the deep moans round with many voices

Things and stuff:

1. On Thursday, a potential tenant asked if we had a sample parking lease they could see. I said sure! And then panicked quietly for a minute because while the Collegetown office has a sample parking lease, the downtown office did not, because our parking lease was a terrible jerry-rigged mess that Lawyer Man "coded" in Rent Manager instead of a sensible fillable form Word document, and had to be separately generated for each new parking space.

So I generated a fake parking lease, edited it until it was generic, and emailed it to myself as a PDF (because trying to save documents from Rent Manager to our computers is an exercise in screaming frustration), after which I uploaded that horrible bodge to our website on the forms page and emailed a copy to the prospective tenant.

Then I set about making a proper fillable form Word document parking lease for downtown, based on the Collegetown parking lease but incorporating some aspects unique to downtown, such as the variant payment structures. I submitted it to Mom Boss for approval on Friday morning, made some edits as per her instructions, and now the downtown office has a functional parking lease instead of Lawyer Man's garbage. \o/

I am going to leave this office in SO MUCH BETTER SHAPE than I found it, seriously.

2. I have been subpoenaed to testify in an ongoing civil suit the rental company is involved in. I suspect most of my testimony will consist of a specifically phrased line Lawyer Man has provided (the contents of the statement are true; the exact phrasing is legally relevant), and explaining how none of our ads include any language related to the issue under dispute, because they don't and so far as I know never have. (They certainly haven't since I took over the ads in summer of 2020.) The court date is March 24, and I will have to drive all the way to goddamn Binghamton and back (plus wait for an indefinite period of time, because no court has ever run on schedule in the history of ever) to give my testimony. Ugh.

3. Cat, Susan, and I had a Zoom call Saturday night! It is always good to catch up as a group and not just one-on-one, and also good to be able to see each other. :)

4. I planted my bell pepper and jalapeno seeds today. I also did some prep work for zucchini seeds, but those sprout in about... 7-10 days? and need to be transferred outdoors within 2-3 days thereafter. Thus I won't plant those until early April. so as to reduce the risk of frost.

5. I had been vaguely meaning to read Tamora Pierce's Protector of the Small quartet for many years (having loved the Song of the Lioness quartet since I was... 10? 11? Look, I found a copy of The Woman Who Rides Like a Man in the library because it was next to Meredith Ann Pierce's books, managed to track down the first two books over the next couple years, and didn't find book 4 until I was in high school. My childhood library had no YA section so the kid's section was, shall we say, highly eclectic. (I also read the Immortals quartet sometime in high school, though I didn't imprint on that nearly so deeply)), and on Thursday it occurred to me that my current local library might have ebook versions of some of Tamora Pierce's work. In the event, they did! I read First Test and Page in rapid gulps, and am nearly finished with Squire tonight. It is interesting to see the books get longer and the narrative tone change as Keladry grows up. Also, I love Kel. She is the best! ♥

6. I am attempting to do some spring cleaning of my apartment, which is currently a horrendous mess and has begun to annoy me. I got some things tidied up this afternoon after a shift at Not the IRS, but I still have a long way to go. *sigh*

7. Speaking of Not the IRS, today I had a client who got screwed over by Cornell because while they tell graduate students on stipends that some of that money is taxable and none of it is withheld, they don't provide any active assistance with setting up estimated tax payments. So my client got whacked with a significant federal and state tax payment, plus a state underpayment penalty, and I could tell they were upset which made me upset. I tried to give some advice on how to make sure this didn't happen again next year, but it sucks to not be able to help in the moment, you know? :(

8. In brighter news, Friday was Nick's birthday! I called right as he and our parents were sitting down for him to open presents, so I got to be on speakerphone through all of that, which was nice. He continues to suffer from what we are now pretty sure are chronic migraines, but at least the symptoms are slightly less awful? That or he's learning to cope with/compensate for them.

Chronic illness is such bullshit. The human impulse is to make things better, but some things don't lend themselves to being "made better" -- our instincts are all set up for acute events, not chronic conditions. We want a narrative: problem, struggle, solution. And sometimes the narrative is just, "And then they kept on dealing with the same damn thing day after day for the rest of their life," which is not emotionally satisfying and I think a lot of people aren't sure how to deal with that.

...

It's especially annoying because I have a chronic condition of my own (depression) which I manage because there isn't really a "cure" and yet I still find myself struggling with how to talk to Nick about his health. Brains suck sometimes, you know?

...

I think I will now go attempt some more apartment tidying.

