the deep moans round with many voices

I wrote and sealed twelve thirteen Christmas cards today, and clipped them out for the mail carrier to pick up in the morning. Four Three others are waiting for people to get back to me with addresses, three more are for my neighbors and will be hand-delivered (possibly with brownies or cookies) in a week, and the last one will get slipped into the package of whatever gift I mail to Susan. Twenty cards! Each with a one-sentence handwritten addendum to the printed greeting, plus a little holiday-themed doodle. I have lost some relatives off my card list over time, but this year I've added four former coworkers from the smoke shop, since I won't be able to hand-deliver cookies to them anymore.

Now I just need to get on top of the actual gift part of Christmas. Blargh. I have wish lists from my parents and Vicky, but I need to call Susan and grill her for a bit. She has a knack for buying me awesome things I never realized I wanted but which fit seamlessly into my life -- like my favorite winter scarf, or adorable turtle-themed jewelry, or the woven basket I use to collect my bills until it's bill-paying day, or... well, you get the picture -- but I have no idea how to do anything similar, so it's wish lists or everyone gets random nonfiction books. I'd grill Cat too, but she kind of swore off the whole gift exchange thing a while back, so it's just a card for her. Well, maybe some kind of paper crafty thing as an insert, but that doesn't really count.

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Christmas is such a logistical tangle.

So today I filled fifteen of those big Lowes yard waste bags with dead leaves.

Usually Landlord Dude takes card of yardwork around the house, but this year (presumably because of his back and shoulder problems) he never came by to deal with all the fallen leaves. I finally got sick of them sitting in massive drifts all over the yard, so yesterday I went to Lowes and bought a rake and a five-pack of the paper yard waste bags. Today I filled the first five, looked at the giant piles of leaves still waiting for my attention, said "argh," went and bought two more five-packs, and filled those as well. And there are still leaves sitting around in piles!

Ithaca picks up yard waste on the weeks opposite recycling pickup, except in November when they pick up leaves every week. Unfortunately, I did not know the November exception, and since our last November trash pickup just happened at 4am this morning... oops. It is apparently possible to cart the waste down to the county's solid waste facility, but I am unclear on what, if anything, that might cost, not to mention I won't have a car after Thanksgiving.

Fortunately, Downstairs Neighbor S has a friend who lives out in the country and has a huge garden, for which she is always seeking leaves to use as overwinter mulch. So she's going to come by on Tuesday or Wednesday, load my fifteen bags of leaves into a borrowed truck, and make them disappear. Victory!

I think I will leave a note for Upstairs Neighbors T & E asking them to buy another set of waste bags and deal with the remaining leaf piles in the side yard. It's not absolutely necessary, but I hate leaving jobs unfinished. And the bags only cost about $2 for a five-pack.

(After that, I may ask Landlord Dude for a slight reduction on my next month's rent payment, because ouch, that was a lot of work, not to mention it was at my own expense...)

1. I was the only person in my house doing Halloween this year. Well, I should qualify that. Downstairs Neighbor S told me in advance that she wasn't going to decorate and wouldn't be home Friday night. I have no idea what Upstairs Neighbors E & T did. Perhaps they took their daughter -- Mini-Upstairs Neighbor C -- out to visit friends. But they weren't around. And Diagonal Neighbor P took her daughter and... whoever else she has either living with her or visiting for regular and/or extended periods, carved and lit ten jack-o-lanterns, and vanished until 9:30pm.

And none of them left me any candy! I had five bags, but kids started coming by at 4:45pm and I ran out at 6:30pm, less than two hours later. I then turned off the porch lights to discourage people from knocking on the door, but the lit jack-o-lanterns caused some confusion on that front. :-(

Next year I'm going to ask everyone to give me and/or Downstairs Neighbor S a couple bags of candy if they're not planning to be around, since our neighborhood is THE hot trick-or-treating spot in Ithaca, and I hate disappointing kids when they come around.

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2. A thing I did today: dumped ten jack-o-lanterns into the compost bin.

It's a joint bin for our house and the house next door, which is also owned by Landlady and Landlord Dude. There is some kind of local or regional program that rents or sells these bins, and then sends a truck around to all the known bin locations every Wednesday morning to empty them if they're out by the curb. Downstairs Neighbor S complained to me a while back that nobody was regularly wheeling the bin to the street, so I decided I'd deal with it every two or three weeks. She wants one of the resident men to claim the chore -- she gets a little weird about gender roles and physical work -- but I figure that there's no point in her trying to guilt people who obviously don't care when I can handle things instead.

