So, when I arrived home today to discover that my DSL still wasn’t working, I called at&t. 40 minutes later, I had a technician appointment and left for work, leaving my cell phone number.

Fortunately for me, I work for a company that does DSL (just not to my apartment), so I grabbed our Sunset and headed out to the dmark box outside my apartment building. Guess what: it worked.

Hoping to spare myself the expense of having at&t tell me what was wrong, I then went up to my apartment and started testing jacks, finally finding one it would sync on. After promptly calling and cancelling my appointment, Peter and I went searching for answers, and found them in the “DSL” box. Whoever was kind enough to wire the apartment had filtered all of the jacks but one. DSL obviously doesn’t work on a filtered jack.

So, after a run to Taco Bell, we fixed the wiring, labeled things and put together my internet.

Well, I’ve completed the move to my new place, the Blanche Apartments across from MTU’s library. School is now a 3 minute walk away, and I’m closer to most buildings on campus than the dorms are.

Before I moved in, I took a bunch of walkthrough photos, which are posted on flickr. Once I’m done unpacking and cleaning, I’ll take some more.

I like it a lot; it’s close to where I spend most of my time so it alleviates my dependency on oil (I would have to walk farther if I wanted to park my car on campus). While the apartment isn’t as spacious as my old house, and has some really god-awful wallpaper in the halls, it has enough space for me. The kitchen is a bit nicer (by virtue of being cleaner, it is a lot smaller though). The new stove came the day after we moved in, while electric like the one in our old place, it works a lot better.

One of the old tenants came by to make sure all the keys were still here, got a chance to talk to him and he seemed like a pretty decent guy. I asked him about the landlord, and he said he was nice, but liked to make sure water and lights weren’t left on unnecessarily (I can understand that, he pays the utilities, so waste comes out of his profit).

I also got another chance to meet Don (the landlord) and we did a walkthrough of the apartment where I pointed out some things that needed fixing (I don’t want repairs for stuff already broken coming out of our deposit) and he said he’d get a repair guy here. He also told me that if hte apartment needed anything (new lights, outlet covers, etc.) to pick it up, keep the bill and he’d take it off the rent. That’s nice since I value privacy in my home from random strangers and I won’t have to schedule times someone will be home to get a light replaced.

All that said, I really wish the previous tenants hadn’t been quite so messy. There’s a lot of cleaning to do, especially in the kitchen where they cooked a lot of greasy food on high heat (there are splatters literally everywhere).