the deep moans round with many voices

Three days weekends are a great gift, you know?

Mine is a little offset -- Sunday-Monday-Tuesday instead of Saturday-Sunday-Monday -- but the principle is the same. I wrote Sunday off as a sleep and do-nothing day (very important for physical and mental health!) and have been using today for assorted household chores. I haven't completely managed to clear off my tables and counters, but I made significant progress. I've also put away all my laundry, caught up on one of the podcasts I follow, caught up on Dracula Daily emails, and responded to some AO3 comments that have been sitting in my inbox for up to a year. \o/

Tomorrow morning I have an appointment to get a potentially faulty automatic braking system part replaced in my beloved car (Toyota issued a recall/replacement in June, but I only got around to scheduling the fix last week), after which I think I will continue with the household and internet tidying. I think the focal points will be assorted flower pots and then vacuuming the whole apartment (ugh).

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In unrelated news, I have started slowly working through the Netflix adaptation of The Sandman. Audiovisual media remains a challenge for me, so I'm only halfway through episode 3 despite starting four days ago, but I'm enjoying it a lot so far! :)

(I may also have reread Preludes & Nocturnes, The Doll's House, and Dream Country in one evening because of reasons, but that is neither here nor there, really. *wry*)

My current audiobook is an unabridged version Herodotus's Histories, as narrated by David Timson. The particular version I'm listening to is produced by Naxos Audiobooks, and I have no idea what translation they're using because the product data very carefully says nothing whatsoever about that fairly important issue.

I think it's an older translation, based on some of the word choices and the fact that Naxos Audiobooks claims the text is in the public domain. Older doesn't necessarily mean less accurate, but still, I'd like to be able to trace the provenance of the text!

That annoyance aside, Mr. Timson does the most "cheerfully garrulous British traveler eager to tell you about everything!" shtick I have ever heard, and it's frankly delightful. Very chatty, very plummy.

And the text works AMAZINGLY well in audio form. I think I would be driven up the wall by the non-chronological approach and the constant asides if I were reading this on paper, but when it's a cheerful old guy talking my ears off, the rhythm of the prose is deeply pleasing and makes nice shapes in my brain. :)

I also really appreciate Herodotus's habit of saying flat out that he's heard different versions of some stories and then repeating both along with their provenance -- it's a nice bit of humility and also reveals more about his world than just picking one and not mentioning the others would do. He's pretty careful about sources in general, for a guy who is inventing his genre out of whole cloth.

I am just about to the end of Book 1, which seems poised to end with the death of Cyrus. This is only 4 hours into a nearly 28-hour recording, so I have plenty more enjoyable digressions with my delightfully chatty guide ahead of me. :D

I let my daily to-do lists fall by the wayside a few weeks back -- writing them just became too overwhelming to deal with, even though that has led to a handful of things slipping through the cracks.

But today I made myself a to-do list, on the principle that this is a very good day on which to be Very Busy, for many and various reasons.

Thus far I have:

1. Changed my linens (which I should have done Sunday afternoon, but eh, life happens)

2. Taken kitchen compost to the communal back yard bin

3. Bagged all my trash and put the bag into my designated trash can at the side of the house

4. Washed the masks I've worn over the past week

5. Boiled some eggs

6. Put away my electric fans

7. Vacuumed my apartment

8. Bought groceries

9. Cooked the pre-seasoned salmon and broccoli I'd had sitting around for the past few days. I then ate them for dinner. They were delicious. I must do that again sometime. (For reference, my salmon-cooking method is the same as my minimal-effort cooking method for most meats: namely, chuck it into a covered Corningware dish with a bit of liquid to stop it from sticking/burning and cook it at ~350 Fahrenheit for 20-30 minutes. The tastiness of the results is based entirely on one's seasoning choices, and a bit on the size of the meat pieces.)

...