(Incidentally, this is why I am also the one who takes out the communal recycling bins. Former Diagonal Neighbor K used to do that, before he and his family bought a proper house and moved out, but that was just because I worked closing shifts so he'd usually gotten to them before I returned home on Sunday nights. Downstairs Neighbor S thinks Upstairs Neighbor T or one of Diagonal Neighbor P's male houseguests should claim that chore too. I think she's being silly. I mean, does she want the chore to get done, or does she just want to lay pointless guilt trips on people who clearly have other priorities in their lives? I, for one, would rather make sure the bins get emptied on schedule. There is no need to wait for a man to do something I am perfectly capable of doing myself.)

Anyway, I hauled the bin out to the curb and then thought to myself, "The jack-o-lanterns are starting to sag and grow mold. They will probably look passable for another couple days, but the compost will get taken tonight, and we're past both All Saints' and All Souls' days, so there's no superstitious reason to keep them around..." and I carted all ten of them around the side of the house and chucked them into the bin, one or two at a go. It was rather therapeutic, watching them go smash. :-)

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3. I voted this afternoon. Yay democracy!

I also picked up a very tasty slice of zucchini bread from the accompanying bake sale -- my precinct is an elementary school, because Ithaca did not get weirdly paranoid about voters and schools the way various parts of America did over the past generation -- and left a donation in return.

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4. I picked up some supplies for a new batch of chicken soup this evening. I wanted to also get some broccoli, to steam as an accompaniment for the two chicken thighs I won't toss into the crock-pot -- they come in a six-pack and I only need four for soup -- but the grocery store was completely out of broccoli. Sadness. So I bought a yellow squash and a red bell pepper and I will make a batch of stir-fry instead. It's more work, but it stretches farther -- three or four meals instead of just two. One makes do. *wry*

1. Since the smoke shop closed, I have noticed that I feel very out of touch with what is going on in the world. Heck, I feel out of touch with what's going on in my town. This is because over the past eight-and-a-half years, I stopped checking the news online. There was no point. I could walk ten steps from the register and see shelves of newspapers five or six days a week, and I could look at the return shelves in the back room for any days I missed because I was off work. I didn't read all that many articles full length, but even a glance at the front page of two or three papers will give a general sense of what the major current issues are.

Now I have to remember to actively search for news, and I am completely out of the habit.

I do still have a subscription to the Economist, which is a very useful world overview, but that's a weekly and I don't usually get my copy until Monday or Tuesday (instead of Saturday), so it's not an adequate substitute for a daily newspaper smorgasbord.

I have such first world problems. *sigh*

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2. I have new neighbors! Upstairs Neighbor E and her partner/husband Upstairs Neighbor T (...well, I think his name starts with a T, but I'm bad with names so I could easily be misremembering) moved in last Friday and Saturday. They have a two-year-old daughter (Mini Upstairs Neighbor C) and thus far seem like friendly and sensible people. They specifically asked for permission to store their bikes on my half of the front porch, and to stash their canoe (they have a canoe, what even) under my back porch. Upstairs Neighbor E also mentioned that she likes gardening, so she may do something about our rather slapdash landscaping. (Landlord Dude only does the bare minimum of yardwork, since he has back and shoulder problems.)

There IS a little designated garden plot in our backyard, but the problem is that the soil in a lot of Fall Creek neighborhood is 19th century landfill. In other words, it's a bunch of coal dust and related gunk, with maybe a one-foot-deep veneer of topsoil. So the more you garden and the more you turn up the dirt, the more this grayish yuck gets mixed in. That is why my old neighbors gave up on gardening a couple years ago and the "garden" is now a nicely stone-lined weed patch.

Upstairs Neighbor E sounded like she thought that was an interesting challenge, however, so we shall see if anything changes. :-)

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3. I have an appointment with Tompkins Workforce New York on Tuesday, to review my resume and job search strategies. This is a required part of the unemployment benefits program -- they want both to help people find new jobs, and to make sure they aren't mooching around doing nothing instead of actively searching for employment. I will definitely wear my nice shoes instead of my sneakers, and maybe a necklace, but I don't think this is the kind of thing I need to dig out my old suit/blazer jackets for. (Although I should air those out anyway, in hopes of future interviews.)

