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Tonight's forecast is for a hard freeze, down to about 25 Fahrenheit. So I brought in my banana pepper for the night, and my tiny potted fig probably for the season, figs not being especially cold-hardy trees.

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Last night I treated myself to dinner at a local restaurant, just because. I had the appetizer sized Caesar salad, the appetizer sized scallops in cream sauce, and a glass of white wine. It was very nice, and I also figured out a slightly less confusing route to reach the restaurant than the one Google maps wanted me to follow. :)

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At work, Ms. Random Numbers wants me to create a clear landing point for people who are searching for immediate availability and/or spring semester leases, since we have a lot of vacancies this year. The problem is that because of the way our website is structured (it is based on data pulled from our Rent Manager account), I cannot list an apartment as available for two separate time periods, and we are already a month and a half into renting for the 2025-26 lease year.

The website also has static pages that run through Wordpress. I already have a price chart up on the static prices page, but I don't think people use that much.

I can either create a new page or repurpose a non-used page to basically be a list of apartments with some prices, date, and links, but there's no way to make it easy to find. I guess at least it would be something I could point people at in response to email inquiries?

Anyway, the moral of this story is that you shouldn't build your website with Rent Manager.
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Today I repotted a bunch of plants. Tomorrow I need to buy some more potting soil because I still have four to go.

I also need to buy a bit of chain for hanging one of my newly potted plants from the ceiling, but that's a less immediately pressing concern.

Some of the plants in question are houseplants, but others are from the Wine & Herb fest and need to go outside once potted.

I actually was going to take one out this afternoon, but when I did I discovered that I REALLY do not trust the structural integrity of my back porch/deck thingy. I must text Landlord Dude and let him know he needs to replace that this summer.

(For context, the deck is untreated wood and I have lived in this apartment since June of 2009. I do my best to keep the deck clean and clear, but there comes a time when decay cannot be staved off any further.)
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I keep forgetting to post here, which annoys me. Um. Anyway, I went to Minnesota over the New Year's weekend, which was nice -- it is always lovely to see my parents and brother in person!

I wrote a Yuletide story and ought to make a proper separate post about that soon.

I got into cross-stitch a few months back, and started with some pre-made kits (purchased via Etsy) that I immediately began modifying both for genuine artistic reasons and also a couple times because I goofed my stitch count. The first two I only modified in very small ways, but I am currently working on one where I changed some color choices, reworked parts of the backstitch writing for the central motto, and drew some entirely new additional flowers on my pattern guide in colored pencil because a couple parts of the field looked weirdly blank.

I am also working up a pattern of my own devising as a gift for my friend Cat, because reasons, so. Begin as you mean to go on, I guess?

Tax season has begun, which so far has meant that I have spent ~9 hours over two days sitting in a Not The IRS office doing basically nothing. (I mean, what I actually did was cross-stitch, but you know what I mean.) I answered the phone a couple times and made three calls reminding past clients it's time to schedule their tax appointments, but if corporate wants to pay me to do nothing, I'm not going to stop them.

And in non-work news, I potted some plant cuttings that had grown roots over a few weeks in water, weeded some old shirts out of my closet, and vacuumed my apartment for the first time in... uh... you don't really need to know how long it's been, okay, let's just move on. I also cleared some papers and whatnot that have been collecting on various flat surfaces.

I think my task for the back half of this week is to continue weeding my clothes so I know if I need to buy any new items, and then sort, package, and actually donate all my collected no-longer-needed/wanted items to charity.

This includes the small filing cabinet I really should have gotten rid of over the summer, but eh. Better late than never, right?

And now to bed. :)
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Today was a good day with abundant spoons! (...I should go to bed early more often, huh.)

I managed to:

1. Attend a virtual tax prep CE class from 10am to 12pm, during which I learned stuff, participated in class discussion, and also cooked scrambled eggs and a toasted English muffin for breakfast, made tea in my new teapot, washed all my dishes, changed my sheets and towels, and made decent progress on a cross stitch project.

2. Wash laundry, dry laundry and/or hang items to air dry, and put away my linens. (Clothing can wait for tomorrow.)

3. Have a productive conversation with Downstairs Neighbor S, during which I returned a mason jar (she used it to give me a sunflower bouquet a while back in thanks for bringing in her mail); gave her an empty canning jar (I have no use for it and I know she cans fruits/veggies/etc.); and gave her $25 for candy purchases, a wicker basket, and my laminated "Take 2 Items" sign in preparation for Halloween. I also managed to end the conversation within 15 minutes without being rude! \o/

4. Attend a different virtual tax prep CE class from 3pm to 5pm, during which I learned stuff, participated in class discussions, and made more progress on my cross stitch project.

5. Buy groceries, and return a bunch of Coke cans for bottle refund credit now that I have figured out where the store moved their can/bottle return machines after their newest remodel. (They have added a tiny bank branch beside the customer service counter.)

