edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-06-15 10:05 pm

drive-by update!

1. I had a uterine fibroid embolization on June 4. This is a minor surgery that basically murders a fibroid by cutting off its blood supply. I had to stay in the hospital overnight for observation, since blood clots can be Bad News and this procedure essentially creates an artificial clot -- they needed to make sure it didn't hare off and cause problems.

My sleep was very disrupted for about a week thereafter, and I had some minor side effects as well as discomfort, but I am now pretty much back to normal. It will take a month or two to see if the slow withering of the fibroid fixes some problems I was having.

2. Friday the 20th will be my last day at the rental company. I am trying to get a certain set of tasks complete before I leave, but Lawyer Man keeps yanking me aside to work on stuff related to our imminent website revamp, which is frustrating. I am 90% sure I will not be able to finish everything I want to wrap up, but such is life.

3. I have two U-Haul U-Boxes set to be delivered to my driveway on Monday the 23rd. My parents will arrive later that day, and the goal is to have the boxes packed and collected by midday on the 26th, and for us to hit the road no later than mid-afternoon on the 27th.

Then I get to crash in their guest room and go AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaa for a bit.

4. In July Mom and I will return to Ithaca for my surgery follow-up appointment, and probably also to close my Ithaca bank accounts. Later in July I am road-tripping through western Canada en route to a fandom friends' gathering, and then road-tripping home by way of Washington and assorted bits of the northwestern US, because why not.

Then I will do a bit more AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, and in August I start looking seriously for a new job. New housing will follow, since it's easier to rent an apartment convenient to a job location than to find a job convenient to an apartment location.

5. I have been sorting through boxes and bins of stuff that I have not touched for literal decades, and holy shit I have been clogging my apartment and my life up with so much nonsense. It will be good to start over on a cleaner footing.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-04-18 11:34 pm

tiny update

Survived tax day. Was utterly useless at the rental office the following day, but I did manage to do some actual work on Thursday and Friday.

Packed a couple more boxes of books. Probably ought to assembled some more empty boxes and start sorting through clothes and kitchen paraphernalia.

Hmm. I should probably also weed my filing cabinet. I am 100% sure I don't need to bring all those papers with me to Minnesota.

But tomorrow is mostly for unwinding. I will resume productivity Sunday afternoon, after treating myself to brunch.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-01-14 11:28 pm

assorted daily stuff

I had a dentist appointment this morning to fix an old filling that had gone bad. We were also initially scheduled to do a second filling at the same time, but the dentist decided that since one of the affected teeth was in the upper right quadrant and the other was in the lower left quadrant, doing both fillings would potentially leave me with no good chewing surfaces if either tooth was sensitive after the Novocain wore off.

So now I have a THIRD appointment scheduled for January 28. *sigh*

On the bright side, the filling replacement seems to have gone well and I am not, in fact, having any pain. I also got the dentist to shave down the little scraggly bit on the filling she replaced a couple weeks ago, so it is no longer snagging food, my floss, or my tongue. \o/

Other things done today:

1. Completed a renewal lease and made good progress on creating a key plan for the 1st floor of one of our largest buildings.

2. Uploaded a batch of my 2023 Three Sentence Ficathon fills to AO3.

3. Refilled my blood pressure meds.

4. Bought groceries (and upon getting home immediately realized several items I forgot, so I made a new list)

5. Prepped for laundry tomorrow.

6. Wrote one (1) Three Sentence Ficathon fill.

And now I shall go to bed. :)
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-01-06 08:27 pm

winter, blecch

I got to the Collegetown office this morning and discovered there was no heat. We reported this to Maintenance, who sent a guy to fix the boiler... but we still had no heat. So they sent a second guy to come stand on a ladder and stick his head into the ceiling next to the fan, whereupon he discovered that the motor had died. Completely gone. Unrepairable. Needs to be replaced.

