DHCP: keep a lease forever?

[Dave]

I got a simple problem.  My local IP addresses keep changing (didn't have
this problem before until a firmware update), and I don't want them to.
I got these spammy winboxes that greedily race for to steal my FreeBSD's
lease.  I'm using a simple 4-port linksys router here.  It's configuration
is about useless.

Let's say I wanted to be 192.168.1.170 for argument's sake.  I turn
everything off (router + computers).  Set my 'starting IP' to 170.  Fire
the FreeBSD machine up first, let it get 170.  Then I turn the dumb
winboxes on, and who cares what they have they arn't important.  Like a
couple of days later, I'll type "ifconfig" and suddely I got 172 on my
FreeBSD box (192.168.1.172) instead of 170.  I could turn DHCP off, but
then my dhclient takes really really really long to find the network (but
it does find it, eventually).  How can I setup a more static system here
without the long wait for dhclient?  Anything in dhclient.conf I can put
in there?  I want to disable dhcp, but I need to figure out how to
efficiently get the connection going on, and basically, I havn't owned
FreeBSD in the pre-dhcp era, so I wouldn't know how.