WE LIVE

And we're back online.

Briefly, we had the truck driven up from Salisbury MD to Hudson for us, got 3/4 of the truck unloaded yesterday, injured my back doing it, got through today on Percocet, got all the really heavy stuff out of the truck today with the aid of two professional movers from LaborReady, spent multiple hours banging on our Verizon residential DSL service and finally got yama to connect to it via PPPoE, and have a network connection again.

The bad news on the connection:  we're on an RSU that Verizon will not allow anyone else access to, so it's Verizon or nothing, it's dynamic-IP PPPoE with the addresses reassigned every 48 hours, and Verizon supports only Windows and Mac and will refuse to even attempt to support or troubleshoot anything else..  The good news: it's only costing us $30/mo ($20/mo for the first three months), we're getting 3.3Mbps down and 864k up, and I was eventually able to make it work with OpenBSD.  (Yay real firewall!)

Tomorrow I get to take the truck back to Budget, get sorted out with them exactly why they had bloody well better not attempt to charge us overtime for the 2 weeks it was sitting at the International dealer being repaired, and take my CBR929RR across the road for its New Hampshire inspection.  Then I need to get the upstairs rooms painted, then we start putting furniture together in the rooms where it actually belongs.

Other bummers:

• We'd hoped to put the two 72" Digital racks down in the basement.  Can't figure out a way to do it.  They won't fit down the stairwell -- too tall standing up, and won't go round the corner at the top laid down.
• We can get the washer we were given while loading the truck hooked up without too much trouble, but the dryer has a four-pin (presumably 208v) plug and the dryer outlet in the basement is three-pin 120v 30A.
• We didn't have room in the truck for (or time to load) several key items like the gorilla racks, the steam vac, the shop vac, the Pioneer stereo rack, or my 12-year-old Pioneer 46" projection TV (which we were going to give to cymrullewes' mom in Princess Anne, MD, because it still works fine right now but we're uncertain how much more abuse from small children it'll survive).

Still, all in all, things are looking up.  And so far, the only damage we've found from this move is one broken bowl, one broken glass, and some minor damage to our oak bookcase.

Oh, yeah ...  I'm caught up on email and webcomics, but will not be attempting to catch up on four weeks of LiveJournal.  Sorry.  If you posted something you think I really ought to see, please include a link in a comment to this post and I'll go look at it.

Today ....

...woulda been sdfischer's 56th birthday.  I still regret not meeting him sooner.

A word of thanks

...to radarrider for transcribing phone posts for me over the past few weeks.  I am indebted to you, sir.

Now deploying lawyers

Budget Customer Service told us that after we got the truck returned, they could make an adjustment for all the shit we've gone through on this rental.  I got the truck returned this afternoon, and the agent at the local Budget franchise told me she could credit us for three days of overtime, but we'd have to talk to Customer Service to get the rest sorted out.  Now that they have our money, customer service is now stonewalling us and telling us it's out of their hands and there's nothing they can do.

The fuckers rented us an unsafe truck, they blamed us when the truck broke down, they declined to replace the truck so we could complete our move (breach of contract #1), they're charging us for the time we spent waiting for the truck to be repaired, thus de facto charging us for the repair even though their damage waiver (which we took) says we're not responsible for any damage to the truck from any cause, up to and including the total loss of the truck (breach of contract #2), and they lied to us to manipulate our money out of us.

No more Mr. Nice Guy.  We're deploying lawyers and we'll sue the fuckers if that's what it takes.  They want to play nasty?  OK, we are now officially playing nasty.

Vr00m Free or Die

And lo, there was vr00mage in the state of New Hampshire; and though it was only a quick blast down to the bank to deposit a check and buy baking powder and whole-bean coffee, verily, it was good.