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4. I still have not received the snail-mail letter I am supposed to get from ESC regarding my mentor and the academic advising program, but I emailed them yesterday and they put me in touch with him electronically. He has sent me some preliminary information, and I will email him back tomorrow once I've had a chance to look it over and formalize my plans.

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5. I don't recall if I mentioned this, but the tiny pepper sprout with oddly dark leaves that had been refusing to grow basically pulled up its roots, tipped over, and died maybe ten days ago. The other tiny pepper survived and I repotted it into its adult home today, but I'm not putting it outside just yet. It's too small to stake, you see, and I'm afraid that without a stake for a shield, animals will attack it. (It is a tiny pepper. Going by number and arrangement of leaves, it's only a week behind the others, but it's literally only a third of their size. It's like a bonsai pepper. Very cute! But also very strange.)

Tomorrow or Sunday I think I may repot the baby spider plants I cut loose and stuck in water two weeks ago. They have grown some rootlets by now, and I have set up the hanging pots into which I intend to plant them. I'm thinking two or three babies per pot, so they start out looking reasonably full but still have some room to grow.

I've been having issues with internet connectivity again, which are clearly and entirely the fault of my upstairs neighbors -- their router/modem/whatever apparently went kerflooey yesterday. I have a temporary connection via an unsecured network I've never seen before, which may or may not be theirs by a different name since it appears with the strongest signal as theirs used to. I think they are still in California on vacation and this may be the result of their dogs messing stuff up and their housesitters making fumbling attempts to repair the damage. I suppose I will find out for sure over the next few days.

I've been writing to fill some of the downtime, kind of poking at whatever catches my attention. This means the Jade/Dave/Terezi cross-dressing porn is now at 9,200 words -- we are moving through negotiation toward actual sex, yay? (...I should really think of a title for that fic one of these days. It cannot remain "untitled Jade/Dave/Terezi cross-dressing porn" forever. *headdesk*)

I also wrote several hundred new words of "Harvest" and properly integrated a 15-minute snippet (the one where Ekanu tells Laefa about Vinaeo) into the main body of the story. It feels a little weird to be working on original fiction after such a long time writing almost entirely fanfic, but it's a good weird. I have missed Ekanu and Denifar and the ability to set ALL the rules of whatever secondary world I am currently inhabiting. Anyway, "Harvest" is now at 14,100 words and is definitely in the final third of the plot and character arcs -- basically I need to write Ekanu and Denifar having a screaming argument on the vision islet, making up, agreeing they work better as friends, the return to the Ileara chapterhouse, and then the farewell dinner before Ekanu heads off to Vinaeo (taking one of her students with her).

"Harvest" is kind of an odd story for me, because it is explicitly built around a romance -- Ekanu's and Denifar's joint emotional arc is one of the three overarching story threads -- but it's not a successful romance. They fail hard and it nearly destroys their friendship at a couple points. They love each other, they may even be in love with each other, but the things they want out of a romantic/sexual relationship and out of their lives in general don't readily mesh and they don't manage to work out a compromise.

And yet, "Harvest" is not an unhappy story overall. Ekanu and Denifar do rescue their friendship, Ekanu successfully completes the job she was hired to do in Ileara, and she makes some important steps toward adulthood and finding a way to balance her birth culture against her chosen life path. Not every romance needs a happy ending, after all, and saving a friendship seems pretty damn important to me.

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In other news, summer is here with a vengeance -- I don't think we've quite hit 90F on the Commons yet, but the upper 80s are bad enough. I am so glad I bought an air conditioner last year. SO GLAD. And this afternoon we had a lovely storm sweep through around 5pm. The thunder and lightning skirted Ithaca to the north, but we got a thorough soaking of rain and lashing of wind, which is all to the good.

Also I saw the Cascadilla Creek ducks on my way into town -- a mama duck and three half-grown ducklings resting on the little foot of the concrete wall that channels the stream through the center of town. I am sad I didn't get to see this year's ducklings when they were still tiny balls of fluff, but it's good to know they are carrying on the tradition and growing well. :-)