edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-01-04 11:04 pm

what even are brains? we just don't know

I have a mental stumbling block that hits me a lot on weekends, which is that I sort of halfway get up for half an hour (to eat some crackers and take my meds) and then go back to bed, and by the time I get up "for real" it's nearly noon or perhaps already past noon. And then I kind of don't want to get dressed for just the afternoon, but my brain has Opinions about doing tasks or eating meals before I have dressed, and also about dressing without showering, and it just kind of spirals and I lose the day.

But! Today I gave myself permission to just not shower or get dressed and do stuff in my pajamas. Which meant I got some assorted chores done and by the time 3:30 rolled around I decided I might as well take a shower and at least change my underpants. And then I did more tasks.

All in all a surprisingly productive day, and I short-circuited the weird guilt spiral over sleeping in and being useless.

Brains, man. So annoying, yet occasionally so easy to do an end-run around.
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)
2024-12-05 09:20 pm

this bleepity bleeping cold (or flu! they hit me the same so who even knows)

I have basically spent Sunday through today sleeping with intervals of reading, and I am so tired of being ill. Since I stopped working retail, I get sick much less often, but upper respiratory ailments still tend to hit me like a tractor-trailer. I am distinctly unfond of the experience.

However today I am definitely on the mend -- I had significantly more physical energy and mental focus, to the point where I pulled myself together enough to order Chinese takeout and actually go pick it up -- so I think I will manage to get ONE day at the office tomorrow.

I might then do a make-up day on Saturday to catch up on photo and video editing (I think tomorrow will mostly be emails and advertising updates), but if not, oh well.

I am also considering signing up for Get Your Words Out in 2025. I think that I will go for a habit pledge rather than a wordcount pledge, because what I need to do is build writing into my daily routine. We shall see.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-12-02 03:41 pm

ah the joys of travel

Thanksgiving was lovely, but unfortunately I caught a nasty case of traveler's crud (not Covid!) and spent Sunday sleeping, drinking excessive amounts of tea-with-honey, and doing things that required no thought or energy (aside from driving to the grocery store to purchase more fruit juice, tissues, and NyQuill).

I also let Mom Boss and Aunt Boss know I would not be at work today, and have thus far spent Monday doing approximately the same as Sunday, though at least today I managed to dress in actual day clothes instead of just putting my pajamas back on.

I don't really feel up to a walk longer than about two blocks, but I may take a small drive shortly just to get out of the house.

I am currently undecided about whether to go to the office tomorrow. I think I will let Mr. Geniality know I may be out, and then decide in the morning based on how well I sleep tonight.

Bodies. Ugh.

...

Probably gonna take a nap soon. I am exhausted.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-11-25 10:30 pm
Entry tags:

Thanksgiving logistics

Tonight I have been prepping for my flying (...pun retroactively intended) Thanksgiving visit to Minnesota.

Context: we used to do Thanksgiving at my parents' house in New Jersey. This worked because A) tradition and B) it was halfway between Ithaca and DC. Then Vicky moved to Minnesota, but we still had east coast Thanksgiving because my parents still had the best house. (Also we randomly did Thanksgiving in my apartment twice over the past 15 years, but that was a logistical pain in the neck so it never caught on.) Then our parents finally retired back home to Minnesota, but! Instead of Minnesota Thanksgiving we did a few years of Chicago Thanksgiving because that's where my Aunt C lives and it's drivable from Ithaca in a pinch. (IIRC we had also done Chicago Thanksgiving once previously while Grandma D was still alive but was no longer able to fly -- Aunt C picked her up from Iowa and drove back to Chicago, while Mom and Dad picked me up from Ithaca and we drove west. I don't recall how Vicky got there.)

Anyway, this summer Aunt C retired back home to Minnesota, so now family holidays are in Minnesota and I am traveling by plane because I am not driving 20+ hours for a two-day visit.

