Work was kind of blargh today, but Mr. Geniality and I did get video of another apartment, so that's good. I also finished editing the photos I took of said apartment on Saturday, but I was unable to get them onto our website because the uploader broke around 5pm. Ugh.

Then I had a Board of Trustees meeting immediately upon arriving home. This was the first of two meetings this month, and it wore two hats. The first part was to take care of the unfinished agenda from the March meeting (where we ran 15 minutes overtime before throwing in the towel and calling it a day), and the second was to appoint an interim minister search team. We were very successful at part 1. We were a little less successful at part 2, in that we decided A) we are appointing two Board members and three members of the congregation at large, B) we chose the two Board members in question, and C) we authorized EXCO to appoint the three other people... but we didn't actually choose the three other people yet. This was mostly because we have yet to hear back from all the people we sounded out, but still. I just want this to be DONE.

And then I was very good and efficient and wrote up my little draft "sense of the meeting" summary and sent it round for edits so we can get it into the newsletter and the midweek announce. I also have the minutes in pretty decent shape -- they will need one more pass to make sure I haven't mis-phrased anything or left anything out, but that shouldn't take more than five minutes. That's important, because I'd like to have the minutes ready to approve at next week's meeting!

Thank goodness we already have the agenda in place. EXCO set both agendas last week because otherwise this month would have been a screaming horror of disorganization and no time.

I unexpectedly had a new tax client this afternoon, whose return itself was pretty simple (once we sorted out the filing status) but getting one of their W2 forms took an incredible runaround due partly to their generally being a non-techy person but also partly to corporate WTFery.

In summary, one store they worked at had closed, and their W2 was not mailed. They were able to get the URL of the company's internal website, but logging in required their old employee ID number, which of course they didn't have because they hadn't worked there for like 9 months. So they called a local company rep, who gave them the number of the corporate IT department, who said they couldn't hand out anyone's employee ID number and asked why the client didn't just go talk to someone at the local store? Which, of course, is closed -- and they'd said up front that that was why they were calling in the first place! *headdesk*

Finally the client remembered they still had their old ID badge sitting in a drawer at home, called their kid, and got them to read off the ID number. And then we had to walk through the password reset process, but we triumphed in the end.

It really does go to show that moving everything online can be super helpful and efficient, but you NEED a meatspace backup of some sort for when glitches inevitably strike or people fall through highly individualized cracks.

...

Also if the latest Covid-19 stimulus bill does get through Congress, we are going to have to do such a lot of amended returns to account for the sections about the first $10,000 of unemployment not being taxable and the rejiggered child tax credit qualifications and amounts. Those are both excellent provisions, but I wish to all the gods that anyone ever held holy that Congress had been able to pull their act together before the 2021 tax season opened. *sigh*

(In less directly job-related news, I spent about 45 minutes after one of my coworkers had left and while another was between clients listening to Coworker #2 (...Sonny Boy? yeah, let's call him Sonny Boy; it's the actual nickname Office Grandma uses for him) and Office Grandma spiral off into horrible Trumpian right-wing garbage. If they address me directly, I do challenge their statements, but I don't think there's much I can do by spontaneously butting into their "private" (ie, VERY LOUD but not technically aimed at me, and also part of the volume is just that Office Grandma is hard of hearing) conversations. I think I do more good by being a nice white lady who they like and poking at the edges of their misinformation bubble when more people are present than I could by setting myself up as an opponent and thus automatically to be disregarded.

Still, it is very stressful to have to listen to that kind of bullshit at extended length, particularly when they started going on about Kamala Harris being a slut who slept her way to her current job and is probably involved in illegal foreign business deals to boot. Especially when they simultaneously excuse EVERY FUCKING CRIME Trump has ever done in his life! *noises of inarticulate rage*)

Me this morning: I have a 4-hour church leadership Zoom retreat today, which I will be attending from the rental company office because Reasons. My work computer does not have Zoom installed and also has weird sound input/output issues, so I will bring my laptop. My laptop doesn't have access to the company wifi, so I will use my phone as a mobile hotspot. Cool, I have worked out all the necessary pieces!

Me slightly later this morning: Oh fuck I forgot my phone's charge cord.

...

My poor phone was down to 11% battery by the time I got home. Mobile hotspot eats power like nobody's business.

Things done today:

1. Figured out how to access a virtual credit card and used that to renew my PTIN for 2021. Then I uploaded proof of the renewal to my account in the Not the IRS intranet, and filled out a couple other forms while I was logged in.