When will that happen? *shrug*

So we got two space heaters, which raised the temperature by perhaps 4 degrees Fahrenheit, but it was still miserable and my toes were slowly going numb even though my lovely oversized winter coat was keeping the rest of me warm.

Mom Boss and Aunt Boss left at 4pm and I closed up the office at 5pm, an hour early, because Collegetown is dead as a doornail during winter break and I prefer not to freeze.

Anyway, after 30 minutes at home to eat dinner and toast my feet on the radiator under my desk, I felt much more human and ventured forth into the dark and the cold to belatedly take care of my laundry. Everything has been washed, the air-dry items are home and hung up, and as soon as I hit 'post' I will head back to fold and retrieve the machine-dry items.

I think that is quite enough for one day.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-01-03 12:26 pm

welcome to January

Some stuff:

1. Flew out to Minnesota for Christmas and some ancillary visiting -- I left Monday afternoon (12/23) and returned home on Saturday (12/28). The flights out went smoothly, but both legs of my trip home were significantly delayed, which was annoying. Anyway, it was good to see Mom, Dad, Vicky, and Aunt C again.

2. Mom seems to have finally internalized that I am serious about moving to Minnesota this June and is now lightly panicking about logistics and my impending job search, which is... well. I am glad she cares! I am glad she wants to help! But it's also very tiring.

3. I thought I had finished all my Not the IRS paid training by the end of the year, but apparently they lied to me when they said all the training would be in X section of the company intranet. Actually half the training was still on Y section of the intranet (where all of it used to be) so I had to go take care of that portion yesterday. But now, finally, I seem to have ticked off all my mandatory boxes.

4. We rented an apartment to a guy with a start date of January 2 and I wanted to stage/photo/video it before he moved in. However, despite the apartment having sat vacant since FREAKING JUNE, our Maintenance department didn't finish turnover until Thursday morning and then the tenant showed up three hours early, so there went my plans. *sigh* However, I did manage to stage/photo/video a different apartment this morning, which is good because in theory we have someone ready to sign, pay, and move in this afternoon.

5. I am attempting a habit pledge for Get Your Words Out this year, after not writing much at all for a few years. I would like to get back into writing and I think a habit pledge is more useful for that than a word count pledge. :)

And now I think I will go grab some lunch before returning to work.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-11-12 09:39 pm

assorted miscellanea

Tonight's forecast is for a hard freeze, down to about 25 Fahrenheit. So I brought in my banana pepper for the night, and my tiny potted fig probably for the season, figs not being especially cold-hardy trees.

-----

Last night I treated myself to dinner at a local restaurant, just because. I had the appetizer sized Caesar salad, the appetizer sized scallops in cream sauce, and a glass of white wine. It was very nice, and I also figured out a slightly less confusing route to reach the restaurant than the one Google maps wanted me to follow. :)

-----

At work, Ms. Random Numbers wants me to create a clear landing point for people who are searching for immediate availability and/or spring semester leases, since we have a lot of vacancies this year. The problem is that because of the way our website is structured (it is based on data pulled from our Rent Manager account), I cannot list an apartment as available for two separate time periods, and we are already a month and a half into renting for the 2025-26 lease year.

The website also has static pages that run through Wordpress. I already have a price chart up on the static prices page, but I don't think people use that much.

I can either create a new page or repurpose a non-used page to basically be a list of apartments with some prices, date, and links, but there's no way to make it easy to find. I guess at least it would be something I could point people at in response to email inquiries?

Anyway, the moral of this story is that you shouldn't build your website with Rent Manager.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-11-08 05:54 pm

assorted work scheduling thoughts

I have spent the past two days doing very little at work. I'm not doomscrolling or anything, but I am definitely not focused on my actual job. By which I mean I have answered a few emails, talked to a few people who walked into the office, reviewed a few apartment videos, uploaded a few other videos to YouTube, and talked to the Maintenance department about a few issues. And that's it.

