Tomorrow, Laura and I drive off to Sun Valley, Idaho for a week of vacationing with my family. Both Mapquest and Yahoo! Maps agree that it’s about 790 miles (give or take). The routes are almost identical, but Mapquest says it will take us 14 hours and 23 minutes and Yahoo! Maps says it will take us 12 hours and 16 minutes. Obviously, Yahoo! expects us to drive much faster. I guess we’ll have to try and oblige.

In the mail today, I got a check from Charter Communications for $7.07, a refund for our partial last month of service in St. Louis. I also got a bill from SBC (for our partial last month of service) for $7.06. To wit, this means that I am one cent richer than I was before I read my mail!

For future reference: If I need any sort of fastener (screw, bolt, washer, pin, nut, whatever), it doesn’t matter that OSH is closer, and The Home Depot is bigger. They won’t have it. Go to Palo Alto Hardware. It’s my favorite hardware store; no matter what obscure screw or pin I’m looking for, they’ve always have it, and in sufficient quantity.

Friday morning, a van drove into the lobby of my building. Besides an armed driver, the van was loaded with toxic chemicals, and a package (addressed to Steve Jobs) containing a bomb. As the building was evacuated, I was asked to help, and I spent half an hour applying pressure to the wounds on the receptionist’s head and what was left of her arm, until the ambulance arrived.

Well, not really. But we did have a “mock emergency drill and building evacuation,” during which all of the above was simulated.

I unpacked the TiVo last night, and spent a good hour in Guided Setup reconfiguring it for our local cable and telephone setup. My TiVo Gripe Of The Day: Season Passes are channel-specific, which is fine, but it’s very frustrating when you move and find yourself with two dozen perfectly useless Season Passes, because NBC is now on KNTV instead of KSDK, etc…. It seems like a nifty feature would be if Guided Setup could notice “hey, you have a bunch of Season Passes for KSDK, which you no longer receive. Is there a local affiliate you’d like to switch them to?” As it is, I had to go through and make a new Season Pass for each program, re-enter the options and re-sort them, then cancel the old Passes. And since this is summer, and not every show has an episode airing in the next two weeks, there are some Season Passes that I can’t recreate right now. I can only hope I’ll remember to do it before I miss something.

The movers came and brought our stuff this afternoon. Our apartment, which Sunday was spacious and empty, is now full. Piles and piles of boxes, with the occasional piece of furniture. I suspect our to-do list for the next few weeks will include a lot of unpacking.

Amazingly, my Palm turned out to still have all of its data intact, over three weeks after it started refusing to power on. It’s happily charging now.

We won’t have DSL for a week or so yet, but the phone service is on, and I’m typing this over a speedy dialup modem connection. My computer picks up about four other wireless networks (they come and go) in range, but amazingly they’re all encrypted. I guess we have a lot of neighbors who are both savvy and a little security-conscious.

I managed to lock the keys in the trunk this morning. That was fun. Especially because I was trying to be in a hurry. Luckily, AAA was over in about half an hour and opened the car, and we were able to retrieve the keys from the trunk before the car’s alarm got too loud.

Fun, though.

This weblog is now on Pacific Time. Which is why this entry, which was written five minutes after the previous one, was also written two hours earlier. BEEP.

Laura and I took possession of our new apartment today. It’s very nice; the movers don’t show up with our stuff until Tuesday, so for now it’s empty (we’re staying at my parents’ right now, and will continue to do so for a few more days). We did go to Cost Plus and get some very nice patio furniture, though.

This whole three-day weekend thing is strange. I keep expecting to wake up and go to work, but there keeps being more weekend. It will be nice next week, once we start sleeping at the new place, to have a much shorter commute to Apple. Maybe I’ll even figure out how to make public transit work, and not have to drive at all. That will be nice.