Well, it's been about. . . Oh, I don't know. Let's say 8 months of home ownership, give or take a lunar cycle or two. And I just cooked my first meal here. Tada!

It was stir-fry. I had to go to the cornershop to get olive oil. I also had to cook the rice in a frying pan. This worked surprisingly well, resulting in very fluffy rice that did not stick to the cookware at all (nor did it have that disgusting 'bottom of the teflon-covered rice pot' skin that rice invariably gets when you use one of those steamers expressly made for the purpose of cooking rice. Of course, this might have also been due to the fact that it wasn't me cooking, but rather Allison. Either way, the point is - good rice).

Well, since I've cooked in it at least once, and have done the horizontal hat dance in it at least once, I suppose I can now officially call this place my home. Since I took this long to get it ready, I'm going to go ahead and schedule the official housewarming party for the same day I close on the sale of the apartment.

I know I said that I'd post a picture of my bookcase the next time I was home, but that's a serious hassle. Less so now that I have a mac, but my camera isn't bluetooth wireless enabled. Which means that I actually have to attach a wire to my computer to download the picture, which is complete nonsense. Next time I'm in the living room I'll do it. Instead, I'll tell you about my clock.

I don't know if this is something that a lot of people do, but both my girlfriend and I like to have the clocks in our respective bedrooms (soon to be officially consolidated. It was fairly unofficial before, since I was shacking up with her for a bunch of months. But soon one of us will stop paying rent on their apartment. I hope it's her, since I don't want to lose this place for not writing my mortgage checks) set forward some amount. The particular amount differs, but we've settled on about 15 minutes. I recognize that this makes absolutely no sense, since it only results in me doing a little simple math every morning to figure out what the real time is as opposed to the clock time, and making the assessment as to whether or not I should get up based on that. But still, this is what we do, and we're that much happier for it.

It turns out that for some as yet unexplained reason, the clock in my bedroom runs fast. Not fast in the way described above, but fast in that the time it measures as an hour is less than the time the rest of the world measures as an hour. Also, this speed differential changes from night to night. I always reset it to T+15min (where T is the actual EST time) when I go to sleep at night. When I wake up, sometimes the clock reads T+15. Sometimes it reads T+25. One night, I ended up getting to work a full hour early because I didn't have the presence of mind to check my email (and therefore the clock in the corner of my screen) before I took a shower.

This is, in fact, the best possible modification to my behavior of setting the clock forward. I can only ever assume that the clock is 15 minutes fast at any point in time, and I operate my snooze alarm based on that assumption. However, the start time for my entire morning schedule is now reliant on a completely random variable the distribution function of which I am unaware. I haven't been collecting data (and I don't plan to, so as to keep it a secret from myself) so I can't figure out the average time jump during the night. Now, based on this process, I am early for work completely at random. It's awesome.

The fact that my alarm clock is a digital clock, and was therefore designed around the concept of not allowing this sort of behavior to be exhibited should perhaps make me uncomfortable. It does not.