Admittedly I didn't want to leave the office to take care of some pending tasks because Mr. Geniality is out of state visiting his family and it's not great to leave the office entry unattended, but still.

I was out sick Wednesday-Friday last week (general exhaustion, full-body aches, minor but persistent headache, minor but persistent upper respiratory gunk, minor but persistent lack of correct internal temperature regulation) and used paid sick leave to cover two of them, but I need to save some paid time off for Thanksgiving and Christmas visits to family in Minnesota.

So I'm thinking I might come in tomorrow afternoon to stage a couple studio apartments and take photos and video. The forecast predicts sunshine, and this way I could make up at least part of that missing day.

Next week I will be in the Collegetown office Monday and Thursday, and downtown Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Hopefully this is a sign that I will be able to return to my normal one-day-per-week in Collegetown before the end of the year.

-----

Unrelatedly, I had a paid training session for Not the IRS on Monday evening, which included a 1-hour Teams meeting and then some online assessments. On Monday the 11th I will get the results of those assessments in the form of personalized additional paid training. Apparently there's like 55 potential training modules, but you only get assigned ones to covered points where your assessment results were a bit wobbly.

The thing about tax training is that if something is a government requirement (continuing education in order to renew your PTIN) that's unpaid. But if the company assigns additional training/education beyond the government's requirements, and makes completing that training/education a condition of employment, that usually has to be paid.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-11-06 08:25 pm

fuck fuck fuck

The Collegetown rental office was eerily quiet today. All of Collegetown was, actually -- and Ithaca in general was subdued. New Hire called out sick (Aunt Boss and I suspect it was stress/grief rather than germs) and Mom Boss stayed home and did a bit of remote work.

Fuck.

Anyway I have set up a monthly donation to the ACLU. Gonna look into some other options next week once I am less numb -- I need to pick things that don't require a big in-person time commitment (or making cold calls, or knocking on doors) because I will 100% flake out on that and it's better to find some activity I can stick with.

In a tiny silver lining it looks like my House district may have swung to a Democratic challenger instead of the Republican incumbent? The margin was very tight, though, so a mandatory recount may be triggered. We shall see.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-11-04 11:23 pm

work blather

Most of what I did today at work involved apartment tour videos.

So, tour videos. As part of my job, I stage vacant apartments, take a bunch of photos, and record a narrated video tour (sometimes all on my own, sometimes acting as camera operator for Mr. Geniality). Later I upload the raw footage of each apartment to a photo album in one of our company Google accounts (which I set up and initially paid for but finally remembered to transfer the ownership last year) and I share the albums with our social media guy. I also send him a quick email with notes about extraneous footage to cut and any other unusual elements for each tour.

He then edits the raw footage for each apartment into a finished video, uploads that file to the relevant Google photo album, and shoots me an email to let me know it's ready for review.

I then watch the video and either download it in preparation for posting it on our company YouTube account, OR I let him know that this or that needs to be edited. There were a few edits needed in the videos I reviewed today, mostly basic stuff -- one video had the wrong background music track, one had inaccurate text about air conditioning and heating, one had lost part of the narration when Mr. Social Media was blipping out a creaky door. Little things, but best fixed before we post the video anywhere public.

I also staged, photographed, and videoed a studio whose tenant unilaterally broke their lease two weeks ago, without either giving 30 days' notice OR paying any of their October rent. The furniture had changed since the last staging in 2022, and we like to keep our apartment images as up-to-date as feasible.

Tomorrow and Wednesday I will be at the Collegetown office, and then Thursday-Friday back downtown. I have been working Monday-Tuesday downtown and Wednesday-Friday in Collegetown to plug the gap between Miss Scatterbrained leaving and New Hire number-I-forget-what being hired, and then also to cover while New Hire is in her training period. This is significantly less than ideal for me, but hopefully this week I can walk New Hire through how to process a signed and paid lease after which perhaps I can pull back to 2 days a week in Collegetown and then back to my normal 1 day per week in December.

