The transition to my new web host is complete, and AT&T has shut down the old site and email address. Google, Bing, and the other web search sites have yet to catch on to this, so in the meantime, if you are looking for me, go here:
…and if you’ve got any links to the old site, please update them.
FYI, the AT&T Worldnet service I’ve used for the past twelve years is shutting down this month, so I’m moving to a new web hosting service. My web domain remains the same—www.bymattruff.com—but because I’m no longer using web forwarding, links to specific pages will have a different URL than they did before. Specifically, if you’ve got a link to my site that begins “http://home.att.net/~storytellers”, you’ll need to change that part of the address to “https://www.bymattruff.com”.
My email address is also changing—you can find the new one on the contact page of my web site if I haven’t already sent it to you. As of this posting the old email address still works, so if you’ve sent me something recently I should have gotten it, but AT&T will be pulling the plug sometime in the next few days.
Part of settling into a new house is learning its little quirks. This weekend, we discovered a new one: the flap that covers the external vent for the oven exhaust fan does not close completely when the fan shuts off. The local starlings have noticed this and decided to build a nest in the exhaust pipe. Given birds’ sensitivity to Teflon fumes, this is not a good long-term survival strategy, but you try telling them that.
While I was away in France and Germany, our landlady called to say she was planning to sell the house, so since I got back Lisa and I have been busy relocating.
We’d hoped to stay on Queen Anne, but rents have really shot up over the past five years, and given what we need—room for two home offices, plus wall space for more than a dozen 7-foot-high bookcases—it didn’t make financial sense. So we expanded our search horizon to include Ballard, Phinney Ridge, Green Lake, and Wallingford, at which point our housing karma kicked in and we found a great place.
It’s definitely a change, which in a way makes the transition easier. The Queen Anne house was a brick Tudor built in the 1920s. The new rental is modern construction, less than a decade old, but what we give up in cove ceilings we get back in sunlight and amazing views—you can see the Olympic Mountains from the living room, without standing on tiptoe. And we’re near a major bus route, so even though we’re farther out from downtown it doesn’t take much longer to get there.
The move was time-consuming but relatively painless. Lisa’s parents flew in to help out, and for the heavy lifting we hired Hansen Brothers (we’d used them for our previous move, and they remembered us—maneuvering large objects down a spiral staircase tends to make an impression). Rent-a-Yenta and Stanley Steamer did a nice job cleaning up the old place after our stuff was out.
The one major hassle involved AT&T Broadband, our DSL provider. With all of our other utilities, we were able to switch addresses online, or with a single phone call. To move the DSL, though, we first had to cancel it at our old address, wait for the cancellation to be finalized (the DSL stops working immediately, but the paperwork, or whatever, doesn’t go through until the end of the current billing cycle), and then reorder it at the new address. It took about ten phone calls to straighten all of this out, and meanwhile we were without Internet access for three weeks. Hence my lack of recent blog posts.
Anyway, we’re pretty much unpacked at this point, so once I catch up on email, and get over the novelty of being able to watch YouTube again, it’ll be time to get back to work on The Mirage.