Things I have done this week:

1. The endless saga of photo editing continues. *flops disconsolately over desk* The problem with photo edits is that they are horribly, mind-numbingly tedious, and yet I can't just automate them by saying, "Kick up the light by 30, kick up the color by 50, increase clarity by 15" and so on, because every photo has a slightly (or strongly) different color balance and light-dark balance and so on. Also some of them are cockeyed. So I have to pay attention to every single one, but it's all fiddling with sliders and squinting doubtfully at my monitor in an attempt to determine whether changing the red-green balance or reducing highlights or whatever other alteration actually helps anything.

2. I continued prodding Mr. Geniality into recording voiceovers for the video tours we shot while his voice was gone. We have six left, plus one that I need to record myself because it was the second video I shot without him and the timing is deeply fucked up, so I figure that I will suffer through trying to narrate something useful. Also we recorded three more intro clips (one of us stands outside an apartment door and does a little "Welcome to such-and-such building, located [fill in place]. Brief description of building. Today we're going to see Apartment XXX, which is a [style of apartment] on the YYY floor. Let's head on in!") because while I kept a record of intro clips for apartments where Mr. Geniality did the tour, I neglected to keep track of apartments that needed intro clips where I narrated the tour. Whoops! But that is fixed now.

3. Last week I pinned a bunch of architectural blueprints to the wall in Mr. All Hat's unused apartment. (Insofar as I am aware, Mr. All Hat's company position is "brown-noser to Company Owner." As part of that, he gets a complimentary studio. We started using it for storage last year because fuck him, and after I cleaned up his mess (ewww) we also use it as a sample unit for tours.) I then took good digital photos of the blueprints -- both each floor as a whole, and every individual apartment -- and I have been using those to create nice clean floor plans for all the apartments that did not have extant floor plans, what the hell were they even DOING before I moved to the downtown office??? *headdesk* I can do about two a day, which I think is not bad considering my only graphics program is MS Paint. *double headdesk*

The thing is, I can't just clean up the blueprints, because they are not always up-to-date! So I need to check them against photos of the apartments to see what, if anything, has been changed, which direction doors actually open, and so on. If things have changed, I then have to draw new walls, move doors, delete closets, and otherwise rearrange things as needed, so there's a creative element as well as the general "turn a grainy, grayish drawing with occasional wobbly bits into a clean, readable, sharp-edged black and white diagram." It's more satisfying than photo edits, but equally tedious.

4. Prepping for a special board meeting on Wednesday, to discuss ministerial options and things we need to make sure get addressed in our meeting with a UUA representative next Saturday morning. The UUA rep was originally planning to come to Ithaca for the weekend and give our Sunday sermon, but given the Covid-19 situation, the UUA has imposed a travel ban on national staff. So our Saturday meeting will be on Zoom, and the sermon will be pre-recorded and inserted virtually into the service in whatever fashion makes most sense to the Celebrations committee.

5. Mom's birthday was Thursday! I sang her Happy Birthday over the phone. She has safely arrived in Minnesota and is staying with Nick. :)

6. Cat's birthday was Friday! I texted her Happy Birthday, and she said she had a great day. :) Hopefully the card I sent arrived today. (I should have mailed it at the same time I mailed Mom's card, but I was distracted and didn't remember until a few days later, oops.)

7. Mr. Geniality has decided to get back into a fitness routine as his New Year's resolution. I have never had a fitness routine, per se, and since I have had regular possession of a car, I don't walk nearly as much, which was previously my default exercise. Driving is really convenient so I don't think I'm magically going to start walking a lot again, but I do want to do some kind of activity.

What I really need is a gym buddy, but I have no idea where to find one. :/

And now I think I will go websurf a bit, because my brain is kind of fried from editing photos and floor plans all day. *wry*

Things done today:

1. More photo editing. I am very tired of photo editing. I have so many more photos to edit. *slumps wearily over desk*

2. Wrangled Mr. Geniality down to the Commons to shoot an intro clip for an apartment he videoed on his own (probably on a Tuesday, which is my day off) during the period his voice was lost. He didn't tell me he made that video, so it wasn't in my spreadsheet (even though I apparently downloaded it from the iPhone to our office drive???), so it wasn't on my list of apartments that needed intro clips, and so we didn't shoot an intro when we slammed through several dozen of them in a week. But that is now remedied.

3. Further wrangled Mr. Geniality into recording another set of voiceover clips. And THIS TIME, I wrote the apartment names on a post-it and told him to aim the iPhone camera at the note so I could tell which videos went with which units! \o/

4. Did my own voiceover clip for a different apartment, and then wrote up the absurdly complicated instructions for our social media guy so he can edit the video clips into something functional. The problem is that I shot the base video back when I was just starting to do videos without Mr. Geniality, and I hadn't figured out yet that apartment videography works better if I narrate the tour, even if I'm just mumbling to myself in the expectation of a later voiceover. So the timing was a godawful mess, and I did the whole thing as a single 5:11 take. *headdesk

Anyway, I did the voiceover as four separate clips and gave Social Media Guy the best time markers I could in the instructions. We shall see if he manages to Frankenstein anything useful out of that disaster.

