I’m typing this from my phone, because we don’t have internet hooked up yet, and typing long messages on this thing sucks, so I’m going to keep this short.

I hired movers. Watching them load the truck, I have never felt so good about being so lazy. Worth every penny.

We apparently moved to New York in the middle of goddamned weather-pocalypse. Pouring rain almost put me into the guardrail a dozen times on the way up until it lt up, it started pouring again as soon as I started to unload my car, and last night sixty mile an hour winds and massive rain tore through.

We’re about 90% upacked, and so we took this afternoon to screw around in our new home. One of the things I don’t think I’ll ever get used to is that it’s utterly possible here to get bored and be a short train ride from the center of everything. Broadway shows, museums, a thousand awesome bars, all right there. I think I’m going to like it here.

Today we went an exhibit on Jack Kerouac at the library, where they had the first 60 feet of the 120 foot scroll he wrote On The Road on, then ate a bunchof awesome barbeque at a place called Hill Country. We also saw Be Kind Rewind, which I enjoyed. You can tell it was Michel Gondry’s movie, because it’s kind of wierd, but not the bad wierd, and I love Mos Def. Full review likely coming when I have a real keyboard on which to type.

This has taken like an hour to type, and my thumbs are starting to hurt.

New to me, at least. Overheard in NY has been kicking around for a while.

I like Overheard in New York because of things like this:

Black guy: Where you from?
Tourist: Maryland.
Black guy: Cool. I’ve seen The Wire. I know how you guys get down.

I’m filled with equal measures of pride and horror at that statement.

And I like Stuff White People Like because of things like this:

“If you are in the position where you need to take a white person to lunch for business or pleasure, saying “I know a great sandwich shop,” will always bring out a smile. The white person will then tell you about the great sandwich shop in the town where they went to college and how they had a crush on a waiter, or that there was some special sandwich that they always ordered.  This will put the person in a good mood.”

It’s all very tongue-in-cheek, and it cracks me up.

This is a picture of NWA. It is amazing because they’re all wearing hats for sports teams, except for Ice Cube, who is wearing an Ice Cube hat.

He’s sending a real message, and I don’t know what it is, but I love it.

If you haven’t already heard the news, Becki and I are officially engaged. Woo hoo!

Confession: I have a nasty habit of gnawing on headphone cords. Enough of that abuse, and I’ll sever the wire. I have done this twice now, once with the ones that came bundled with my old nano, and again with some cheap-o set that I think Becki got free in a back of AA batteries.

This time around, I picked up a set of these, on the same trip to the Apple store where I bought a keyboard (I don’t know why I bought the keyboard, but I have to say the decision has worked out pretty well), because I figured that if I shelled out for something a little nicer, I might not try to eat it.

I didn’t like the things at first, because you have to cram them well into your ears to keep them from falling out, and even then they tend to wiggle loose at the slightest provocation, but they’ve grown on me. The in-ear design blocks out background noise by acting as an earplug, and sound quality is good enough for me. I suppose it probably isn’t up to Audiophile snuff, but I have a lot of CDs I ripped in 128 kpbs MP3s before I knew what VBR was, so I doubt that the headphones are the real bottleneck here.

Anyway, the point of all this is that when I’m listening to music above a certain volume, I can’t hear a thing. Since I’m usually hunched forward staring at my monitor, I can’t see much of anything either. Neither would be bad by itself, but taken together, I end up in my own little world, completely unaware of my surroundings. The building could catch fire and I might notice before the sprinklers went off, or something killed the power.

Which is pretty much what I was doing this morning, when a bunch of IM windows started blinking at me, and I finally noticed a couple of people waving at me.

Apparently, they’d been trying to get my attention for a while, and since I wasn’t responding, half the people in the room started waving and yelling at me to see if I’d notice. Then, in a space of 11 seconds, I got the following messages:

“Earth to Greg”

“hey greg look up”

“GREG!@” [sic]

The interesting thing here is that these were all from different people.

This is not the first time this has happened - sometimes the guy who sits right across from me, facing me, six feet away, has to IM me if he wants my attention. Other people come up right behind me and tap my chair*, which scares the crap out of me

*This is totally unrelated, but I love that chair - I managed to upgrade from the regular office chairs we have to a spare Aeron floating around the office. Best. Chair. Ever.

So yeah, I am totally, embarrassingly, out of it sometimes when I’m working. But I want to thank (blame?) Apple and their earbuds for that, at least in part.