We shall see how that shakes out in practice.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-08-20 08:43 pm

fun with freight elevators

Today's minor adventure:

So we have a freight elevator in one of our buildings, right? Mostly our maintenance staff use it to move trash and recycling bins outside without needing to stink up the passenger elevator (and also because you can fit so many more bins per trip), but we also let tenants reserve it for an hour when moving in or out. It's especially helpful for people who bring their own furniture, but also for people who just have a lot of boxes.

Normally we get one of the maintenance staff to operate the freight elevator, but I am also trained to run it in case of schedule conflicts. Which we had this morning. So I spent 9am to 11am helping a tenant move in. There are two reasons the move took that long.

Reason 1: he had hired a couple people to help move his stuff but they had trouble finding the location and showed up 30 minutes late.

Reason 2: this is the adventure part.

This tenant was bringing his own furniture, which mostly wasn't an issue since it was either disassembled or relatively small. However, he had an absolutely MASSIVE sofa. Getting the sofa out of his U-Haul truck into the freight elevator wasn't terrible. Getting it out of the freight elevator and into the hallway, however, was more of an issue. There are two doorways to negotiate, and the sofa, as previously mentioned, was MASSIVE. So the tenant and the movers played applied geometry for a while.

They got through the first doorway, spent five minutes judging angles, then attempted the second doorway.

I leaned in to help squish the cushions.

They s q u e e z e d through by the skin of their teeth...

and slammed the sofa corner into a fire alarm (one of those little emergency pull-boxes), set off the fire alarm for the whole building, and summoned the fire department complete with heavy suits and helmets and a fire axe.

We did call to report that it was a false alarm, but the fire department takes precautions anyway, which is an extremely rational choice under the circumstances.

Anyway, the whole pull-box has to be replaced now. It was absolutely smashed and could not just be put back together.

So that was my small adventure this morning.

(Other mishaps during this particular move-in included me having to shove 5 pieces of our own furniture into random empty apartments because a guy was laying new carpet in one unit and had obviously moved the furniture out... and consequently blocked the hallway. *sigh* And then there was the time the tenant was helping me close the freight elevator doors, lost his balance, and almost got his leg smashed in the jaws of the rapidly closing door. But! We persevered, nobody got more than bruises, and the fire department let all the evacuated tenants back into the building pretty quick.)
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-08-15 12:30 pm

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

August continues to be The Worst, but I persevere.

I got my sleep schedule utterly mangled at the start of this week (you know how sometimes you're so tired you cannot make the choice to go to bed and just sit trapped in a mindless activity loop? yeah, that), but I think I have wrenched it back on track.

I have also mysteriously bruised my left forearm, bashed the hell out of my left wrist (pro-tip, when walking backward carrying half a loveseat, be wary of doorframes!), and done something to my right foot that caused a case of painful pins-and-needles that lasted for about 10 hours. (It has cleared up!)

It's been just oodles of fun all around, really.

On the bright side, one problem tenant vacated at his lease end date, which was nice. And what's even nicer is that fake!FBI tenant vacated his apartment only a few days late and then, yesterday, FINALLY confirmed in writing that he has relinquished the apartment!! So I turned off his key fob access to the building and we are going to throw out his mountains of junk and then spend probably a month rehabbing the apartment because he destroyed it. Holes in multiple walls and doors, broken mirror, broken furniture, weird substances gunked everywhere, etcetera.

Anyway, as soon as Mr. Geniality returns from grabbing lunch I am headed down to the Commons to stage an apartment and check on the turnover progress for a few others.

-----

In unrelated news, I gave blood on Saturday. I always enjoy that -- it's a very low-cost, low-effort way of making a tangible positive difference in the world. (I mean, it's low-cost and low-effort for me. I have good veins and am not bothered by needles. This is not true for everyone!) My iron was a little lower than usual, which is probably because sometimes during turnover season I am too tired to practice proper nutrition, but eh. I just need to remember to eat more broccoli or something.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-08-05 08:43 pm

August. Ugh.