2. Deposited a check.

3. Purchased and mailed a birthday card for my aunt. Also bought some birthday cards to add to my stash for future use. I like to keep several around because I know I'm bad at judging when things need to be mailed and sometimes having something right at hand makes the difference between card-on-time and card-three-days-late, you know? Additionally, sometimes I find a card that's absolutely perfect for some specific person whose birthday won't be for like half a year so I need to buy it NOW to make sure I have it ready THEN.

4. Attempted to buy wine but the thing I wanted was out of stock, alas. I'll try again later in the week.

5. On my way home from the liquor store, I got an email saying my library books were ready. There was still half an hour before the library closed so I drove back into town and picked them up. My public library isn't open-open, but they're taking hold requests and are open for indoor pickup Tues-Thurs-Sat (10am-1pm and 3-6pm -- I think the break is partly for lunch, partly for sterilizing everything) and curbside pickup at scheduled 15-minute intervals Mon-Wed-Fri. They have been planning some tentative and limited browsing and computer use hours starting in December, but given the rising Covid-19 infection rates, who knows if that will actually happen.

6. Sprayed all my peppers (which are now firmly indoors due to weather -- did I mention we had snow flurries today? because we had snow flurries today) with a water-and-detergent solution, because the fucking aphids are back. I guess they were mostly under control when the plants were outdoors, due to wind and predators and whatnot, but indoors they are exploding all over my poor peppers. So it's back to spraying and squishing. *sigh* I think I will reduced the number of plants I'm overwintering once I get the peppers harvested, which should let me keep them far enough apart to prevent one plant from reinfecting any others.

...

In other news, I have an appointment Wednesday evening with Best Buy to figure out why my computer thinks it has a microphone, and thinks that said microphone is working (no diagnostics report any problems), but has no apparent way to access it and also can't get audio input from any other devices, such as a headphone set with a built-in microphone. Hopefully they'll be able to figure out what's gone wrong and then fix it.

I just need to make sure to back up all my files before I drop off my poor laptop and am computerless for however long it takes. *sighs disconsolately*

Random things done today at work:

1. Called a person to get them to submit the rest of their lease documents, since they kept not reading their email. Then I was on the phone with them for like half an hour while they had some DEEPLY WEIRD email problems -- like, they couldn't send an email to either of my company accounts at all, either by writing a new message OR by replying to a message I'd sent them just an hour earlier -- but finally we were able to get the documents to my company Gmail account (though even that was slow as molasses). And then they had to re-photograph two items because their initial photo had one on top of the other in such a way that neither was usable. *sigh*

But! We triumphed in the end, and that lease is now put to bed. :)

2. Ran around our downtown properties to take down a bunch of signs I should have taken down two weeks ago but I kept forgetting. *deeper sigh*

3. Un-staged an apartment whose new tenant should move in tomorrow.

4. Created a draft version of an employment verification form, since for unknown reasons (*cough* Ms. Busywork *cough*) we had never had an official form for that before. *headdesk* Also, fun fact! ( whoops ) so Mom Boss has been rewriting that for us.

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Random things done today outside of work:

1. Got the Board "sense of the meeting" writeup edited and sent to the congregation's office manager person to include in the monthly newsletter, which included turning a Google Drive spreadsheet into a PDF, among other things. Go me!

2. Edited the minutes from last night's meeting and sent them around to the Board for review, because I am trying to stay more on top of things instead of letting them slide for weeks.

3. While I was at it, I edited the minutes template to remove a whole bunch of inconsistent formatting, because inconsistent formatting drives me up the wall. Also, the tidier the template is, the less time I have to spend tweaking things during meetings when I should be paying attention to people talking.

4. Family Zoom call to discuss Thanksgiving. In summary, Chicago is now on Covid-19 lockdown so we are not doing Thanksgiving at Aunt Cara's. In theory, I could drive to NJ or Mom and Dad could drive to Ithaca and we could do a mini-Thanksgiving and call Nick via Zoom, but that would feel weird and unbalanced. So we're all going to stay home and do our own thing, but be in contact via Zoom -- probably also with Aunt Cara, and maybe even with Mom's friend Mary.

We still intend to do a nuclear family Christmas in NJ, though -- gods willing and the creek don't rise. *wry*

The Zoom meeting itself was frustrating because Mom's settings wouldn't allow me to call in via phone, and my computer still doesn't believe it has microphones even though the hardware exists. We tried having me call Nick and him putting me on speakerphone, but that A) was too quiet and laggy to be useful and B) produced hideous feedback. So I just typed in the chat. (I could hear everyone fine! I was just on permanent involuntary mute, alas. I really need to schedule a Geek Squad appointment to get the microphone situation fixed.)

