And That's the Name of That Tune

I guess today is a significant day. I am moving, finally, after living here for sixteen years. I'm in that weird mode where I notice everything I do because they are all "last times." Last time I write a blog post from this location, here in this room. Last time I take a shower, last time I sleep here. Last time I shovel snow from the driveway. (I wouldn't have done it but I wanted to make sure the movers wouldn't slip and fall as they carried my stuff to their truck.) Last time I use at least that particular snow shovel, because I'm throwing it away. It's the one I bought the first winter my wife and I lived in the first house we owned. It had a shiny yellow scoop on it, made of metal, and a nice wooden handle. Now the scoop is rusty and somewhat askew and about half worn away, eroded from 32 years of scraping it along concrete driveways and sidewalks. It is razor sharp along the leading edge.

The unnerving part is that the basement is still not completely repaired. The structural part of the work is complete, and there are now eight piers along the front of the foundation that are stabilizing the basement walls, having been pushed about fifteen feet down to bedrock.  But the crew has to return to backfill the holes and put concrete on them to restore the basement floor. They must be running behind because it iced and snowed a couple days ago, then turned cold. Like negative 5 degrees.

I'm moving anyway. I got the apartment starting the 15th, and I have until December 28th to vacate. I still have to move a few odds and ends I don't want the movers to move, and then clean the house. I hope the new owners don't expect me to clean the windows or finish raking up the leaves outside, which would be a little problematic at negative 5 degrees.

 But I don't care. I got Google Fiber at the new place. So what. I ordered the minimum 100Mb/s internet access, and a  $10/month telephone line to which I had my old landline number ported--so the technicians in India can still reach me to respond to pleas for help from my operating system. I did NOT get any TV channels. It is a grand experiment. I purchased a nifty digital antenna (digital antenna?  Really?) which may or may not be better at picking up the digital signal from the TV stations than the old analog rabbit ears. At any rate, I tried it out here and I get a couple dozen TV stations. They are mostly kind of weird little stations that I'll never watch, but it's possible that between the antenna and Netflix and Hulu Plus, my entertainment needs will be satisfied, and I will save $100 a month.

It's a shame, by the way, that we are no longer, apparently, going to have the term "rabbit ears" in the technical lexicon. That is such a fortuitous phrase.

It's also a shame that even though we think we are so smart now, we constantly fail to understand that nothing in the real world is digital, that everything is analog at least until the electronics in the black box say it is digital and then try to do something with it. I'm not sure why I'm bothering to think about that right now.

So, as I consider that each act sits precariously atop a mountain of events leading to it, I'm ending the last post from 78th Street, typing out the last complete sentence and ending it with the last period.