nomads are cool, but i kinda like my material possessions

hoorah! i did get the keys on friday, and i moved on saturday. good lord, i have a lot of crap.

after all, i did show up here 3 years ago this coming sunday with just two suitcases and a piano. granted the furniture i've acquired doesn't help, but i think even without it, i've far outgrown the two suitcases---as the 5 car trips we made saturday can attest. (cars are small in switzerland though.) the only thing left is the bookcase, and then i need to scrub the floors and get rid of the rug and the two armchairs if the next guy doesn't want them.

in reality, it actually went pretty smoothly, as far as movings go. of course, i had grand dreams going into it of being so obsessive-compulsive that everything would be neatly packaged and we wouldn't end up in the 'packing-while-moving' bit, but it's pretty much inevitable. i did a good job, but there's always that nasty little stuff hidden in some corner that has to be thrown into shopping bags at the last minute. eh, it's done now. mostly by pierre and i; it was really awesome of him to help out as much as he did. the first four trips were just him and i, plus fabius for one of them, then peter came and did one more run with me after he left.

so the new place is really cool, especially the new reduced 20 minute commute (oh my god, it's fantastic). although there are certain annoyances as well. most i can probably eventually take care of, with the exception of the fact that there are even fewer electrical outlets in this apartment (well, per room) than the old one, if you can believe that. for example, my bedroom has ONE. count it: ONE. what the hell, people? is this not the 21st century? electricity is the new heroin.

the lack of built in closets will necessitate the purchase of a chest of drawers, but this is just a minor temporary concern. procuring one of those should be easy enough. but naturally, the shower head holder is in the most inconvenient place possible. (they always use those silly detachable things, and then instead of mounting the holder where a normal one would be so that you could just leave it there and use it, they put it at about navel height pointed straight into the room... go figure...)

and, last but not least, the phone jack is in the middle of the hallway on the opposite side as the rooms, meaning that i'll need to buy some long-ass network cables and start tracing doorways in order to get the dsl all the way to my computer in my room.

speaking of which, though, the swisscom system has apparently become *disturbingly* effecient. i am beyond shocked. sunday afternoon, i came into the office, and used their website to enter a relocation request, with a desired effective date of monday, though i expected that to be interpreted as "as soon as possible," since i was pretty sure they wouldn't be able to do it that fast. by the time i got home, there was a dial tone (before it had just been dead), but if you tried to dial out, you got a message saying that the subsciption wasn't yet in service. monday morning at 6:50 when i got up, it was working already. even the dsl was active when i finally had time to wire it up last night after work. now this is, as i mentioned, truly impressive (all the more so, seeing as they are swiss), but clearly it means that everything was taken care of automatically by the computer. and if that's the case, why in the name of all that is good and tasty did i have to pay 100 francs for the relocation "fees?" come on, people, that's just plain bullshit. and extortion. welcome to switzerland. [throws up hands in defeat]