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. :)

I should do church Board of Trustees EXCO stuff this evening but I did a bunch of that last night and I dunwanna. *flops*

Possibly I will write things instead?

Or maybe not. Writing takes effort to make the words go and I'm not sure I have that in me tonight.

I think instead I will just go to bed absurdly early, because general free-floating stress, and also because I have been reading some comparison articles about free video-editing software/online programs and my brain is full now.

...

I really need to print out Miss California's editing guide tomorrow since that will affect my software choice. I keep forgetting to do that.

...

She does her editing on her own laptop. I think she has a Mac. She probably uses iMovie.

That is not helpful for me. *sigh*

I have triumphed over the pinch hit! \o/

Also, wow, that ended up significantly longer (and darker) than I was expecting at the start. But there is a time and a place to fight a story and wrench it onto a different path, and a time and a place to follow it down the rabbit hole and see where it wants to go. This was the latter.

Now I am going to drink some alcohol and listen to an on-demand webinar about Covid-19 and taxes, because continuing education waits for no woman. *sigh*

...

...

In rental company news, today I spent a significant portion of my afternoon editing and uploading four floor plans, which sounds like I spent my afternoon doing nothing. What it actually means is I spent my afternoon clearing useless clutter out of architectural blueprints, and filling in all the walls to make solid black lines, and then adding some useful information and a compass and stuff, and moving it all around to look aesthetically pleasing, and adding a frame to focus visual attention, and then trimming and resizing the file until everything was nicely centered. IN MS PAINT. Because I still don't have a decent graphics program.

So yeah, I spent my afternoon editing and uploading four floor plans.

What did you do today?

Today I worked 10am-6pm at the Collegetown office, which was busy in a completely different way than I've been busy downtown -- specifically with tenants, packages, and phone calls. There was a weird bit around 11am where I drove downtown to tape laminated "if you're interested in renting apartments in this building please contact [Company]!" signs to all the Commons properties, but aside from that it was just one damn thing after another all day long.

We lost our internet access from about 11:15am to 12:30pm, which was frustrating but did finally give me a little window to apply pre-printed "how to ticket and tow any jerk who's parking in the space that you paid a lot of money to have exclusive access to" stickers to the backs of our parking permits, so I guess it worked out all right.

I took a bunch more NYSEG meter photos, and then I created a new folder in the Z-drive (our shared company server) where I copypasted all the NYSEG-related PDFs and pictures I will need to finish NYSEG account activation requests on Wednesday, including the ones I couldn't get to last week. This is because we store Collegetown NYSEG info on a separate server (the Y-drive) which is invisible to downtown. I figure I'll get everything done, send Miss California an email explaining what I've done plus updated version of the two relevant spreadsheets, and she can either relabel the relevant files (we append "DONE" to them after we send them in, to minimize confusion) or leave the email for me to use as reference next Monday.

We rented four parking spaces and transferred two other people to "upgraded" new spaces (aka, shifted them from one parking lot to another one that's a bit further east/uphill/closer to College Avenue and which therefore costs more), which is good. I will be very glad when we're done with parking leases for the year.

We're in the middle of switching back to receiving all tenant packages at the rental office, so I had a bunch of package scanning and emailing to deal with. I think we need to reprint and repost our "bring all packages for XXX Building to the Rental Office at YYY Address" signs in addition to trying to flag down delivery drivers.

I signed out a lot of keys (a process we have tweaked slightly to avoid tenants needing to touch our iPads), accepted a lot of completed move-in inspection forms, and signed out several packages (another process we have tweaked slightly to avoid tenants needing to touch our iPads). These tweaks do not save any time or labor, so I'm pretty sure we'll switch back once there's a reliable Covid-19 vaccine in widespread use.

I also explained our internet service to so many people. SO MANY. I don't think it's that hard to understand, and yet.

To summarize: we have a hardwired business-class ethernet network in all our buildings. There is an ethernet jack in every bedroom and every living room. We turn the service on to all apartments for a free trial period that runs through the start of classes; we will let you know when the free trial is coming to an end so you can decide whether to pay and continue or find a different internet provider. In order to connect to the service, you need to bring your own router OR borrow an ethernet cable from us. The router must be set to DCHP mode in order to correctly interface with our network, which uses a DHCP server to assign IP addresses. You can either buy a router that uses DHCP as its default mode, or change your router's mode if you bought one that uses bridge mode as its default. (Basically, if your router is trying to create/assign its own IP address, it will not play nice with our DHCP server and you will not have internet access.)

