The day started with moving a car-load of things to my new apartment, the one I started renting July 1st. The place still isn’t fixed up. The kitchen is a disaster, the carpets aren’t clean, and they stopped painting half-way through the place. Wow. A great start to a Sunday.

I then drove out to Mayfair Mall to replace my DVR which failed at installing an update last week. They gave me a new one and I headed home.

Or so I thought, but the traffic to the Brewers game had other plans.

45 minutes later, I arrive at home with the DVR, I plugged it in, and it read “Illegal Cable Box” or something to that effect. They gave me a number to call, but it only took me to the unpaid bills office, which was closed.

Wow, a terrible day so far, so it was time for some lunch. My roommate decided it would be awesome to make fried Limburger cheese sandwiches. What do you know, the cheese known as “stinky cheese” is capabable of making an entire apartment smell like death once heated, and frankly, the sandwich was so pungent it was barely edible. 2 days later, our house still reeks.

Due to the smell and the fact that we are moving and need to clean anyway, we went out to buy paper towel and other cleaning supplies. We somehow forgot to actually buy the paper towel though, so wow.

Ok, it was time to take a shower and just stop trying to do things and relax for the night, right? Oh right, the hot water heater broke on Saturday, so it was an ice cold shower for me.

Wow, I could at least fire up the grill and slowly roast that brisket, right? Out of gas. Literally the last day I ever planned on using that grill it ran out of gas. But wait! We had extra charcoal sitting in the basement… sopping wet due to the recent rain.

Fine, onto video games. Oh, they’ve been moved already.

Just sit and do nothing, the only way I can’t fail.

In order to get to work and back with all of my things I realized that I’d need some sort of bike cart so on Monday I stopped at the local bike store and dropped $120 on a rear wheel mount and two saddle bags for the bike. That pretty much negated the “free” factor of bike commuting, though this purchase will have paid for itself within two months as two month’s bus fare is $128. Despite appearing to be a simple installation process, I spend a few hours on both Tuesday and Wednesday night floundering and failing at installing the damn thing. One lost bolt and a couple of hacks later I finally got the thing on in preparation for Thursday.

Thursday started off great until I realized I was going very slow and was getting ridiculously tired. At this point I noticed that the rear brake was clamped down and not releasing at all. It appears my wonderful installation of the rack and saddle bags messed the brake up. Huzzah. I was able to release the brake and just had to avoid using the rear brakes for the rest of the day. When I got home I tried to fix the brakes with the only tool I had, a monkey wrench, but after 30 minutes of getting nowhere I walked over to the hardware store for some real wrenches. That made turning the bolts that much easier but then I was faced with the realization that I had no clue what I actually needed to do to make the brakes work better. Nearly two hours after I started the brakes were finally operating almost normally and Friday’s commute went pretty smoothly.

Well, except of course for the super loud honking that the rear brakes now make. I suck at mechanical things, I sure do.

The plan was simple – enjoy a hot breakfast at home with some coffee and Irish cream, have a good day at work, eat lunch outside and watch all of the drunk downtown bar patrons, come home for a quick dinner and then out with a friend to watch another friend play fiddle in an Irish band downtown.

Well, the very first thing that happened at work was a meeting that started “So, what exactly were you thinking when you designed this?” Ouch. Lunch was nice but I then spent the entire afternoon fixing an email template I thought I had fixed weeks ago. I left a bit late and then missed the bus so I arrived home a full 45 minutes later. It turned out not to be a problem though as my evening plans were canceled.

I ended up watching a weird sci-fi movie with a Guinness ice cream float. Yeah.