Word Rant, Bedroom Stuff, and Phone Jacks

Inter­est­ing puz­zles: http://www.blindchicken.com/~ali/games/puzzles.html

The enor­mous, baroque bed­room fur­ni­ture is gone! Well, the two mir­rors and one lamp would­n’t fit in the truck or word­can­dlemage’s car, but there’s none of it in our bed­room any­more. And the two oak chests of draw­ers that sam­bear’s par­ents gave us (they were his as a child) are real­ly very nice. The bed­room seems much big­ger now.

I real­ly need to get stuff on the walls. Sam came across my Rube­nesque Ruby poster stored in a mail­ing tube—I won­der how much it would cost to pop it in a frame? We’ve got a few things that were on the walls of our bed­room in the last house, but I just don’t feel like putting them in our room now.

Pet peeve: I absolute­ly hate the word “ori­en­tat­ed.” It’s right up there with “pre­ven­ta­tive.” Both seem to have extra syllables—why not just save “ori­ent­ed” and “pre­ven­tive?” The Uni­ver­si­ty of Min­neso­ta agrees with me. So does a pro­fes­sion­al proof­read­er. But no less an author­i­ty than the Oxford Dic­tio­nar­ies says that “ori­en­tat­ed” is per­fect­ly cor­rect and the more com­mon usage in Britain. And the dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tion of “pre­ven­ta­tive” is “pre­ven­tive” so why does it even exist?

Okay, sor­ry. I just need­ed to get that out of my system.

Four of the six phone jacks in this apart­ment have not worked since we moved in. The phone com­pa­ny points at the apart­ment peo­ple, the apart­ment main­te­nance guy points to the phone com­pa­ny. I final­ly called the office today and said that I don’t care whose fault it is, they weren’t work­ing when we moved in and we rent­ed an apart­ment with six jacks, not two. I want them fixed NOW. The prop­er­ty promis­es that main­te­nance issues will be resolved in 24 hours, and that has­n’t hap­pened. Some­one is sup­posed to be here very soon to do just that, so I’d bet­ter get some clothes on!