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.

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.

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.

Bodies are so weird.

( hormones and other nonsense )

Dear endocrine system, what on earth was the plan here.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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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. :)

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.

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.)