The remaining items on my list are:

1. Put away laundry (which I have started but not finished)

2. Repair pants (I have set out the necessary supplies)

3. IGNORE ELECTION!!! (which I feel I am managing tolerably well)

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I have also been listening to audiobooks. This morning I finished Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane, which was fine though I'm not wildly enamored of his writing style and I think the summary was a bit misleading in that it didn't mention that this is a very deliberately European-centric book rather than one with a global focus.

This afternoon I started Rome Enters the Greek East: From Anarchy to Hierarchy in the Hellenistic Mediterranean, 230-170 BC by Arthur M. Eckstein, which is a book I saw mentioned on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry and then discovered is part of Audible's new "included in Audible!" promotion thingy where certain audiobooks are available for merely the monthly price of membership rather than needing to be purchased separately. Which means they can also be taken away again at any moment, but hey, in the meantime at least I get to listen to some interesting books I might not otherwise have purchased.

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Apropos of some very particular things I shall not mention, I have had stress pain in my jaw all day long and it is unpleasantly distracting, no matter how much I try to release tension and not grind my teeth. *sigh*

Okay, now off to finish the laundry-folding.

Things done today:

1. The main downtown office was closed today for Labor Day weekend (...which I did not totally forget was a thing until halfway through yesterday, resulting in me trying to schedule a tour for Monday; that never happened, shut up) and I'm technically not supposed to be at that office on weekends, but I had two more South Hill units to stage, so I clocked in up there and did some quick un-staging, staging, and photographs. I am now entirely caught up until the next set of rooms are done with turnover -- and since at least two of them have some structural repairs going on, I don't expect that to be until Wednesday or Thursday.

2. Continued editing photos and floor plans. I didn't actually get many uploaded to our website, because the upload manager for the third-party software program we use to generate our website (among other things) was frozen all day except for one hour between 3pm and 4pm, during which it ran like it was shoving through a three-foot-deep trench of molasses. *headdesk*

3. Handed out keys to several incoming tenants.

4. Replied to an inquiry that led to a tour request, and I was good and said I could do a virtual Skype tour at 5:45pm even though that meant closing the satellite office early, walking back to my car, and driving back up to South Hill which was a pain in the neck. It is better to do things same-day if possible, you see, rather than putting someone off until Tuesday. Anyway, I think the tour went well. I suspect the prospects may actually rent units in a different building, but showing them the building they inquired about helped clarify what they want, so that's useful.

5. Wrote an email to the Right Relations committee of a UU congregation in NJ to ask if they have any advice on how to create a Right Relations covenant and form a Right Relations committee. We are trying to create a Right Relations team (nitpicky terminology difference because of governance structures, not important, ignore it) here in Ithaca, because reasons. Hopefully someone will respond before the Tuesday Board of Trustees meeting. (WHY did I get involved in church governance??? I mean, yeah, okay I was asked to stand for the Board and SOMEONE has to do it. And then nobody else was stepping forward to serve as clerk and, again, SOMEONE has to do it, but still!!!)

6. I haven't been posting my reading or audiobook listening lists lately, have I? In the case of reading, that's mostly because I have shifted my reading almost entirely to fanfic this summer. I am pretty sure that is a stress response. For audiobooks, I recently finished listening to The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, which I had been meaning to read for years (since 2012-ish, I think? definitely since 2014) and kept not quite getting around to. Today I finished listening to Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine by Thomas Hager, which I think I bought as an Audible Daily Deal selection... a year and a half ago? *checks* The text edition was published in March 2019, so yeah, that sounds about right. (I have a fair number of books in my Audible library waiting for me to download and listen.)