The bit about "other internet providers" is a half-truth, btw. Spectrum has a 99% monopoly on Ithaca's internet and cable market. Our ethernet is a Spectrum service. You can get internet directly from them, but it will cost you more per month than our service does and there isn't much real quality difference unless you, like, mine Bitcoin or something. (Don't mine Bitcoin.)

We use ethernet rather than building-wide wifi networks because they are A) more stable and B) more secure. Tenants still ask us what the building wifi password is. *headdesk*

...

Anyway, I left only about 10 minutes past 6pm, because I needed to grab dinner and get home in time for an emergency 7pm church Board of Trustees Zoom meeting. I will not discuss the topic/s because privacy is a thing and frankly, it's not terribly hard to work out what congregation I'm a part of. (...You can probably also work out my meatspace name if you follow that google trail, and while I don't care if you do, please do not use those names on this journal. (I say meatspace name rather than legal name because my legal name has four parts; I use the two inner parts as my fannish name, because reasons. This information will not help you crack any of my security question answers, btw.))

Now I am drinking a Black Russian and eating bread with butter and intend to fall into bed forthwith.

Things done today at work:

1. More apartment inspections. Some were fine, some had super-minor easy fixes, and some needed actual work. Also, one apartment was supposed to be done yesterday but was really, truly not ready when Maintenance Guy and I went to inspect it around noon, and then the tenant started moving in while some senior "management" figures were still clomping around going "ohhh. hmmm. huh." and otherwise being generally in the way and unhelpful. *headdesk* I had no time to stage anything, but I did get some un-staged pictures that I think are slightly better than the previous set of unfurnished pictures.

2. Staged, photographed, and un-staged two studios.

3. Continued uploading shiny new photos to our website.

4. Responded to inquiries and arranged one confirmed tour for tomorrow, plus one unconfirmed tour.

5. ( cut for internal company grumpiness )

I am also doing work on downtown's web presence in general, but I could do that anywhere; that's not tied to a specific office as tightly as the other three tasks.

6. Began planning a list of apartments to stage and video on Friday and Saturday when we'll have someone (presumably Ms. Rise-and-Shine's daughter in law?) in to help with that job. It will need revisions tomorrow as I get a better sense of which apartments will actually be turned over and ready (as well as vacant), but at least I have a solid starting point. My current plan is for them to do a couple-three South Hill apartments on Friday morning, then spend noon to 6pm doing Commons apartments. They can do the rest of the South Hill apartments on Saturday.

This works best with scheduled move-in dates, and also with my own weekend schedule since Saturday is going to be... kind of patchy, shall we say?

(To summarize: Saturday is my church Board of Trustees/staff joint annual retreat. This year we're doing everything virtually through Zoom, so my plan is to bring my laptop to work and just lock the office door during my meeting periods (one hour board-only in the morning, and three hours board/staff joint meeting in the afternoon), though I will be physically present to handle any key issues or emergency lock-outs all day.)

7. Adjusted my one-bin studio staging kit to incorporate some new materials Aunt Boss sent down from the Collegetown office. It's good to switch things up every few apartments so the photos don't get too samey, you know?

...

I need to go buy some cheap, flashy refrigerator magnets. I've been using a handful of my own that I brought in to the office temporarily, but they're small-ish and I do want several of them back.

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In non-work news:

1. I am now into season 4 of Rusty Quill Gaming. I continue to enjoy it a lot. :)

2. Several of my peppers are bearing fruit, which pleases me. Marauding wildlife ate all my early eggplants, but the plant is blooming once more so I have hope for a second round of fruit. This time I'm going to spray animal repellent around my back porch to hopefully protect my veggies.

3. I successfully repaired a couple items with superglue (or an equivalent thereof) and Lexel clear gel. I have plans to repair a few more items this week or weekend.

4. My new laptop weirdly doesn't seem to have any microphone input programs installed? I am pretty sure it HAS an inbuilt microphone -- it would be incredibly weird NOT to in the year 2020 -- but diagnostics do not detect any software for accessing or processing audio input. :(

On the bright side, the webcam definitely works! And I was able to join a Zoom call via my phone, so not having computer-based audio input is not the end of the world.

5. I sent Susan some birthday presents.

6. My parents have returned to NJ from Minnesota and they had BETTER be self-quarantining if they know what's good for them.

...

I should check on that, actually.

...

I think I will.