magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

Big news first. I got the apartment. I'm signing the lease on Thursday and can move any time between then and the end of the month. I feel, again, like I should be excited, like I should be out celebrating my new home. I thought about calling Chris when I left work. 'Hey, you want to raise a drink to my new place when you're back in Brooklyn?' But I didn't. I did pick up a six-pack of Stella at Brooklyn Natural, but only drank one with dinner, and didn't really even enjoy it terribly much. Damn you 23° axis, damn you.

Anyway.

Let me get a bit more complaining out of the way and then I'll say something upbeat and positive. Promise.

I installed the 10.3.6 system update on my computer at work last night when I left. Restarted this morning. The hard drive in my machine has been slowly failing for the last couple of months. Corrupt files. Sometimes destroying things I've worked on, but never setting me back more than 10 or 15 minutes. Part of the system update must have been installed into a bad block.

The first thing I noticed was that Terminal.app wasn't opening a new window on startup. Or manually. iChat didn't open a window, and crashed when I tried to access the menu. Lotus Notes worked. Then didn't. Then worked again. System Preferences would crash as soon as you clicked something. Choosing 'About This Mac' from the Apple menu dumped you to the login screen. Safari didn't open a window on startup, but had an 'Untitled' window listed in its menus. The window was smaller than my prefs and pushed up into the top-left of the screen. It didn't have any of my shortcuts or history and the program crashed if you tried to move or resize it.

While I was out getting lunch, IT came and got my computer. They brought it back around 5, having put in a new hard drive (and a big one at that), but had just cloned the status of my old drive onto the new one, so that all the system problems were copied over as well.

What all this meant, was that I was without a computer for most of the day. I did manage to do some work this morning. Photoshop, amazingly for how complex a program it is, worked fine. About half the work I do is in Photoshop so that was a lucky break. And after IT took my computer away I was able to do a little work on John.S's computer, as he's still away on vacation or something. But other people's computers are never set up the way that you are used to working. And you don't want to mess their way of working up by tweaking it to suit you.

Anyway.

Now I have to say something positive, eh?

Chris did call me tonight. 'So. Do you live in Inwood now?'

'Not yet. But I found a place.' And talking about it, describing my new apartment to other people, just like happened at Thanksgiving, I realize that I am excited. That I really like this apartment. That I found an amazing, unique place that people are going to see and say 'Nuh uh. You don't live there.' And I'll say 'Yuh huh. I do, I do.'