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Nice breakfast of leftover red rice and fried eggs with green salsa. Mmmmmmm.
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Paper is heavy.
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I've been drinking a lot of tea lately.
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Having lunch at home does rock my world. Oralia made tacos dorados and red rice. Absolutely delicious.
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Back to Coyoacán in the evening to move more stuff to our new apartment. It is the amorphous, miscellaneous crap that takes time — not nice and square things like books and furniture. We finished moving the random odds and ends that get stashed at the top of a closet; we have one more closet to go. We also took a little bookcase and most of the artwork on the walls (posters of paintings by Remedios Varo, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Frédéric Bazille); the remaining thing is the big and heavy frame of Giovanni Paolo Panini's Vedute di Roma Antica.
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Some guy cleaning a pool, a few days ago.
(Goddamn Nikon zoom lens... I thought they could do better with respect to pincushion distortion.)
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Saturday: Sleep sleep sleep. Lunch at my grandmother's; she cooked mole de olla which was delicious. Went looking for curtain holders at Home Mart later, but they were more expensive than those we had already seen at Junco. Tamales in the evening at Adriana's and Ruben's. Back home, more sleep.
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Today: Lunch at my mother's. Then, she taught Oralia how to cut my hair. It turned out pretty well. Wheeee, no more having to pay for haircuts!
We went to the old apartment in the evening to move all the plants. Some of them were a bit needing of water and love, poor things. Also, we fetched a little cupboard from Oralia's parents' place.
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Hugo and Juanita stayed at our place overnight because they need to go really early tomorrow to a hospital near here. Didn't see much of them, though, because by the time I got home after yesterday's rehearsal they had already gone to sleep. Then, today I overslept and they had left earlier in the morning. Oh well.
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We watched Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain with my brother Axel in the evening. What a totally fantastic movie. Afterwards we went home to relax for a bit. Axel is always interesting and fun to talk to.
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Productive day, although I am still a bit lagged in the porting work. It gets tedious.
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We watched Der Krieger und die Kaiserin in the evening. Beautiful, sad movie. I did not expect it to be so good.
But the audience... oh, the goddamn audience. People were talking all the time and looking bored, answering cell phones and generally being a nuisance. Why do people not enjoy movies where they must figure our their own feelings rather than absorbing a pre-canned over-acted tantrum? With this movie you have to think about the many strings that get pulled in your guts. They get pulled from dfferent directions and complex feelings ensue... most people seem to enjoy movies only if all the strings are pulled hard and in the same direction. Subtlety does not seem to be appreciated.
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Wanted to get back home and do some more work, but fell fast asleep after brushing Oralia's beautiful curly hair and putting her in bed. Brushing her hair is pleasantly relaxing for both.
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Some of Oralia's portraits from Puerto Escondido. She looks absolutely beautiful in her tehuana dress.
Damnit, I really need a better scanner than taking shots of 4x6 prints using the digital camera.
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Wheeeee! Our phone line got installed today. The Telmex dude was very quick and professional; quite a surprise from the usual service.
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Saturday: Moving day. Hugo arrived at about 11:30 in the morning to help us. Juanita didn't come, though; it seems like she had other things to do. For a few days we had been clearing horizontal surfaces (e.g. desks, tables, chests) of all the random crap that gets piled up on them over time so that they would be clean for moving.
The moving truck arrived shortly after noon. Much bitching by some stupid neighbors ensued when the truck parked on our very narrow street — the old part of Coyoacán is mostly little cobbled streets. Taking the furniture downstairs and into the truck took about an hour, as the house slowly emptied itself. Everything just fit in the truck with very little slack space, and then we drove away.
The truck stopped for gas and I went to an ATM to get money for the moving bill. Then the moving people followed us almost all the way to the new apartment, but we lost track of them a few blocks before we arrived. Fear ensued for they may have run away with our stuff... but we called the moving company and they told us that they should get a call from the truck people shortly, as that is what they do when they get lost. They arrived about an hour afterwards; it seems that they got stopped by the cops for running through a red light or something.
