I got home last night around 10pm, and as I have for the last three months (minus one day), I locked my bike to my roommate’s flat-tired, rusted-out bike, which is (well, was) locked to a giant concrete pillar.

This afternoon around 2 when I went to ride up to the pool, I walked into the garage to get my bike, and both bikes were gone. No clipped lock on the ground, just gone, like they’d never even been there.

I thought for a minute the landlord’s people, who have been on a “let’s clear unused things out!” spree lately might have gotten a little overly aggressive, but the landlord denied it and the handyman who happened to be at the building mentioned that he’d seen the garage door next to mine had been left open for an indeterminate amount of time when he came back from lunch.

Thanks, neighbors! How nice of you to allow thieves to come in and steal my three month old bike!

My lock was a crazy Kryptonite U-Lock, but that security fell apart a bit with my roommate’s combination lock with a wire that apparently was entirely vulnerable to bolt cutters. The thieves apparently decided they’d rather deal with the U-Lock back at their den*, and just took both bikes.

I’m pissed, but I’m not HULK SMASH pissed, like I thought I’d be when I plunked down a good chunk of change for the bike and wondered how I’d feel if it got stolen. My thoughts run more along the lines of, “Goddamn it bike thieves, I had better shit to do with my weekend” pissed.

I filed a police report, I called my renter’s insurance company and found that I am covered minus a fairly reasonable deductible, and then I thought, well, I guess I still ought to go work out. And I got on with my unexpectedly bus-intensive day.

If the bike had been a bit less associated with injury, I’d probably be angrier. This is the same bike I crashed a month after I got it, and one of the gears up and bit me on the leg a couple days ago as I was riding to the pool – I’m going to have a couple little gear-tooth-shaped holes in my leg for a while as a nice souvenir.

And I suppose that having owned bikes pretty much since I left for college in 1999, having this be the first time I’ve had one stolen is something of a minor miracle.

All in all, I’m irritated, but it could have been a lot worse. It’s not like the time tweakers broke the window on my car right after I moved into my old place, where the financial loss was a lot lower, but cleaning up the mess was WAY more of a pain in the ass.

The bike is just gone, along with a chunk of money for my deductible and a new lock. But life goes on.

* – UPDATE 10/30 – Actually, as my roommate discovered as she was walking to the bus to go to work Friday, they took both bikes to a nearby alley, tore her bike to shreds to get mine off of it, and still ran off with mine. No sign of the remnants of my lock, which means it’s apparently a pretty good lock if it stayed on while an entire bike was disassembled around it.

Also, my renter’s insurance company is awesome and has already initiated a direct deposit for the reimbursement, which means I went out and bought a new bike yesterday, which is exactly the same as my old bike except that for now, it remains unstolen. Hooray!

Having been unemployed and stuck at home long enough, however, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I feel like it ought to be addressed. And I’m getting pretty far down on the list of other projects that need to be done.

Hauling about four bags of crap to the trash and sticking another box in my car to go to Goodwill after just hitting the living room and bedroom at a moderate level today felt like progress. There are now several more square feet of visible floor than there were this morning.

The problem is, that’s just what I had to do to get the place clean enough that I would be comfortable actually having a cleaning professional come in and clean everything else. Sadly, I splurged on something else (that I’ll write about once it’s up and running), so my time vs. money ratio tells me it’s all on me to clean.

It’s a definite multi-day task. The bathroom alone is probably going to take me a goodly chunk of tomorrow, and there’s a filing nightmare that awaits me in about a year’s worth of paperwork that’s currently sitting in a gigantic pile on my chair, telling me that I need to switch more of my bills to e-bills.

But hey, it’s something to do. And when I’ve reached the point where I’m so bored that I’m resorting to cleaning to have something to do, it is officially time for me to get a job.

I’ve seen seagulls in there before, which didn’t seem that unusual since I’m only about two miles from the ocean, but the ducks just struck me as odd, so I went and snapped off a few pictures. The fact that one of the neighborhood cats was watching them float around made it even funnier.

Unfortunately, because of my high sensitivity to the bites, I’m still absolutely covered in them. Even the smallest ones take well over a week to go away, and the bigger ones will probably last much longer.

The intense itching is driving me completely insane (even taking a crapload of antihistamines), and I’ve been downgraded to Flamingo from Gay Leopard – It’s not just pink spots anymore, I’m totally covered in calamine lotion.

Anyway, hopefully this will prove itself resolved in the next week or so, and y’all will never have to hear about this nastiness again.

I considered stomping on it when it rapidly descended to the ground, but the damn thing was so big, I feared I would only make it angry.

I’m just praying that leaving it alone will cause it to never actually try to get in my house. I was too tired to scream externally, just to give a brief “Euugh!”, but in my head, and if I ever see that in my house, I was giving a full-throated horror movie scream.

First, I got on the scale, and was happy to see I’d lost another pound. The bad news was, I realized I hadn’t weighed Chaplin in a while, so I picked him up to do the whole “weigh self holding cat, weigh self, subtract” method to see how much he weighed.

The big fucker weighs 18 pounds! Somehow, he’s put on two pounds in the last few months. I’ve been feeding him roughly the same amount, so I’m a little mystified as to how he’s porked up so much.

Second, I’m trapped in my apartment. After months of fighting with my landlord, they finally replaced part of my rotting doorframe. However, when they re-hung the door, they did a piss-poor job of it.

At first, the door was just sticking, which I could live with, but it’s deteriorated badly. Now it takes a ridiculous amount of effort just to enter and leave the damn apartment. It’s worse than it was before, which I didn’t think was possible.

