daily update, Thursday Jan. 30

[edenfalling]

Things done today:

1. Rental office 9am-7pm. Mostly slow, though again a weirdly large number of packages. (Seriously, WHAT are people ordering at this time of year???) Mom Boss had the March rent reminders ready, so I sent them out even though it's not quite February yet. Might as well get them done while we have the time, you know?

2. Read some more of Sovereign.

3. Continued listening to the frustrating Great Courses lecture series. We're dealing with the Reformation now, which is irritating on two counts. First, I happen to know more about the radical Reformation than the lecturer does (by virtue of being a Unitarian Universalist and interested in my own denomination's history, which has some roots in 16th century Poland and Transylvania), so I found a lot of what he said about it either wrong or so incomplete that it wildly missed the point; also, his relentlessly western-European focus drives me up the metaphorical wall because the Reformation didn't stop dead at the Austro-Hungarian border. Second, every time he talks about a pope, he just says "the Pope" and never bothers to say WHICH POPE (unless it's Paul III, and even then only sometimes). This is MADDENING, because it has the effect of collapsing all popes into a single ur-Pope with no distinguishing characteristics -- and he maintains this flattening lack of names EVEN WHEN he is also talking about how a given pope's personality affected his decisions! ARGH!!!!!

4. Wrote ~200 words of the untitled Narnia bridge fic. I have hit my getyourwordsout wordcount target for January, with one day still to go! \o/ Also, I managed to at least partially wrangle the conversational subject back around to bridges rather than taxes, though possibly doing this by way of discussing drowned Telmarine soldiers from the climactic battle in PC was not the most tasteful way to do that? Oh well, whatever. I'm not going to prettify the logical results of a war.

5. Put away some of the clean laundry from yesterday.

And now I will have a slice of coffee cake and do a bit of websurfing before I hit the sack. :)

Comments

[alexseanchai]

3 sounds frustrating as all hell

4 pleases me

[edenfalling]

3. It is intensely frustrating! However, I am getting just enough out of the course that I keep listening... albeit with a VERY LARGE grain of salt toward everything where I don't have enough pre-existing background to know whether or not the lecturer is talking through his hat.

4. :DDD

[redwolf]

Damn! 9-7 is a long haul.

It just occurred to me that I've never asked what the deal with the packages is. Is the office the safe drop off point for packages for your renters?

My current place of work is the first time I've ever worked anywhere that doesn't allow employees to get their parcels shipped to work. They're very stroppy about it. Admittedly, all official mail goes to PO boxes that are then processed through third party security checks before it comes anywhere near us. I didn't know that they did that until a few months back, so they suck on informing staff about how and why stuff works the way it does. Previous place I worked didn't have this issue, but building owner is a paranoid weirdo, so all mail into the building went through the same checks but in-house. I occasionally ran afoul of the mail room and they'd embargo my stuff and make me collect it on the way home.

[edenfalling]

We receive all incoming tenant packages in our office. This is a courtesy service we provide. It offers security and convenience for tenants (packages don't just stack up in giant messy piles on sidewalks or in building lobbies where nobody can find anything and anyone can take anyone else's packages), and avoids, you know, giant messy piles of packages making our buildings look like dumps to current and prospective tenants.

We have ~650 tenants spread over our various buildings, so their packages would quite rapidly create untenable chaos if we didn't have the package redirection service in place.