Moving and selling stuff

Random stuff:

Voptras and my pointy ear headbands, two of my inventions, are available for sale on my website.


I'm also selling my dollhouse and its contents on Craigslist, and I think it's worth what I'm charging for it-- at least I don't want to sell it for any less-- but I haven't had any offers yet. We'll see.

OK, I promised an update on moving into our new apartment...

Husband's parents and a friend helped us move at the end of September. It is a great apartment-- bigger than our old one, which means that we can actually walk in a reasonable fashion around our pieces of furniture instead of holding our breath to squeeze past them. Better than old one in many other ways too. Wonderful big French windows. Kitchen has a garbage disposal. Electric stove, as opposed to old apartment's ancient gas stove with pilot light that kept going out for no reason and flooding kitchen with methane. Old landlord wouldn't even try to fix it; said there was nothing he could do. We had to go in with a screwdriver and turn off the valve to the pilot light, and light it with a lighter every time we turned it on. Husband also had to improvise a stove vent out of a big plastic bowl and a length of duct pipe that led to the window, but the new apartment has a stove vent built in.

Has a pool that we'll be able to use come summer. Has a rental office on the property, and maintenance that reliably comes and fixes problems soon after we call. Laundry room has three washers and three dryers, unlike old apartment which, inexplicably, had three washers and two dryers. Washers don't unbalance nearly as easily as the old ones, too. And there's a quarter machine in the rental office.

And there's no extra price for all these improvements-- the rent is actually $50 less than the old apartment. Probably because it's on the freeway-- but we don't mind the noise, and we like the convenience.

A few little problems: the window is drafty, and the walls are not very thick (one neighbor complained about our video game noise all the time, even when we had it turned down so low we could barely hear-- until one day she knocked on our door when we weren't even playing video games, and we let her in and showed her that the noise she was complaining about wasn't even coming from our apartment, and since then she's been very decent to us). Our upstairs neighbor's footsteps sound like a dinosaur, and our downstairs neighbor probably thinks the same of us... the floors seem to amplify every sound.

Also, the bus routes to the Target where I work are not as good as from the old apartment-- they sometimes involve transfers at places where I have to wait up to twenty minutes. But that's okay because in January my Target is going to rebuild itself into a Super Target, and while it's rebuilding, the employees going to be moved, and I'll be moved to a Target that's practically in the backyard of where we live now, and I'll be able to walk to work. They might want to move me back when the rebuilding is done, but I bet I can get them to let me stay.

I was having a lot of stresses and obsessive worries, but stuff has calmed down lately. My mom says she'll help me with psychologist and psychiatrist visits if I need them, but for now I'm emotionally fine. Our financial situation still sucks-- any extra money we get always goes to buy necessities that we'd been holding off on when we didn't have enough money, so we haven't been able to save a cent-- but there are some promising career options occurring to my husband now, so things are looking up. Also the new publisher is going to start printing my book eventually, and I'm in the editing phase of my new science fiction novel, so at some point that will be at least a little source of extra money.

That's it for now. Got to go.