One of the after-effects of moving house is that I keep noticing ways in which I'm not fully settled in yet. Every so often I'll seize on one of those ways which is particularly irritating me, and tell myself that when that one has gone I'll ‘really’ be settled.

Just after the move, for example, I told myself I'd have ‘properly’ moved in once I'd managed to do some laundry in the new place. Or when I'd cooked for myself, instead of just eating a ready meal as I did for the first few days while I unpacked and sorted out the kitchen.

When I'd reactivated my computer infrastructure enough to run my first proper backup in the new house, that was a milestone. And it took me a couple of weeks to hit the milestone of getting to work on time: I kept being delayed in the morning by either doing a quick chore before leaving the house, enjoying the new shower for a bit too long, or not quite having worked out the optimal route to work yet.

This week's one is that I hope to feel as if I've properly settled in (translation: at least until I come up with the next of these milestones) once I'm no longer generating more rubbish than the normal collection can easily cope with. Even now I'm not making regular trips to the tip any more, my black wheely bin is constantly about half a load fuller than I normally expect it to be, and to some extent I'm still queueing up rubbish inside the house to be transferred to the bin once it's been emptied. It's terribly annoying, and the most annoying thing about it is that it's not nearly over yet: I still have lots of things on my to-buy list which will come in packaging more bulky and annoying than the stuff itself, and which will overflow my bin for yet another fortnight.

Out of curiosity I ran two Google searches this morning, whose results were surprisingly close:

Results 1 – 10 of about 801,000 for "free reign"
Results 1 – 10 of about 841,000 for "free rein"

The right one won, but only just. This gave me an idea for a couple of silly Google challenges, if anyone reading this is bored enough:

Firstly, see if you can find a well known word or phrase, together with a common misspelling, in which the wrong spelling actually gets more hits on Google. (Cross-channel variation, or other reasonably justifiable differences of opinion, don't count as misspellings. One of them has to be clearly wrong, such that anyone sufficiently educated who isn't an incurable descriptive linguist has to agree on which one it is.)

Secondly, see if you can find a wrong-and-right pair in which the scores are (proportionately) closer together than the above two.

I haven't tried either, but I'd guess the second challenge would be harder than the first: I'm sure there must be some wrong spelling more popular than the right one, but those two are really pretty close by the normal Google standards (there's usually more like an order of magnitude difference).