with Kittens is a compilation of stories that J and I have come up with over time. Mostly, he's the one responsible for the adorable Miggle stories, and I'm the one to blame for the longer stuff.

They're all listed in the sidebar, along with my website Cat of All Trades.