Unloading the furniture and taking it upstairs seemed quicker than loading it. Perhaps it is because the new building has fairly wide, ample staircases and spacious corridors. We feared that the washing machine would not fit through the door in the service room, but after some careful and ultra precise hand-span measuring, we made it through.
As a way of thanking the movers for not damaging our stuff we cheered them to some cold beer, and we chatted for a bit. They told us several anecdotes of unhelpful clients and accidents involving pianos. It seems that being in the moving business is not an easy job.
We were pretty hungry after they left, so Hugo, Oralia, and myself went to Tortas Don Polo for lunch. We took Hugo back to his house afterwards, all the way to Tláhuac — about an hour's drive away. Juanita was a bit surprised to see us there. After some coffee and relaxing, we drove back. We had informal plans for going to the movies, but we were too tired and basically just went back to the new apartment to sleep.
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Sunday: Post-moving day. We slept until pretty late. Went to La Parisina to look for some nice fabric for the curtains. On the way back home we stopped by a house where they sell cochinita pibil and paella on Sundays. Got half a kilo of each and took it home for breakfast. It turned out to be pretty good, and we were really hungry anyways.
Food made us sleepy, so we had a one-hour nap that lasted more like three hours. Went to Telas Junco to look at other types of fabric, but they were much more expensive there. So we went back to La Parisina and ordered our curtains; they should be ready in ten business days, they said.
Went to the supermarket to get some indispensable stuff like milk and power adapters. Went to the Coyoacán apartment to pick up some more stuff. Had a moment of nostalgia. After all, it is a very nice place and it is kind of sad to move away from there. Still, the new apartment is bigger and the rent is cheaper, and this should allow us to save money for a house.
Went back to the new apartment and slept.
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Got back half of the pictures of Puerto Escondido from
the lab. They turned out quite well.
However, it turns out that my little Rollei 35 has some mechanical problems. The shutter-open lever in the mechanism is not going back to its original position completely when cocked because the rod that does that can't seem to push it far enough (lack of lubrication?). So, the shutter does not go off reliably. I got back negatives with about 6 exposed frames scattered among many blanks. I am now brave enough to open up this little camera myself and to try fixing it. Let's see what gives.
Perhaps the temperature in Puerto Escondido, combined with the salty mist, is what caused trouble. Hmmmm.
On the other hand, the Nikon F2 performed flawlessly. I was able to get a good number of beautiful portraits of Oralia in her Tehuana dress.
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Cleaned some of the windows in the apartment. Wow, they were dirty. Fortunately they are no match for my mad squeegee 5k1llz.
The Viana people also delivered our stove in the morning. Kick ass. It is a bit scary when they tell you, "oh, the truck will go by between 08:00 and 20:00" but then turn up nicely at about 11:30.
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Ripped a good little bunch of CDs for the office's music server.
This is cool. Listened to various stuff. Of particular note is Porno for Pyros, which is pretty good.
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Awesome Kromlech rehearsal in the evening. The songs for the new album are *really* shaping up.
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We saw Ocean's Eleven last night. Thoroughly entertaining.
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Took half of our CD collection to the new apartment today. CDs are surprisingly heavy.
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Frustration. More removal of deprecated calls turned out some places in the public API that depend on deprecated stuff. Mailed out for advice. Sad to see that the first response to a plea for correctness was, "no way".
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On the happier side, Joakim set up a big hard disk with a music archive for the office. We will populate it as time goes. This is a good way to get to know new kinds of music.
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Early GNOME Board meeting at 9:30, ugh. Went to the office for the conference call, then to our new apartment for a shower. This is the first time I have used that shower, and it is quite nice, with many thin streams that add up to lots of deliciously hot water. Managed to put some books in the bookshelves as well. Right now they are more or less arranged by topic and author, but I wonder if there is a better way...
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More GNOME 2.0 porting work. This gets a bit tedious.
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Lunch in the food court of Galerías Insurgentes with Javier and Chema. On the way back we took some pictures of a fruit seller's stand, and he got mad at us for not asking for permission. Sheesh. It's only stupid oranges.