I have found that audiobooks are an excellent way to consume books that I've been meaning to read and not getting around to, because they are easy to work in and around my schedule in a way that printed text is not -- that is, I can listen to an audiobook while driving, while walking, while cooking, and while doing any number of chores. (Also while doing various tasks at work, such as NYSEG meter photos, apartment staging and photos, or just general walking around and checking on this or that.) The trick is that the narrator has to be someone I am willing to listen to, which is annoying because there are a LOT of audiobooks that are EXACTLY MY THING but I listen to a sample and the narrator's voice scrapes nails across the chalkboard of my soul. *shudder* So they go back onto the list of print books I vaguely intend to read at some unspecified point in the future. *sigh*

(Also they have to be nonfiction, but that's so fundamental I don't even bother opening fiction audiobooks to check on the narrator's voice. I cannot deal with audiobook fiction at all. I could barely even deal with my own dad reading aloud to me once I learned how to read on my own, and that was, you know, MY DAD sitting right next to me on our sofa or on my bed. I cannot be having with anyone less close to me than that trying to dictate my experience of a fictional narrative. (Also they always get the pacing and the emphasis wrong. ALWAYS.) Nonfiction is okay because it's like a university lecture or somebody explaining interesting facts to me, which is totally different. And radio plays/podcasts can sometimes sneak around that block by being specifically designed for an audio medium, so the performers' intonation choices and pacing and such are the POINT rather than an unwanted extra layer of interpretation between me and a source text.)

Anyway, my new audiobook is Supernavigators: Exploring the Wonders of How Animals Find Their Way by David Barrie. I will report back on it at some point, maybe.

8. Continued working on the rough draft of my NFE fic. What I'm going to post tonight will be a serviceable fic, but it is NOT the total of what I'm trying to write. It's more like part one of... three parts, I think? Structure is not my friend at the moment, by which I mean I have a plot but the formal division of scenes and themes is a bit fuzzy at the moment.

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Okay, back to writing.

Yeah, so I am not great at regular daily updates. Ah well. Anyway, since I last posted there have been things! And stuff! Most of which were fairly everyday and boring, but, y'know, I will mention them because this is my journal and I do what I want. *wry*

Monday: Rental company office 9am-5pm. Continued data entry for old tour information. Also distributed all the move-out packets into the mailboxes of one of our three big apartment buildings. This took MUCH LONGER than it should have, because I was removing all junk mail at the same time. I filled three large trash bags worth of paper, which I carted down the hall to the ground floor recycling bin. OUCH.

Tuesday: Moved my container garden outside for keeps! I also did my annual spring cleaning laundry, which involves stripping not just my sheets but also my comforter, my mattress pad, and my mattress protector and dumping them in front-loader washing machines -- and my winter coat, and my little fleece blanket for good measure. It runs about twenty dollars to tack those on to my normal three loads, but it needs doing and now I have a very clean, fresh bed. :)

Wednesday: Grocery day. I should perhaps mention here that I have been comfort-rereading the Books of the Raksura (or at least the ones my library has in ebook form (and has available; one has been checked out this whole week, argh)). I have also been reading some regency urban fantasy gay romance books (the A Charm of Magpies trilogy) by K. J. Charles, since the first book is currently free on Amazon and dammit, I needed to know what happened next. And I put away some laundry.

Thursday: Back at the rental company office. More data entry, more move-out packets. But the packets are finally all distributed! ...Which, of course, means that tomorrow we start sending out emails saying "Hey, your move-out packet is in your mailbox/in your apartment, please read it and follow the instructions" and also adding something about "if you're not in Ithaca right now, here is how to return your keys and here is what you need to do to make sure we send your damage deposit return check to where you will be at the end of your lease".

I also finished putting away laundry, and listened to episode 165 of the Magnus Archives ("Revolutions") which is mostly a very long poem. That was... well, it was odd. There is a strong pattern to these various "hellscape" statements, which is that because they are all one thing, and that thing turned up to eleven (or more), they don't have the same effect as the previous season statements. This is because there's no contrast left. I hope this turns out to have thematic significance as the season progresses, in the sense that a world that's entirely FEAR isn't actually that great for the Fears themselves -- sort of like an ocean of junk food instead of properly spaced out nutritionally balance meals. Or something like that, I dunno.

Anyway, ( spoilers )

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I am probably getting too meta.

Also, I am going to make dinner now. :)