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It is, unfortunately, a reality, not a Scrubs episode.

In the last month, I:

Quit my job of four years

Sold my house (in the midst of a major local mortgage lender’s bankruptcy filing)

Sold my car (on craigslist – highly recommended)

Sold, donated, or trashed most of my belongings

Finished an independent study, the last class needed for my master’s degree, and found a professor who will let me work on my project remotely

Flew to New York City with 104 pounds of luggage plus carry-on, after thanking one of JetBlue’s fantastic employees for waiving the slightly-over-50-pounds-on-both-your-suitcases-sir fee (he asked how long I was going for with all that luggage, then skipped the fee part when I said I was staying; ahhhh, JetBlue)

Squatted at my aunt and uncle’s house while apartment shopping at night and starting my new job in lower Manhattan while commuting from the Bronx – ugh (though the long commute was made up for by the joy of staying with family)

Relied on good friends and family to finish dealing with what I left at my house up to the last moment

Found a great deal on apartment (i.e., one that’s not too much more than my house in Tucson was) which I moved into mid-renovation, the day after my house closed

Sifted through the incredible amount of paperwork involved in all of this, including a lovely time at the NY DMV waiting in lines to get numbers that permitted me to wait in other lines (after which I was given a temporary license and told to wait two more weeks; hey, AZ MVD, if you’re reading this, give the NY DMV a call and let it know where to buy the printers that spit out licenses in 15 seconds instead of 15 days), and the literally hundreds of pages of documentation generated upon my resignation

And did a slew of other things that I’ve since forgotten.

Things I’ve learned recently:

It’s actually quite interesting how little stuff one really needs. The first realization is “this is not worth shipping; I’ll just give it away and buy a new one after I move.” That thought is followed closely by “actually, I don’t need that at all; why did I even get this to begin with and why didn’t I throw it out a year ago?” I think the abundance of space in Arizona turns us into packrats, because there’s no need to throw out that widget you may use in 7 years. It feels good to purge and break free from the stuff. And incidentally, people in New York aren’t generally aware that the descriptive term “packrat” is derived from actual animals of that name that rip out your battery cables and horde them in their nests until they are brutally (achem, painlessly) executed.

New York City, despite the millions of people and all, is really pretty small. It’s quick to walk many places, and driving isn’t too scary (though I’m thrilled to not have a car). It also has less crime (including violent crime) than Tucson. If you ask people for directions, they will happily oblige (though the very same people will, if asked for money, avert their gazes and quicken their paces as if they are being chased by a ravenous monster that can only see those who see it). Also, the friendliest people hang out (ok, ok, they just shop) at the Park Slope Food Coop.

I’ll try to find time to write more and post pictures soon.

At long last, I have Wordpress and Gallery integrated, with the help of some plugins and tweaking. If you click on Photos on the right, you should get the Gallery main page embedded in Wordpress. W00t!

(This has undergone minimal testing, so if it doesn’t work for you, drop me a comment or an email.)

Here’s a quick walk-through for anyone trying to do this (and, let’s face it, so I don’t forget how it works):

The WPG2 plugin embeds Gallery in Wordpress.

The Page Links To plugin lets me direct the “Photos” link right to my embedded Gallery instead of a Wordpress page.

1. In Gallery Site Admin, turn off the URL Rewrite module. I was using URL Rewrite to get pretty links, but it confuses WPG2. Unfortunately this means I’ll have to go back through blog postings and fix the links, but I would have had to do that anyway because I want them to link to embedded albums now.

2. Download WPG2. Unzip it, and drop the directory in <wordpress_root>/wp-content/plugins. Move wp-gallery2.php to <wordpress_root>.

3. In the Wordpress admin page, go to plugins, and activate WPG2. WPG2 should show up on the top menu bar.

4. Go to the WPG2 menu in the Wordpress admin page, and go through the auto config. You may have to temporarily make your .htaccess writable so it can modify it. Then you can run through the rest of the sub menu, but if you just want an embedded Gallery (no sidebar blocks or shared users), you can ignore it all.

5. Now you should be able to load <wordpress_root>/wp-gallery2.php in your browser.

6. Upload and activate the Page Links To plugin in the same way.

7. Create a new Page in Wordpress and save it. Then go back to Manage -> Pages and edit it again. Add a custom field “links_to” with the value being the full URL to wp-gallery2.php. For me this step didn’t work when I added the custom field as I created the page.

8. Then hack up the Gallery template a bit so it fits better; you can find steps for that elsewhere.

Voila!

I posted up a new album of photos from Kim’s visit here and a long-overdue trip to California.

Don’t even let ‘em stare at it!

Prepping the house to install a floor is oddly like trying to back up a computer to reformat it but not quite having enough spare hard drive space. Unfortunately, it’s not a problem that can be fixed with freeNAS; the solution was to make the kitchen impenetrably packed with furniture, and then throw out what didn’t fit. And convert those cheap bookshelves into a stand for the circular saw.

Anyway, floating floors are fairly simple, given that:

1. Even after getting a couple opinions on what the pictorial instructions could possibly mean, you’re happy to just go at it without really knowing.

2. You have enough patience to endure knee pain and put on band-aids so that you don’t bleed on the pretty new floor from the cuts it gave you.

3. Your respiratory system can successfully filter out the burning laminate dust the circular saw spews out.

And here are the pictures.