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.

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.

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.

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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. :)

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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.

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.

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.)

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.

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In completely unrelated news, as of July 29, my parents have been married for 50 years. :D

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.

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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.

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.

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In completely unrelated news, I continue to enjoy the Brother Cadfael mysteries and am currently reading book #9, Dead Man's Ransom.

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.

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.