We are at that time of year where I spend most of my work days running around in disgusting heat and humidity trying to stage apartments in the hair-thin window between when Maintenance finishes turning them over and the new tenants pick up keys and move in.

Earlier in the summer I usually have a bit more time to play with, but August is crunch time and everything goes straight to hell.

Anyway I think tomorrow I will head in at 9am instead of 10am and see if I can plow through three or four apartments instead of just two. I have one already staged, so that should give me a good starting point. We'll see how far I get.

-----

In completely unrelated news, as of July 29, my parents have been married for 50 years. :D
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-07-15 10:32 pm

who invented summer anyway

I spent a significant portion of my workday clomping around apartment buildings that don't have central air (thus no cooling in the hallways) and often no elevators either. Furthermore, we don't leave the air conditioners on in vacant apartments, so those were also stifling.

I mean, making sure turnovers are done correctly is an important part of my job, as is staging apartments for photos and videos (and for that part, I get to turn the AC on and let it run), but yeesh, I usually finish a round absolutely dripping sweat.

-----

In other weather-related news, a severe thunderstorm blew through Ithaca around 6:15-7:00pm. Mr. Geniality and I bailed out of the office right as the lights began to flicker intermittently, and were heading out of the parking lot right as the sky cracked open and the deluge poured down.

Then the second line of thunderstorms developed a gap over Ithaca, so I wound up doing laundry tonight after all.

I have noticed over the years that a surprising number of severe weather systems somehow skip over Ithaca. Either they fizzle out entirely, or a front splits in half so part goes north of the city and part goes south of the city, but nothing hits us directly. This is probably related to the layout of surrounding hills, urban heat island effects, and microclimates around Cayuga Lake, but I don't know that I've ever heard an in-depth explanation.

This is not to say we don't get rain or snow! We do certainly get rain and snow. Just that weather severity predictions for the city of Ithaca specifically seem to systematically overclaim compared to what actually hits the ground. And that overclaim does NOT extend to the outlying suburbs -- it's specific to the city proper.

Anyway, I need to go retrieve my dry laundry, after which I may fall directly into bed.

-----

In news that has nothing whatsoever to do with weather, I bought a six-pack of an apricot-infused hard cider the other day, and my initial test results are promising.

We shall see how I feel upon sampling another can tomorrow. :)
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-07-10 08:39 pm

some work stuff, some weather stuff

Mr. Geniality was out sick again today, so I covered some more apartment tours, answered all the phone calls, and wrote a couple leases in addition to replying to inquiries, performing turnover inspections, and taking photos and video of staged apartments.

I do NOT have any tours scheduled for tomorrow, so even if he's out sick for a third day I should be able to listen to his backlog of voicemail and still get through all my normal tasks.

-----

In unrelated news, I had a bit of a scare shortly after 4pm when the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for my area!

Fortunately whatever thunderstorm element had started to rotate fizzled out shortly thereafter, and the hail and 70mph wind gusts passed a bit south of both my office and my house. On the one hand, severe weather is dangerous, so it's good we were off on the minor fringes. But on the other hand, I do love a good thunderstorm -- they're very cleansing, both literally and emotionally -- and I'm a bit miffed to have missed this one.

Ah well. The forecast for the coming week is just heat and humidity atop heat and humidity, so I am 100% certain there will be other storms.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-07-09 10:51 pm

the saga of fake!FBI tenant continues

Mr. Geniality was out sick today (apparently he has Covid? oh dear), so my plans for the day got thoroughly derailed since I had to cover his three scheduled apartment showings. I did still get several turnover inspections done, though, and one of the tours should result in a lease, so not a total loss.