5. Filled my gas tank in preparation for driving to NJ.

6. Made a charitable donation on Susan's behalf as her Christmas present. On that note, I wish more charities had an option in their online donation flow to note that a donation is on behalf of someone else and my name should not be added to their mailing list -- I will not become a recurring donor and pestering me is a waste of their time and money. For example, I STILL get "to our sister in Christ" junk mail from the United Methodist Committee on Relief because of a donation I made in someone else's name almost five years ago. I'm not Methodist! I'm not even Christian!! *headdesks forever*

And now I think I shall go to bed, because I have a bunch of tasks left for the morning and I would prefer to be awake for them and for my drive.

Things about today:

1. I worked 10am-6pm instead of 9am-5pm, because Mr. Geniality is out for the week (his friend got free tickets to Vegas and he needed to use up some vacation days) and I wanted to make sure someone was in the office in case a tenant came in between 5 and 6pm. In the event, one person did came in to pay some back rent, so yay for foresight. *wry*

2. I kind of want to brag about the building floorplans I've been working on, but I like to keep at least a gauzy veil over the details of my job, such as the rental company's name, and showing you the diagrams would break that illusion. But anyway, I finished the key plan for the second floor of [building name redacted], and am about... 2/3 done with the key plan for the third floor of that same building? (The third floor is smaller and also I have a better feel for how I'm solving certain visual clutter issues.)

We have three buildings that don't need a key plan because they only have one apartment per floor, and I basically did all this for another building last year as part of my project to generate individual apartment floor plans, so then it's... hmm... 1) the smallish building that I can probably reconstruct from mini-diagrams that exist elsewhere, 2) the building in which our office is located (frustrating because each of the four floors is unique), and then 3) the building for which I flat out don't have ANY floor plans for the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th floors, argh. Spelunking through our storage closet full of old architectural blueprints to find something I can use to construct floor plans and key plans for that building remains on my long-term project list. *sigh*

3. When I went out to grab lunch for myself and Ms. Random Numbers, I performed a wellness check on an elderly long-term tenant who has fallen behind on rent and stopped responding to our phone calls and emails. They were not in their apartment and I didn't see them in the common areas of the building, but their jacket/coat was in the apartment, so... a mystery. We are trying to track them down and see if they're okay, because they have health issues and this is worrying. :(

4. Cat, Susan, and I have scheduled a Zoom call for Sunday afternoon. \o/

5. Mom and I intend to simultaneously get new phones sometime between now and New Year. Details are still very much up in the air, but that's the plan. As with the last time we upgraded our phones, we'll probably get the same model. And as with the last time, I am going to buy the smallest phone that is still a smartphone, because I cannot be having with a phone that doesn't physically fit in one of my hands. (I do not have particularly large hands.)

6. I performed surgery on several pairs of earrings, which now have better hooks. I really need to buy a better set of pliers, since earring tweaks look set to become an ongoing part of my life.

I left later than I'd hoped, which is partially because I accidentally cursed myself to sleep poorly (I always sleep poorly the night before I travel somewhere), and partially because I wanted to get some stuff done in Ithaca before hitting the road.

But! I loaded Mom's two boxes of nice china dishes into my lovely car (along with a basket of laundry, some pjs and clothes for tomorrow, my laptop, my cosmetics/medications bag, and my little travel cooler) and drove southeast to NJ. The sky got VERY CLOUDY as I went, but I only encountered sporadic episodes of drizzle rather than proper rain, so that was okay.

As for my parents' house, things look basically okay! Their garage smelled musty-damp (and is on a low-lying part of the property), so I'm pretty sure there was some seepage, but it is dry now and nothing seems damaged. I don't think any water got into their basement at all, barring a possible damp splotch right at the base of the cellar door which has since dried. The power is fine, the pilot light in the water heater is fine, the dehumidifier is working, and really the only potential issue is that the spiders are getting adventurous with their web locations. *wry*

I attempted to recharge my phone from my car during the drive, but unfortunately that didn't work at all. I am unsure why. It's possible my spare charge cord is defective? Anyway, I am now trying to charge my phone from my laptop, since I left the converter at home along with my main charge cord.

The plan for tomorrow is to drive to Hillsborough to have breakfast with Susan and see her new house, after which I will return briefly to Madison to collect my laundry and a small table for church recycle sale purposes, then head back northwest to Ithaca.

And then Tuesday is for errands and chores. *sigh*

ETA: Okay, it's definitely a defective charge cord thing, since my phone has gone from 41% charge to 36% charge over the past ten minutes while I was writing this post, and that is fucked up.

Right. Where can I buy a functional charge cable for a Samsung Android phone around here on a Sunday night or a Federal holiday morning...?