Elizabeth Culmer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
edenfalling) wrote2021-09-16 07:09 pm
edenfalling) wrote2021-09-16 07:09 pm
slightly over a week's worth of miscellaneous stuff
Ack, where did the time go?!
Um, anyway, I am alive! I've been a bit swamped at work as we gear up for the 2022-23 rental season (Ithaca is a college town; our rental market is completely skewed by this) and try to finish up the dregs of move-in maintenance problems and virtual tour videos.
What else, what else...
I remembered I had a copy of A Desolation Called Peace checked out from the library when I got a very disappointed second overdue notice, so I dug it out of the stack it had gotten lost in and finished it. I enjoyed it! Not quite as much as the first book of the duology, but I think some of that is just that I am personally a little more into culture clashes among humans and human-like beings and less into "how do we communicate with a telepathic alien hive-mind" problems. But I continue to love Mahit and Three Seagrass a lot, and enjoyed getting to meet Nine Hibiscus and Twenty Cicada. Eight Antidote is also pretty cool for an eleven-year-old with almost no frame of reference for a normal childhood; he definitely has the "but the world should be FAIR, why is it not FAIR, we should FIX THAT" attitude I remember from my childhood and teens.
Two days ago my Kindle phone app broke. I asked it to open a particular book and it got hung up in an infinite loop I couldn't disrupt even by force-stopping the app, closing it, and restarting my phone. So I uninstalled and reinstalled the bloody thing, after which I had to manually go through and remove a whole mess of books from my home screen and re-download the thirty-odd books I am in the middle of reading or intend to read soon. (I nibble at books a lot.)
I have been working on a Paint-by-Number project for the past few weeks, which has been very psychologically helpful. See, I've been having trouble doing anything creative-creative, like writing, but I still want to Make Things, and paint-by-number pictures do a good job of giving me that nice serotonin/dopamine boost of I Made A Thing without requiring me to, you know, actually design anything. (I have also had to mix and rejigger some of the paints due to either errors in packaging or just shades that were too close to each other, which is a small thing but does make me feel a bit more like I am supplying some creative input and not just a pair of hands. *wry*)
I got the bus version of my NFE fic posted, so that's good. I do want to tweak it some before the collection goes live, though.
I have a plan for my Remix Revival assignment, but it involves some canon review so I've been working on that rather than outlining or writing just yet.
A few of my peppers have started to ripen. \o/
This past Sunday, my congregation held our annual Sundae Sunday bash in Stewart Park, where we had enough space to be somewhat socially distanced (and were also outdoors). This was welcomed with great enthusiasm -- I think as much because people are hungry for in-person gatherings as because it was a way to meet our new interim minister and, you know, eat ice cream sundaes.
(I think I've mentioned before that Ithaca is the birthplace of the ice cream sundae, yes? Pay no mind to any other towns and cities that try to claim otherwise. Also, it was invented by a pair of UUs -- the minister of the time, and the church treasurer who owned a local soda fountain. So we celebrate that historic event every year. :D )
And I think that's about all I can be bothered to dredge up and write down.
Um, anyway, I am alive! I've been a bit swamped at work as we gear up for the 2022-23 rental season (Ithaca is a college town; our rental market is completely skewed by this) and try to finish up the dregs of move-in maintenance problems and virtual tour videos.
What else, what else...
I remembered I had a copy of A Desolation Called Peace checked out from the library when I got a very disappointed second overdue notice, so I dug it out of the stack it had gotten lost in and finished it. I enjoyed it! Not quite as much as the first book of the duology, but I think some of that is just that I am personally a little more into culture clashes among humans and human-like beings and less into "how do we communicate with a telepathic alien hive-mind" problems. But I continue to love Mahit and Three Seagrass a lot, and enjoyed getting to meet Nine Hibiscus and Twenty Cicada. Eight Antidote is also pretty cool for an eleven-year-old with almost no frame of reference for a normal childhood; he definitely has the "but the world should be FAIR, why is it not FAIR, we should FIX THAT" attitude I remember from my childhood and teens.
Two days ago my Kindle phone app broke. I asked it to open a particular book and it got hung up in an infinite loop I couldn't disrupt even by force-stopping the app, closing it, and restarting my phone. So I uninstalled and reinstalled the bloody thing, after which I had to manually go through and remove a whole mess of books from my home screen and re-download the thirty-odd books I am in the middle of reading or intend to read soon. (I nibble at books a lot.)
I have been working on a Paint-by-Number project for the past few weeks, which has been very psychologically helpful. See, I've been having trouble doing anything creative-creative, like writing, but I still want to Make Things, and paint-by-number pictures do a good job of giving me that nice serotonin/dopamine boost of I Made A Thing without requiring me to, you know, actually design anything. (I have also had to mix and rejigger some of the paints due to either errors in packaging or just shades that were too close to each other, which is a small thing but does make me feel a bit more like I am supplying some creative input and not just a pair of hands. *wry*)
I got the bus version of my NFE fic posted, so that's good. I do want to tweak it some before the collection goes live, though.
I have a plan for my Remix Revival assignment, but it involves some canon review so I've been working on that rather than outlining or writing just yet.
A few of my peppers have started to ripen. \o/
This past Sunday, my congregation held our annual Sundae Sunday bash in Stewart Park, where we had enough space to be somewhat socially distanced (and were also outdoors). This was welcomed with great enthusiasm -- I think as much because people are hungry for in-person gatherings as because it was a way to meet our new interim minister and, you know, eat ice cream sundaes.
(I think I've mentioned before that Ithaca is the birthplace of the ice cream sundae, yes? Pay no mind to any other towns and cities that try to claim otherwise. Also, it was invented by a pair of UUs -- the minister of the time, and the church treasurer who owned a local soda fountain. So we celebrate that historic event every year. :D )
And I think that's about all I can be bothered to dredge up and write down.
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There are hundreds of people still looking for places to move into NOW, and I am gearing up to rent apartments with lease start dates of, like, August 15, 2022. Some Collegetown properties/companies are already at 100% occupancy for the 2022-23 lease year. The rental market here is absurd.
This is at least 75% Cornell's fault, because they underestimated the number of students who took gap years or just did half-time semesters last year when everything was virtual but are now returning to Ithaca. On top of that, they admitted a larger new freshman class because of some new dorms they built... which would be inadequate to hold all those new people anyway.
(Cornell always over-admits after new construction. The university has not had enough on-campus housing, ever, in its entire history.)
A fair portion of Collegetown is also currently under construction as, among other things, a whole block of houses is demolished to make way for new apartment complexes, so Collegetown inventory is down exactly as demand has skyrocketed. That has shoved a lot of Cornell students further away from campus, which in turn has shoved a lot of locals out of the city boundaries altogether.
There are at least a dozen students who are living in the Statler hotel -- an on-campus fancy establishment run by Cornell's School of Hotel Management -- for the generous discount of getting to pay a flat rate even during times of high demand like Homecoming or Parents' Weekend when prices normally jump at least 100%. That is their only concession. (I know this because we were able to find one of those students a spring sublet, so at least they're only stuck for a single semester and not the whole freaking year.)
We just rented our last available unit (which we had kept back because we weren't sure the previous tenant would actually vacate, and it's a terrible idea to rent an apartment that the new tenant can't move into) to a student who's been living in a bed-and-breakfast for the past month, for crying out loud!
It's a mess and I'm not feeling very charitable toward Cornell at the moment.
(...Okay, they're doing all right on the Covid testing front. But they screwed up housing something fierce.)
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