6. Rearrange my dresser drawers to remove some items I don't use anymore and to create space for some new items I have recently purchased. This involved using some shoeboxes and USPS flat rate mailing boxes to make little designated sections, and I was therefore able to partially consolidate my collection of empty boxes.

7. Whack off the top of my schefflera, because it had gotten ridiculously leggy. I stuck the cutting in a vase to root, and might whack off another portion of the parent plant to see if I can encourage it to bush out a bit more.

8. Write and post my November rent check super early, and also pay off the rest of my October Visa bill. (I'd made a partial payment last week because I didn't have cash on hand to cover the entirety of my December airplane tickets. But! Last Friday was payday, so I can now cover the balance and not owe any interest.)

And now I think I shall mosey along in the general direction of my bed, because the older I get, the more I realize that sufficient sleep is a necessity rather than an optional bonus. *wry*
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I spent far too much time this afternoon sorting through the extremely mismatched collection of flower pots I've acquired over the decades. This was prompted chiefly by the disease that struck my spider plants a while back -- little oozing scaly things that attach to the stems and leaves -- and by the way that the spider plants reacted VERY BADLY to the three-in-one insecticide/miticide/fungicide spray I used to lightly spritz them in my attempt to kill the parasite.

In other words, a lot of my plants died.

(Swear to god, I was not expecting them to bite it. Spider plants are normally the next best thing to unkillable, but here we are.)

I am, of course, sad about my dead plants! But I am trying to look at this as a useful opportunity to downsize and reassess. It's sort of working?

Anyway, I dumped out a lot of dirt, washed a lot of pots, reorganized my gardening cupboard, and set aside a whole bunch of pots that I need to cart to... I guess the Salvation Army store (ugh) for lack of any other goodwill/consignment shop in town. I actually have quite a lot of nonsense saved up that I need to donate at some point. I should probably sort and repack those boxes next weekend, and then actually get them out of my apartment.

Hmm. And I should take my old tiny filing cabinet to the re-use center while I'm at it. I am about 95% sure it fits within the categories of household furniture they accept, even if they don't directly mention filing cabinets anywhere on their website.

Oh, and I also repotted a pothos cutting I stole from my work.

Long story short, Miss Cactus had been training a golden pothos vine up the office wall. I don't like pothos when it gets really long and stringy, and also I wanted to be able to move the big terracotta pot in order to rearrange items on the shelving unit where she'd placed it, so over the past several months I have been snipping off 4-leaf or 5-leaf lengths from the vine and rooting them in water. I planted the first two cuttings back into their parent pot to make the growth less one-sided, but I brought the next two home and have planted them in small-to-medium hanging pots since my windows were looking barren without their normal overgrowth of spider plants.

I intend to keep them fairly close-trimmed, though I may take the next (final) batch of cuttings and plant them all in a group in a single larger pot. We shall see how I feel in a couple weeks when they have begun to root.
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Things done recently:

1) Yesterday I realized I'd gotten so caught up in my job at the rental company that I'd forgotten to reapply for my seasonal job as a tax preparer at Not the IRS. I couldn't find the reapplication link on the relevant site, so I emailed the guy who coordinates that stuff and he told me the (completely non-intuitive) way to search for it. So this evening I updated my "resume" on file (basically tweaking the years at various jobs and adding my brand new experience creating video tours, so help me) and submitted my application.

2) I staged three apartments yesterday and three more today. One of today's apartments was very nearly a complete disaster, due to a glitch in how our computer system creates work orders. Basically, we needed to move furniture into a mostly unfurnished apartment, but the listing of the items already present created a phantom work order. When we deleted that, nobody (in either the rental office OR the maintenance office) realized we'd need to create a new work order for bringing in all the other furniture. So I went to stage the apartment and found it empty except for a bed and dresser. And the tenant was scheduled to arrive at 4:30pm.

This was, shall we say, less than ideal. Anyway, we were able to get in touch with Maintenance Dude directly, who corralled some Maintenance staff into fixing the problem -- and actually, I was able to streamline the issue slightly because I knew that, coincidentally, the tenant in the apartment literally next door wanted some furniture removed, and that included two pieces we needed to furnished the empty apartment. So that was helpful.

In the event, I got the photos and videos, and the tenant hadn't turned up to get their keys by the time I left at ~5:15pm, so who even knows what was going on there. *hands*

3) Tomorrow I have three more apartments to stage, one of which is a 3-bed 3-bath unit which is going to be a pain in my ass. The really annoying part, though, is that I couldn't have knocked off one of the other apartments back in July -- I just overlooked the fact that the previous tenant vacated early, so I exacerbated this time crunch myself in a way that could easily have been avoided. Gnrgh. Ah well. After tomorrow, I have only two more units to handle, and one may turn out to be unnecessary -- it only needs staging if the furniture has changed from last year.