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A detail of one of the plants we got the other day for the new apartment.
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Saturday: The floor on the new apartment is all granite except for the bedrooms and bathroom, which are wood and tile, respectively. The huge living room's floor is a beautiful granite, mostly light pink and with little chunks of darker stone, and the kitchen's is white. We got it all polished, which took the whole afternoon. It is nice and shiny now.
I also picked up my mother at the airport; she had gone to one of her company's yearly conferences. She was quite excited about having learned many things. And she got us a few presents! One beautiful blue blouse for Oralia and a nut-colored shirt for me.
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Sunday: Purchased a new stove; it should get delivered on Thursday. Got a very pretty curtain for the shower/bathtub. Moved the first batch of books to the new apartment, as well as my hanging bookcase. Rubén and Adriana helped us mount it on the wall.
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On Saturday we took Oralia's stereo to the new apartment so that we could listen to music while we did the cleaning. I took my discman to go along with it, as the CD player in the stereo is not working. So, to be able to listen to music while in the office, I took my little radio walkman and decided to listen to the radio more often. Radio UNAM is the University's radio station and it is wonderful. They play a lot of contemporary classical music which is hard to find.
Today they had a fantastic piece by John Tavener with a single soprano and orchestra. It started with cellos playing a base note and its harmonics, one note for each cello, and sustaining them. And then the vocalist started with harmonics and a few dissonances, mostly long notes, with some lyrics that I could not understand. Absolutely beautiful.
They also had John Ireland's Legend for piano and orchestra. Fantastic.
One good thing about listening to the radio is that you learn about music you did not know before. Now I'll have to get CDs of these composers.
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Took the second batch of books to the apartment in the morning. We can basically fit the contents of a single bookcase in the car, so we are doing it a bit at a time.
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I've been going through libgnomeui and converting uses of gtk_foo into g_foo for GTK+ 2.0.
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Met with Oralia at the new apartment for a bit so that we could start doing some cleaning. Went to the bank and on the way we found a street vendor that sold quasi-bonsai trees and some little cacti. We got two trees for the new place and a little cactus for the office. It complements the other one nicely.
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Productive hacking day, ensuring that stuff was completely ported over to GNOME 2.0. This new platform takes some time in learning but is oh-so-much-prettier than GNOME 1.4.
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Learned bits of Pango, ATK, and the new Glib/GObject type system. Got confused by ATK but then remembered it is just a proxy that translates random widget APIs into standard interfaces for accessibility.
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Oralia had made albóndigas en chipotle, so I took some of them for lunch to the office. Yummi.
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Kromlech rehearsal in the evening. The songs are shaping up quite nicely. I can't wait to get a new keyboard; it looks like it will be a Korg N1 that we can get for a super discount. Extreme pissiness ensued, though, when Leo started bugging me yet again about when the new keyboard will appear.
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Went home rather frustrated and pissed off. Oralia and myself went for a walk in the park. We went to El Jarocho to get hot chocolate, as usual, and we ran into Esteban while there. It seems that he is going to be changing apartments as well. He told us that Philip Glass is giving several concerts this week in Mexico City, so we'll go on Sunday to the Palacio de Bellas Artes to listen to his great minimalistic music.
Esteban seems to be pretty frustrated from working for the city government on computer stuff. Apparently people are just ignorant of what can be achieved with a bit of work and the proper tools.
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Constitution Day holiday, so it was a very quiet day at the office. It is very pleasant to work this way.
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We tried going to the movies in the afternoon, but it seems that the ATM connection from all ATMs to our bank was not working. Couldn't withdraw money, had to go home and rent movies instead. Bluh. Anyways, we also went to the bookstore and got a book for Oralia, Juan Arturo Brennan's Cómo Acercarse a la Música. This guy is fantastic.
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We got the keys to our new apartment today!
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Delivered the apartment paperwork. It looks like we'll have to make the initial payment on Monday.
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Read lots of ATK and accessibility-related stuff. Quite interesting.