Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

New town, new job, new phone

I have moved. Well, mostly. As of Saturday, the place in Playa Del Rey is stripped bare, the shelves wiped clean, and the keys turned in. With the help of Sarah’s dad, we drove the two-car convoy up to San Francisco with no major incidents, feline or otherwise. The new place, which bears a strong resemblance to the old place, now has a new Ikea mattress, a new Ikea computer cabinet, and a bunch of clothes, minor kitchenware, and other crap that came up in a total of four carloads, plus the usual Target and Costco ventures. Tomorrow or the day after, we are supposed to get the big truckload of everything else, which will be great fun.

I got a new job. As per the normal drill, I won’t mention it here, but if you are curious, you can email me. It’s going to be an interesting venture, which means I might not post again for another six months. And it’s 45 minutes away, so even if it was banker’s hours, that’s a huge hit. But I am excited about it, so we’ll see.

Right before we left LA, I reached lifetime status at Weight Watchers. That means I stayed under my goal for long enough, and now I don’t have to pay. (I posted about this in LiveJournal.) I have not eaten as well since, because I have either been on the road or have not had a kitchen available to me. But I think I am still maintaining, and now need to get in the groove of eating correctly in the new office situation. I still don’t feel thin. And I am afraid to go buy new clothes, even though my current ones are hanging off of me.

There are two new phones in the family. Sarah got an iPhone, and I got a Samsung Blackjack 2, which is a Windows Mobile phone. They both have interesting features to me, but the 3G speed is a huge wonder to me. It’s strange to hold a tiny device that’s smaller than a box of cough drops that can download files twice as fast as my first DSL connection. I’m still working on using a Windows Mobile computer while syncing to a Mac, but I have that almost figured out with Missing Sync. I’m almost at the “so what do I do with it?” phase, and I will need to adjust my data hoarding accordingly. The iPhone is neat, and I like the Mac-centric interface, but I can’t type at all on the virtual keyboard. If it had a slide-out, it might be more viable for me. Oh well.

Time to go install more crap I don’t need on the phone. I have almost two weeks off until work starts, and it starts with me flying to Dallas for training. Maybe I should buy a memory card and fill it with ripped and shrunk DVDs for the trip.