Sewers, Laptops, and Moneys

Last weekend, our neighbor held the first ever neighborhood potluck. Going into it, I was a little skeptical of the outcome because no neighbor really talks all that much to any other neighbor — but at the same time, I had high hopes that it would be a great time. And it ended up being a great time. I met a number of new people and learned some new things.

One of the things I learned was about our wacky sewer system. A neighbor works for the city and had access to some survey work of the area. While you would expect most wastewater systems to consist of a pipe from your house directly out to the sewer in the middle of the street, our neighborhood is a weird spiderweb of wastewater pipes, most going in weird directions and passing under other peoples’ properties. 100 years ago when the sewers were first being constructed, the main sewer pipe followed the path of a dry riverbed, not at all a straight line. As more houses were built, they used the lay of the land to connect up to the main sewer pipe — partly based on the shortest path to the pipe and partly based on taking a downward slope so that gravity can do most of the work. That has persisted over the years, and now we have a wacky network of sewers.

I forgot to mention that a few weeks ago I got a new laptop. It was actually the longest time I had gone between laptops — about five years — and it was really starting to show. I didn’t immediately post about it because the migration went so smoothly that I was computerless for only a few hours. Moving my home directory from one machine to the next and reinstalling apps was all it took. Technically, I could have gotten away with moving most of the apps, but felt it was saver to reinstall. Most are entirely self-contained, but a few put hooks in to the /System or /Library folder and I didn’t know which was which. I didn’t have to migrate preferences or registration codes because unlike “that other operating system,” the “registry” is just a bunch of XML files under my home folder. Everything just magically worked.

Financial planning session #2 was yesterday and went really well. Although it was just an informational gathering session, I still learned a lot. Session #3 will be in a few weeks, at which point we’ll be presented a number of different options for how to handle immediate and long-term finances.

Posted in: Dear Diary Portland

5 thoughts on “Sewers, Laptops, and Moneys”

  1. DRAT!

    Well, if you happen to come across anything, let me know. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way I can successfully work from home is by not actually being at home while I’m doing it. Must get laptop.

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