the deep moans round with many voices

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?

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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.

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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.

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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*

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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*

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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?

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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.

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I should check on that, actually.

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I think I will.