Linkstew

One of the questions people seemed intent on asking me immediately after my arrival in Dublin was "how are you settling in?"

"You mean to this place where I've only been living for a week?" I'd retort.

For the better part of my first month here there were a lot of obstacles to settling: I was living in a temporary apartment; I stubbornly resisted "unpacking" my limited belongings and was hence living out of three bags; to make matters worse, I suffered a pretty severe failure of planning when I only packed 4 t-shirts and 3 pairs of socks (though thankfully the socks were resilient smartwool); I was feeling constantly overwhelmed worrying about little things like money and bank account setup and utilities and on and on; and for a variety of reasons, I also didn't want to start buying groceries at the temporary place, so I was eating out every meal.

I felt extremely transient my entire first month here.

But, I've got my apartment now, and my first batch of stuff arrived a week ago, and all of my IKEA furniture is now built, and so it's getting better.

That's not to say that I'm feeling settled yet -- not by a long shot. Every time I turn around something else seems to go wrong: my bedsheets don't fit my bed; my internet order got all kinds of messed up and it cost me €25 to fix the order since a person had to do it over the phone and now it's not coming for another week; it turns out I can't read power labels [more on that soon]; the fake plant on the balcony blew over my first night here and its pot broke; and insult to injury, my MacBook Pro's screen died (but hooray for Time Machine and FireWire Target Disk Mode). And then silly minor stuff like the apartment's TV not actually doing NTSC or the fact that the "furnished" apartment didn't come with a trash can or my two day old loaf of bread sprouting a nice furry coat prematurely.

Sorry to sound like I'm whining. I know none of these in and of themselves are a big deal, and I know they'll all work out one way or another, but when all of that happens in a week, you can't help but feel a little put out.

Things are coming along. The rest of my stuff arrives in 3 weeks (I have no clue where most of it's going to go, but if nothing else: yay bikes!), I've got my first trip booked to Madrid in two weeks, and looking on the bright side, I've got a week without internet to do things like finally catch up on some writing or my remaining unpacking or even picking up Ulysses.

Maybe I'll even try to worry about that social life thing at some point.