4) I've been working on this whole "going to bed at a reasonable hour" thing, and I have to say, it produces really nice results! Yes, even after days when I have run myself into the ground. *wry* I will be continuing that streak tonight, because I need to get to work early tomorrow in order to have any hope of knocking off all three apartments.

5) My parents have 90% completed their move to Minnesota as of this past weekend. They still have some stuff in their NJ shed which they will collect in September (when they will be back on the east coast for some doctor/dentist appointments, and I think also for Nick to see a specialist at Johns Hopkins), but the real estate agent has taken pictures of the house and I think they will open for showings and offers next week. Everything is moving so fast...

6) My peppers and zucchini are doing well on the back porch. :)

And now I will go eat a light dinner and websurf a bit before I fall into bed in a timely fashion. *wry*
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
I think all my artistic/creative impulses are currently getting yoinked sideways into staging apartments (it takes skill to make them look good, okay? I have gotten so much better at it over the past two and a half years!) and then taking photos and shooting video tours, to say nothing of the subsequent photo editing process.

On the one hand, hey, at least I am being creative at something? But on the other, I'd really like to get a solid day or two of writing, or even just make some more progress on my paint-by-numbers kit or a cross-stitch kit. *sigh*

Hmm, what else...

Tompkins County has been in a mild state of drought for a couple weeks, but we had rain yesterday and today, so that should help a little. Unfortunately it was torrential thunderstorms both times, rather than a gentle day-long fall, so a lot of the water will just run off rather than soak in to replenish our groundwater levels.

I have tied up my peppers to prevent them from getting knocked over by storms. They are doing well, and a couple have set buds. My two surviving zucchini are also growing exuberantly, though as yet I have no fruit to harvest.

And honestly, I think I will go fall into bed soon, because I have been wiped out this whole week from hauling staging materials around in godawful heat and humidity. My feet in particular are very near to staging a mutiny, and I would like to head that off. *wry*
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So today I spent 11am to 3pm staging apartments, taking photos and videos, and unstaging apartments. I also reviewed a bunch of packages lying around the mail room of one building in order to weed out items sent to tenants who have already moved out.

The heat was not quite as horrendous as yesterday, but very draining nonetheless, and my feet are still screaming bloody murder at me nearly five hours later. :(

Still, victory is sweet!

Tonight I have unboxed my newest tiny citrus tree, which will get a couple weeks to recover from shipment before I move it into a more permanent pot.

I have also received my NFE assignment, which is delicious and full of fascinating possibilities! >:D

...And I am still drained as hell, and will probably collapse into bed around 9pm, because holy FUCK I am tired and out of spoons.

(My peppers and zucchini, incidentally, should no longer be wilting because I watered the hell out of them when I got home from work. In theory Ithaca will get rain Sunday night, but it's been weirdly dry for the past few weeks, and I am not holding my breath.)
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Things I apparently do while depressed and consequently low on impulse control:

1. Buy cross-stitch kits from Etsy

2. Buy baby clothes for my friend's kid

3. Buy tiny citrus trees

...

I mean, the last item isn't a surprise. My houseplant collection would not be nearly as large as it is if I didn't have a habit of buying greenery when I'm feeling hopeless, and I am determined to get fruit out of a tiny citrus tree eventually. (I have killed... uh... several. However, my second-to-last tree -- a clementine -- is still going strong after two years, and produced one whole flower last summer! Still no fruit, though, alas.)

The baby clothes make sense in context. (Did I mention that I visited Susan over the 4th of July long weekend while I was down in NJ helping my parents pack up their house? Probably not, given that I haven't been posting. Anyway, I visited Susan and her baby is the cutest baby in the world. He also looks a bit like a squashed frog, but you know, all babies look kind of like squashed frogs, so I don't think that can be held against him. *wry*)

And cross-stitch kits are the same kind of low-mental-effort creative projects as paint-by-number kits.

But still.

I would like some spoons back so I can funnel a few into renewing my self-control. *sigh*
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
Things done today:

1. More inquiries.

2. More spreadsheets.

3. Our office phone system went down for a few hours in the middle of the day. That was fun, especially when Lawyer Man received a copy of an email that said, essentially, "I tried to call but your phones are down so I am emailing my question instead" and panicked a bit at me like three hours after I'd already answered the email and also the phones had been fixed. *headdesk*

4. Rented two apartments.

5. Scheduled a tour and an apartment inspection.

6. And in non-work news, I trimmed the interior of the lilac bush and installed my air conditioner! \o/ (These tasks are related because the lilac bush grows directly outside the window where I place my AC, so every year I have to hack away the new growth to create vacant space for the machine. I will do the main pruning job in a couple weeks, once the lilac has finished flowering for the year.)

Now I am going to nurse my new collection of mosquito bites in my slowly cooling apartment. *wry*

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Elizabeth Culmer

July 2025

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