The point of this story is that this afternoon it occurred to me that, given the short duration of the visit, I might not need to pack a suitcase -- instead, I could get by with a backpack and a tote bag. This would be preferable since then I would NOT need to planeside check any items and therefore wouldn't need to wait for any such items to be returned on the jet bridge after landing. That is important because I have a RIDICULOUSLY tight connection on my way west Wednesday afternoon/evening, and anything that saves time could be vital.

So far this plan seems to be working out in practice as well as in theory, but we'll see how the final few items fit.

Also the weather in Minnesota is proper wintry so I will be wearing my new winter coat to the airport and stuffing my all-purpose black hoodie into my backpack. Oh! Which reminds me that I must remember to bring my scarf and some gloves. Yes. I will go add them to my packing list.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-11-19 09:18 pm

TMI probably

Bodies are so weird.

hormones and other nonsense )

Dear endocrine system, what on earth was the plan here.
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)
2024-11-10 10:32 pm

a slow weekend

Yesterday morning I gave blood, after which I was so tired I decided not to go do any office work, let alone stage any apartments.

This, I think, is a side effect of getting older. It used to be that I could donate blood and then work a 9-hour retail shift the same day, but in the past couple years I have been noticeably draggy for a day or two after a donation.

I was still pretty tired today, but I hauled myself up to do coffee hour cleanup at FUSIT. It was more of a production than usual, since coffee hour was doubling as a presentation by the environmental committee and a representative from Cornell Cooperative Extension about energy efficient heating systems and was therefore held up in the annex instead of in the parlor. That meant the hospitality team had to use the annex sink and sterilizer, which are part of the youth group room and don't have much actual kitchen apparatus around to make things run smoothly.

It was starting to rain by the time we wrapped up at 1:15pm, which of course increased my desire to sleep. However, I had pre-purchased tickets to a 3pm chamber music concert by the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, so I ate lunch instead of napping. Today's concert featured a Brahms string sextet and a Schoenberg string sextet (from before he abandoned keys and jumped into tone rows). I made the mistake of sitting next to a radiator and almost fell asleep several times, but the music was very good and I am glad I went.

For obvious reasons, I took a 2-hour nap immediately upon returning home! I have since then been puttering around doing nothing in particular, but the afternoon/evening rain seems to have finally let up, so it's time to take the recycling out to the curb and go to bed.
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)
2024-11-04 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)
2024-11-02 11:53 pm

okay I now understand the French knot thing from personal experience

Today I learned how to make French knots.

I also learned that I do not particularly like French knots.

Also also, I think this particular cross-stitch pattern would have been fine with somewhat fewer French knots and somewhat more single Xs of the thread color in question. They are producing a basically similar effect, but one option is so much less work.

---------------

In completely unrelated news, today I renewed my PTIN for the 2025 tax season.
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)
2024-08-05 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)
2024-07-07 09:28 pm
Entry tags:

small joys

Today's highlight: found a silly Colin Firth joke on Tumblr, took a screenshot, sent it to my family. :)

(Context: Pride & Prejudice is my mom's favorite book. When the 1995 miniseries came out, she bought the deluxe VHS box set and watched it so frequently that I have multiple scenes engraved onto my brain and I think Nike might be able to quote the entire script line by line. She also began tracking down every single film Colin Firth had been in up to that point and watched any new ones in theaters. (I have seen some deeply weird arthouse films as a direct result of this.) I don't know if her celebrity crush is still burning very strongly these days, but it lasted a good 15 years and Nike and I will never stop lovingly teasing her about it.)
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)
2024-07-02 11:16 pm

what even are bodies

Random thing I dislike about summer: the soles of my feet peel. I think this might be partially related to wearing sandals, but I don't actually wear sandals that often so maybe it's a humidity thing instead.

Anyway, they peel in slow, ragged patches (because the soles of one's feet are generally callused and callus doesn't peel well), and they itch in the process. It's not a constant itch, but it's extremely distracting and I sometimes wake myself up in the middle of the night to discover I've dug bloody scrapes into my ankles and the more delicate tops of my feet by trying to dig out the itch with my toenails.

And anti-itch creams don't work super well, because they can't get through the callus. *sigh*

I think I need to buy a new pumice stone and spend half an hour just scraping my feet tomorrow.