Month: March 2006

I receive tons of spam of the nature “I am the son/daughter/accountant/dog of a middle-eastern/african/russian dictator/president/general. I have a gajillion dollars just burning a hole in my pocket. Here, complete stranger that has been referred to me by my best friend's cousin's neighour's mistress' dog, have some of it.”

They're all fairly typical: poorly written ALL IN CAPS to make it look more official. My favourite bit though is always when they include an email address in the message that is different from the sender email address – which is usually their real account but they're just too stupid to masquerade it.

If I wanted to, I could probably create a more plausible scenario to scam people. Damn my morals. Anyway, I got one that made me giggle. It was telling me that I'd won a lottery (that never sold tickets) and that the draw had picked my work email (which I never give out outside of actual work functions). All I needed was to email all my personal banking details and identity information to a nice lady and she'd have the money wired into my account. How nice of her. Fairly typical scam so far. The amusing bit is that I won a UK lottery, but I need to send all my info to an address ending with sympatico.ca (for those of you who might not know, that's a Canadian ISP for home internet). Made me giggle, anyway.

I got everything I wanted to do this weekend done:

• bought two new pair of jeans
• sorted through the mountain of paperwork in the office
• went to the gym on sunday

All in all, a quiet weekend.

One of Katy's friends is being a bit of a pain in the ass at the moment. She was supposed to help us clean and decorate the apartment before we moved and also help us with the actual move. We never saw or heard her. It's been 3 weeks now. We know she's still alive because she has no trouble calling and seeing common friends of Katy. Her phone is just mysteriously breaking down when we try and get in touch. I'm at the point where I don't really want anything to do with her anymore but the annoying thing is that she has some of Katy's books and CDs, and my old digital camera that she “bought” but hasn't actually paid for yet (and that's been close to 2 months now). We've now send email to those common friends to try and kick some sense into her backside so she'll get in touch with us. See what happens how.

– House pictures are up: http://www.flubu.com/various_pics/hinxton/

– We bought the flatscreen LCD. Quite cool, but I will need to contact the customer service monkeys because it hums. I think it's the transformer. This annoys the hell out of me.

– I'm giving a course on PRIDE/OLS with a co-worker all week. Eeeep!!!

Saturday was the big moving day. Katy's dad and uncle came down with a rental van from Leicester in the morning and we got the show on the road. I went with them to the Hinxton house to unpack the first load, which consisted mostly of Ikea stuff and a fridge. I had some work colleagues giving us a hand and it was a mostly smooth process. All in all, it took 4 vanloads to get everything shifted here. Katy and Judith were loading in Cambridge and myself and Charlie (at first) then Sam/Natalyia (afterwards) were here to unload and shift stuff around. I managed to get the bed build in between van trips, so that was a plus. The first priority was to get everything in the approximate rooms and get the basics sorted. Mel and Stu got the wardrobe build while we tackled the kitchen.

When the left, we went to the Red Lion to have a nice dinner. I had a big hunk of dead cow, Katy had the duck. It's a really nice pub. I think I'd like to become a regular there. Since I'm going to be hitting the gym more often, the thought of a regular pint doesn't really scare me.

We spent all day Sunday unpacking stuff. I'm happy to report that 99% of the boxes are empty and neatly stacked in one of our many shed out back. All the dishes have been washed (thanks to the Katy girl) and most of the things are, if not in their final resting place, close to it. The wardrobe is full and so is the new chest of drawers.

I was off work on Monday to wait for the Sky cable man to come round to install our new mini dish so I busied myself by building the last of the furniture while I was waiting. The table looks really nice and is heavy as hell. The corner office took forever to build and will only come out of the room in pieces because there's no way in hell it'll fit through the door. Speaking of, we'll probably have to unhinge it because that room won't accommodate the desk and the bookshelf. Oh well.

Katy started her new job yesterday and gave her day a solid 8 out of 10. A promising sign. She's not actually working on campus yet, which is a bit annoying. They're in the process of opening the new wing and moving bits out of the old buildings gradually into the new ones. That means that they still need staff at the old place. That's only temporary and she should be working here within a month or so. It's only 3 miles away, so it's not a biggie.

I hope it all goes well for her. She's been really anxious about it. It has translated
into a grumpy girl who spent a whole afternoon being snarky because she couldn't find her slippers (that she'd packed herself, spent the whole of Sunday manically looking for them, and managed to overlook them twice…)

Things are settling in nicely. We sold the TV and the woman is coming to pick it up this weekend. We're probably going to buy the new one this weekend when Katy's parents come to visit. Most of the change of addresses are done. I need to get in touch with Mrs Simmonds to give her back the keys and go over the inventory with her and finalize the paperwork for the old flat.

The next step is to get used to cooking with a gas hob now. I just need to figure out the heat levels and gas marks. Last night's dinner was good, so that's a positive start.

On a last note, I strongly recommend the song that I'm currently listening to. We've been listening to an assload of BBC Radio 1 (as it was the only form of entertainment while we were painting/moving) and I've grown to really love it.