the deep moans round with many voices

Things I have done today:

1. Got up early, drove to the Not the IRS valley office, and successfully renewed my NY State tax preparer registration. \o/

2. Answered so many emails at the rental company office, under both my Collegetown and my downtown hats. Which is understandable, after we were closed for four days, but still.

3. Fielded various people's various sublet woes. People are just not very good at setting up sublets, which is frustrating because we have a pretty simple process and there are clear step-by-step instructions on our website and in an email template we send out to any tenants who let us know they're working on a sublease. *sigh*

4. The FedEx driver figured out that we were open. The UPS driver figured out that we were open. And yet somehow BOTH mail carriers decided (despite the OPEN sign on the door, our lights being on, and our holiday hours posted clearly on the door!) that we were closed and just shoved letters in through the drop slot in the aforementioned front door. WHY.

Anyway, that's why I was stuck at work 15 minutes late processing rent payments, which I otherwise could have handled during actual business hours. Gnrgh.

5. Took some more pepper plants outside and disposed of them. (I harvested the peppers last night.) I am now down to one jalapeno plant and one bell pepper plant; in both cases, I'm waiting for some existing fruit to ripen, after which I will chuck those as well. It's the only way to finally murder the aphids.

Death to the aphids!

6. Roasted zucchini and cooked rice, because I am a productive human being and I can feed myself! ...Even though what I really wanted was a BLT and was tragically thwarted in that desire because the sandwich shop was closed. :( Ah well. It's not as if leftover turkey and roast zucchini is in any way a bad dinner.

(The turkey is from Christmas, since Mom gets a free turkey every year through some program whose name I forget, and obviously we did not eat it at Thanksgiving. So Mom, Dad, Nick and I did Thanksgiving for Christmas instead. *wry* Christmas Eve was salmon, and Boxing Day was takeout from Il Goccino, an excellent Italian restaurant in downtown Madison.)

And now I think I will have some buttered bread as a follow-up, because I do love me some bread and butter. :D

Things done today:

1. Got up ~10 minutes early in order to dump my experimental pork-greens-and-onions slow cooker dish (basically what I did with chicken, chard, and onions last week but on a larger scale and with collard greens because apparently my grocery store doesn't sell chard) into some tupperware and shove it in the fridge.

I had some for dinner tonight. In conclusion: not bad, but I did not increase the spices enough to compensate for the extra meat and veggies. Also I really should have chosen a leaner cut of pork. Ah well, I'll know better next time.

2. Work in the Collegetown office was slow (aside from a few interminable phone calls with parents of Cornell students who are trying to do their kids' apartment hunting for them), so I was able to answer all today's downtown inquiries instead of fobbing them off on Mr. Geniality. I also put in some good work getting a couple spreadsheets closer to up-to-date.

3. Agreed to reschedule tomorrow's dental checkup from 8am to 9am, since my dentist ran into some last-minute scheduling problems.

4. Picked up a couple things from a local store that I ordered online yesterday afternoon.

5. Baked banana bread.

6. Enrolled in health insurance for next year. I was going to give serious consideration to getting insurance through work this year (since I am eligible for the first time since the smoke shop closed in 2014), but the deadline for that was December 1 and it blew right past me. So tonight I pulled up my big girl pants and fought my way through a bunch of forms and a couple computer glitches on the NY State of Health website to pick an insurance plan.

See, the thing is, I NEED insurance, and I specifically need it to cover generic drugs, because how the hell else am I going to pay for my Celexa (which is technically a generic citalopram knockoff, and I know it's been at least two different formulations since the pharmacy has called and asked if it's okay to use an alternate formulation once or twice). So I picked the plan that covers three primary care visits before the deductible starts kicking in, and has zero pill deductible.

As for dental, I'll wing it. Aside from the Year Of All The Cavities (that was a bad year), it is actually cheaper for me personally to pay dental out of pocket than to pay for dental insurance, and I do not anticipate a second Year Of All The Cavities now that I have my handy-dandy prescription fluoride toothpaste and am flossing regularly.

Monday I was in Collegetown, and was surprisingly NOT overwhelmed by Tasks. So I got started on a downtown Task during my spare time: namely, creating a spreadsheet into which I can enter the key stamp numbers for all downtown apartment keys, so we have a clear record of which key belong to which lock.