I also had three phone calls from fake!FBI tenant, which were of varying length and varying degrees of frustration. The context is this gets long )

...

He was doing okay-ish for about a month after his extensive hospital stay, but he has clearly stopped taking whatever medications he was prescribed and has slid back into delusions and/or mania. He is not well, he needs help, and our company is 100% not equipped to provide it.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-07-08 08:50 pm

my job, so exciting

I spent most of my workday updating one particular spreadsheet, with pauses to scan (or manually correct and re-scan) the source documents as needed.

Context: For various reasons most of which can be summed up as "college students living on their own for the first time are not great at forward planning," with a heft side-helping of "the local electric company is deeply unhelpful and always runs late," my company has a policy of making all incoming tenants complete a NYSEG new account application form which we then email to NYSEG on their behalf. We also have a standing request with NYSEG that if a tenant cancels their account, it should revert back to us rather than being shut off entirely. This ensures that new tenants do not arrive to apartments and discover they have no electricity.

However.

The Collegetown office was running understaffed until a couple months ago, and the new hire, while enthusiastic and trainable, does not pick up new skills fast and frequently Mom Boss and Aunt Boss were both too buried under their own tasks to walk her through assorted projects step by step. And I only work in that office one day per week, about half of which I usually spend dealing with downtown emails.

So the NYSEG requests got put into the "we'll sort this out later" basket for a little too long, and I am the person who is now sorting it all out. *sigh* This is especially annoying because, for data security reasons, we only ever store NYSEG forms on local drives so I literally cannot do any of that work from my downtown computer.

But our tracking spreadsheet is now up to date, I sent in all June and July account request forms, and I took a stab at a few August forms for good measure before I called it a day and spent the remaining 45 minutes trying to catch up on my email.

Also apparently nobody updates the office whiteboard calendars when I'm not around? On the one hand, this pleases me because I enjoy that task and like making little thematic header illustrations for each new month. (July is fireworks. August is grapevines. September is trees with fall foliage. October will be pumpkins and maybe a haystack.) On the other hand, I'm not going to be working there forever and somebody needs to step up.

-----

In completely unrelated news, I continue to enjoy the Brother Cadfael mysteries and am currently reading book #9, Dead Man's Ransom.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-07-03 04:49 pm

wherein Liz brings a minor work quest to a satisfying conclusion

Half day at work today, since I will also be working a half day on Saturday.

Today I have succeeded in my 4-year mission to get good video tour footage of a nice and unique apartment in one of our buildings, as well as matching photos.

We had an extant video tour, but it was from 2020 before I forcibly removed the gimbal and iPhone from Lawyer Man and displaced him as camera operator (I have Opinions about his camera work; they are all negative) and it was one of the videos Lawyer Man had edited himself and therefore full of weird and distracting text effects. (I also have Opinions about Lawyer Man's video editing skills.) Additionally, nobody bothered to take photos while the apartment was staged (I also have Opinions about Lawyer Man's common sense and logistical planning skills), so for two years we had a shitty video and no staged photos.

In 2021, the tenants renewed so we had no window for staging.

In 2022, I was able to do a minimal guerilla staging and shoot photos during a tiny gap (less than 1 hour) between when turnover was notionally complete and when the new tenants came to get keys, but I had no time to also shoot a video. I also got Social Media Guy to re-edit the raw 2020 footage into a video that fit our current house style, so we then had nice staged photos plus an okay-ish video with bad camera work and a staging that completely failed to match the photos.

In 2023, turnover was running so late that the new tenant literally picked up keys before the apartment was ready and had to go cool their heels for two hours, so there was no time to try for either photos or video.

But! This year turnover was complete by 10am and the new tenants aren't arriving until tomorrow (they had a friend collect their keys this afternoon), so I was finally able to get GOOD video footage plus new photos that will match.

