Things are pretty normal now. Except - oh, yeah, I blew up my apartment.

There are a certain percentage of things that can only happen to me. Bizarre coincidences leading to disaster, things like running into a skunk while skiing, or having a plow truck dump all the snow from an overpass onto my car while I was driving underneath. Twice. The first time I ever drove in a blizzard. This week had one of those.

Sunday afternoon, I was watching football at home and decided to flip over to the other game. Since I don't have cable, I pick up all the broadcasts via an antenna made out half a dozen coat hangers and a paper clip. Understandably, whenever you change the channel, you have to re-twist the metal a dozen different ways in order to pick up the new broadcast, and I've gotten fairly used to the general idiosyncrasies of each channel: CBS - down and to the right, Fox - straight up and over the TV, ABC - attach to the doorknob, NBC - don't even try. Still, it can take a couple minutes of struggle to finally get an only vaguely fuzzy image.

On this occasion, I was wrestling the wires and jerking things back and forth when the paper clip burst free from the coaxial input and slipped off the edge of the hanger. Purely coincidentally, it managed to impale itself inside the outlet that the television was plugged into, in the millimeter of space between the plug and the outlet. There was a small, brilliant explosion as the paper clip melded itself to both the outlet and the plug, leaving a large, dark circle around the outlet and knocking out all of the outlets and lights in my apartment. I whacked the plug out of the outlet with a wooden spoon and went to flip the breaker a couple times. Nothing. I had shorted out my apartment.

I called my apartment complex to tell them that my outlets didn't seem to be working for some reason. They were appropriately apologetic for my baffling loss of power. I managed to be magnanimous about the whole thing. "I'm sure it's just one of those things," I told them.

Hopefully they'll forget about this incident quickly so that they can't start putting a pattern together. This sort of stuff tends to follow me around.

This post is about 97% for my mom, who likes to know these things.

The apartment is finally completed, and pictures are up!

Let's start with a guide to my apartment area. I live in one of these:

Good start. On to the kitchen!

Wood floors, people. Wood floors. It's a whole different lifestyle. Now, the dining room:

Nice, nice. You'll note that I own a tablecloth, and that should count for something. This room also has a well-organized closet that the cat is a big fan of.

Once, while I was unpacking, the cat managed to get himself shut up in the closet for several hours, something I found out only after the cat started ramming his head into the door repeatedly. He didn't seem that unhappy about it. Okay, here's the bedroom:

As you can imagine, my bed is always that neatly made each morning. Here's the closet:

Y'know, this might be the moment to compare this place to my old apartment when I first moved in. Pretty much the same, right? Lets take a look at the living room.

And the flip view. The door leads out onto a patio and into my laundry room on the other side.

Well, there we go. I'll put up pictures of the whole apartment complex later, so you get an idea of the luxury I'm living in, in comparison with the old place. But it's been great to tour an apartment with one of those forms for writing down everything that's wrong, and only being able to come up with "the freezer smells a little funky." I've been humming "Movin' On Up" for weeks.