What’s sad about this is that it really doesn’t affect me too much at all, since I’ve barely been leaving the house anyway. Hopefully they’ll get this fixed by a reasonable hour tomorrow, and I’ll be able to at least take the trash out and go to the gym.

I will note a few random things I’ve noticed in the last few days:

- Chaplin falling asleep on my chest means I will, without fail, be asleep within 15 minutes as well.

- If ever you’re cleaning out your apartment and you find old letters or printed-out emails from your ex, for the love of god, do not start to read them. Save them if you must, but shove them in the drawer before you start reading them. Do not do that to yourself.

- I have to vacuum up dirt and cat hair substantially more often now that I have hardwood floors, but I doubt there was actually any less dirt or cat hair when I had carpet. I’m not grossed out by much, but that thought grosses me out just a bit.

- Apparently the new guy next door to me is some sort of classical pianist. It’s kind of interesting when the music bleeding in matches up with whatever movie or TV show I’m watching. And sometimes its hilarious when he’s playing some delicate thing while I’m watching an action movie.

- No matter how much food I buy for a party, it’s inevitably way, way too much, and I wind up freezing a bunch of meat and throwing out a bunch of buns. I just cannot get the calculus right.

- I have several hundred DVDs, most of which I never watch, so I thought I could sell some to bring in some extra money. But combing through them, I can only find about a dozen that I’m actually willing to part with, most of which will not bring me a damn dime because nobody else wants to watch them either.

They’re selling much of the old furniture to the incoming tenants, but they’ve decided not to store any of the remnants, so they’re giving away what they couldn’t convince the new kids to take.

I scored a very nice lamp, which will now bring light to my attempts to read on the couch, and a great overstuffed chair that conveniently matches the color of the couch.

There’s only one minor issue: The chair has been sat upon by two dogs in the fairly recent past, a pug belonging to my former employers and a husky/Aussie shephard mix belonging to another employee.

This was slightly concerning, since I know Chaplin doesn’t get along very well with other animals (this is a large part of why I have him in the first place: while he’s a sweet kitty on his own, he didn’t get along with his previous owner’s other pets).

After I dragged the chair into my apartment this evening, Chaplin flipped a bit, sniffing and scratching and scratching and sniffing at it, and seemingly generally concerned.

At least he was until he decided to bury himself in the chair, working his own little groove into the seat. It’ll be covered in cat hair in no time.

And that’s when I’ll know that the chair is definitely mine, since the defining characteristic of about 90% of what I own is that it’s covered in cat hair.

You know how, when you move, there’s always a few boxes that never actually get unpacked until you move again, and you wonder, what’s in here that is actually worth moving?

I unpacked those two boxes today. Turns out the answer was: not much.

I also went through my magazine and newspaper collection and threw out anything that wasn’t of legitimate historical value, meaning about 95% of the batch is now in the dumpster.

Let me back up for a second: I’ve had several boxes of old magazines that I kept around for years (as in, the oldest one I found was the issue of Newsweek right after the ’95 Oklahoma City bombing).

I’ve dragged these boxes all over the country, since my mother moved out of the house I grew up in and into a much smaller condo, depriving me of much-needed storage space.

I started hanging onto this stuff after my dad showed me a newspaper he’d kept from the day Kennedy was shot, something I found really fascinating. I wanted to save similar stuff for the future.

But I went a little overboard: I saved dozens of issues of Guitar World, Rolling Stone, and other magazines that really are of no use to anyone. I saved every Oscar issue of Entertainment Weekly. I saved everything even moderately historic from Newsweek.

I’d long considered selling the collection on eBay, but when I went to look online today at what I might actually get for some of these magazines (answer: very little to nothing), I decided to just pitch them.

So I went through, saving a very few truly historical items, but otherwise pitching everything. I threw out four bankers’ boxes worth of crap.

What’s funny is that when I checked my email after doing that, there was email from my dad, who’d been looking for my Social Security card. He didn’t find it, but he did find a massive pile of other stuff, including correspondence from summer camp, report cards from elementary school, and various other pack-rat items.

At least I know where the hoarding instinct comes from.

After that, I went through the aforementioned drag-around boxes, digging up dozens of documents that needed to be shredded, and a whole lot of trash.

I wound up with so much stuff to shred that two things happened: First, my shredder overheated badly enough to be unusable for about an hour. Second, I filled a medium-sized moving box completely with the shredded remains of all that paper.

My bedroom is now almost disturbingly clean, and my cat is really, really confused, since all his hiding places are gone. I’ve kicked up enough dust to be sneezing like a madwoman, but it’s nice to feel like I’ve actually made progress on something.

Tomorrow, I’m attacking the living room. I expect to finish filling the dumpster sometime in the next couple of weeks.

1. Moved out of my old Russian-Mob-Owned shithole apartment in Venice. I might have wanted to strangle my neighbors on an hourly basis, but I’m paying almost half again more rent than I was, which is definitely in the category of Not Helpful when unemployed.

Also, the dipshit management company here is just as unresponsive to maintenance issues as the mobsters were, so why the fuck am I paying them all this money? I mean, other than to live in a neighborhood with fewer drive-bys.

2. Fucked up my ankle, requiring me to pay exorbitant COBRA rates instead of finding cheapo individual insurance because my ankle turns into a monstrously expensive preexisting condition if I get the individual coverage.

These two things alone are absolutely killing my unemployment budget. I’ve just looked at how much I’ve spent so far this month, and realized I can’t leave the house again until approximately February.