This is also important because the apartment used to have a large television, visible in both the 2020 video tour and the 2022 photos. Last year we decided to stop providing televisions in our downtown properties (partly because there was no logic to which apartments had them, but also because anecdotally very few tenants were using them), so I'm working to ensure that our advertising materials no longer show amenities that don't exist.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-06-28 09:48 pm

a tiny work story

A message I sent to our maintenance coordinator this afternoon: "I know you are going to hate me for this and I'm sorry, but can you switch the tables in [Building A Apartment X] and [Building B Apartment Y]? The table in Apt X is HUGE and the one in Apt Y is tiny, and that is exactly backwards."

For context, Building A Apt X is a 1-bedroom unit. Building B Apt Y is a 3-bedroom unit. And yet the table in Apt X is literally twice the size of the table in Apt Y.

Hopefully we can get those swapped. It's not the end of the world if we can't, but they are wildly out of place in their current locations.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-06-27 11:41 pm

work grumbles, mail order clothes, some stuff I've been reading

1. We are well into summer move-outs and turnovers, though so far we've only had a couple new tenants move in. That should pick up speed over the next week.

I also need to get more on top of apartment staging and photos/videos, but it's been like pulling teeth to get certain important apartments into shape during June. The maintenance department marks them as done, I go to perform a final inspection, I find some things that still need fixing, I note the problems in our shared FileMaker page... and then nothing happens. It is extremely frustrating.

-----

2. I bought a bunch of mail order pants in May with the intent of wearing some while on my vacation. I wildly misjudged some sizing charts, though, and had to return most of them. I did keep four pairs even though they were also too larger, because they had drawstrings to supplement the elastic waistbands and were therefore functional albeit much less than ideal.

Anyway, last week I ordered another batch of that particular style of pants, in two smaller sizes. Turns out one of those is just right, but the other needs to get returned. I should probably take care of that tomorrow or Saturday.

I am unsure what to do with the too-large pants. One pair I'll just donate since I got a replacement set in the smaller size, but the other three are in colors that I couldn't match in the smaller size, so... I guess I'll keep them around for now? They're fine for mucking around the house, if nothing else.

-----

3. Twenty years late to the party, I have been reading Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel series. I enjoyed Phedre's trilogy very much! Imriel's trilogy is a little slower but still good -- I have temporarily stalled out in book three because I hit a point where all signs point to something Bad about to happen and I was abruptly not in the mood to watch the characters suffer.

So naturally I picked up the first Brother Cadfael mystery instead (A Morbid Taste for Bones), because what is a little bit of religious turmoil and murder along the Wales/England border in the early 12th century if not light entertainment? *wry*

I am not really a mystery genre fan, but I have noticed that the mysteries that do grab me tend to also lean heavily on a second genre, such as historical fiction or sci-fi/fantasy. And also some cozies, which I think also count as leaning on a second genre (the quirky small community full of friends) and which I can rely on not to drop me into excessively dark waters when I just want something fun.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-06-18 11:11 pm

a minor scheduling dilemma

Decision of the day:

Tomorrow I don't need to be in to work until 1pm-ish, because I am working a half day so that I can also work a half day on Saturday without incurring excessive overtime. (During the summer, the rental office keeps some weekend hours to accommodate tours, let new tenants pick up keys, and also give me additional chances to stage apartments for photos and videos.)

Here are some things I could do with my unexpectedly free morning:

1. Sleep in

2. Get a long overdue haircut

3. Miscellaneous household chores (put away laundry, hang some pictures, wash dishes, clean bathroom, etc.)

4. Cross-stitch and listen to the Hidden Almanac

I cannot do all four. I probably should choose options 2 and 3, but the siren lure of sleeping in is very strong. So is the siren lure of cross-stitch, to be perfectly honest.

(The danger of choosing to sleep in is, of course, that I might end up sleeping in for more than an extra 60-90 minutes and then have no time for anything else.)

...I will set my alarm for the usual time and see how I feel in the morning, I guess.