This is not hugely important for finding keys since they're all pretty clearly labeled in the locked key cabinets, but it will be IMMENSELY useful once we start tracking key sign-outs and sign-ins in FileMaker, because we'll be able to stick a label on each key.

Electronic fob tracking is going to be a little more complicated, but we're working on that as well.

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Apparently my first attempt to upload my 2021 PTIN to the Not the IRS internal website didn't go through because you need one specific bit of corroborating documentary evidence (out of four potential options) and I provided all three EXCEPT the required document. *headdesk* So I redid that, and hopefully this time it worked.

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Yesterday I fried two strip steaks and had one for dinner. It was perfectly rare and absolutely delicious.

Tonight I ate the other. It was a bit less rare, on account of reheating in the microwave, but still delicious.

I have another pack of two steaks in the freezer. (They were on sale this weekend.) I think I'll cook them Thursday or Friday night.

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I got the church Board of Trustees agenda mailed out in good time, with all relevant supporting documents attached. Go me! \o/

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Sunday morning I had a Covid-19 test done out at the local mall. They said to allow 45 minutes, but the whole thing was over and done in under 10 minutes, from when I drove up to when I drove away. They said it might take 72 hours to get results, and they'll call me if I'm positive. I can also create an account with Caqyuga Medical to check results online and get details even if I test negative. I should probably get on that.

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I had no energy to deal with laundry on Sunday, but today I pulled up my big-girl pants and got everything washed and dried. I will leave the folding and putting away for another day.

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I have been so goddamn tired lately and I don't know why. It's extremely inconvenient.

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I need to send out holiday cards, blargh.

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I also need to coordinate with Nick and Dad about gifts for Mom, and poke Nick again about what he wants for Christmas. I should probably poke Cat and Susan too. I don't have the spoons for that, but transit time is a thing so I really do need to get started soon.

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Shit, what's the health insurance re-enrollment period this year???

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I've been falling into obsessive reading this past week, which actually, along with the inexplicable exhaustion, is a pretty good sign of a periodic depressive episode. (These are unrelated to my general low-level anhedonia and are basically my brain deciding to drop me down a well for 1-3 weeks at random intervals.) Hmm. Right. Okay, the treatment for that is mostly to maintain as close to a regimented sleep schedule as possible and make daily to-do lists, which I had stopped doing a couple months back.

Okay. Yes. And on that note, I think I should head off to bed.

The first year I grew jalapenos, they came out so mild they might as well have been bell peppers.

The second time I grew jalapenos, they were a little spicy, but still pretty mild.

This year, I think they are actually spicy.

How do I know this, you ask?

Not because I ate any. Not yet.

But tonight I chopped a bunch of them up for later use, without wearing gloves -- I'd never needed gloves with the previous rounds! -- and now I have a freaking capsaicin burn all over my left fingers and a smidge on my right thumb.

Bleep my life.

(Yes, I wiped my hand down with rubbing alcohol, and then doused it with olive oil and washed that off with dish detergent. That helped a little... but the burn is still throbbingly intense.)

Things I have done today:

1. Long phone chat with Susan from noon to not-quite-2pm. It was good to catch up!

2. Changed linens. Also rotated my mattress, which I think will help my sleep quality. I try to do that every time I swap my summer blankets for my comforter and vice versa, but I forgot to do that in October and the dents in the mattress were getting uncomfy.

3. Laundry. Ugh.

4. Swept leaves off my back porch/deck thingy and checked on my container garden.

5. Cooked salmon and broccoli for dinner. Yum. :D

6. Downloaded the free version of Lightworks and watched several tutorial videos. I still don't feel ready to mess around with anything complicated myself, but I think I can get to "make a basic video from three or four clips" by the end of the week.

7. Some church Board of Trustees stuff.

8. Kept compulsively checking news sites. I don't even know why! I think it's kind of a rebound from determinedly avoiding the news from Tuesday through Saturday morning, and being on a very news-light pattern since... hmm... April-ish? That is, I'd read local news in my local paper, but avoid national stuff as much as possible. And now I think I'm bingeing a little in reaction.

It's like the bends, but metaphorical, you know?

...

Anyway, I'm going to read fanfic for about twenty minutes and then go sleep on my newly rotated mattress. :)