the deep moans round with many voices

1. I had a uterine fibroid embolization on June 4. This is a minor surgery that basically murders a fibroid by cutting off its blood supply. I had to stay in the hospital overnight for observation, since blood clots can be Bad News and this procedure essentially creates an artificial clot -- they needed to make sure it didn't hare off and cause problems.

My sleep was very disrupted for about a week thereafter, and I had some minor side effects as well as discomfort, but I am now pretty much back to normal. It will take a month or two to see if the slow withering of the fibroid fixes some problems I was having.

2. Friday the 20th will be my last day at the rental company. I am trying to get a certain set of tasks complete before I leave, but Lawyer Man keeps yanking me aside to work on stuff related to our imminent website revamp, which is frustrating. I am 90% sure I will not be able to finish everything I want to wrap up, but such is life.

3. I have two U-Haul U-Boxes set to be delivered to my driveway on Monday the 23rd. My parents will arrive later that day, and the goal is to have the boxes packed and collected by midday on the 26th, and for us to hit the road no later than mid-afternoon on the 27th.

Then I get to crash in their guest room and go AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaa for a bit.

4. In July Mom and I will return to Ithaca for my surgery follow-up appointment, and probably also to close my Ithaca bank accounts. Later in July I am road-tripping through western Canada en route to a fandom friends' gathering, and then road-tripping home by way of Washington and assorted bits of the northwestern US, because why not.

Then I will do a bit more AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, and in August I start looking seriously for a new job. New housing will follow, since it's easier to rent an apartment convenient to a job location than to find a job convenient to an apartment location.

5. I have been sorting through boxes and bins of stuff that I have not touched for literal decades, and holy shit I have been clogging my apartment and my life up with so much nonsense. It will be good to start over on a cleaner footing.

This evening I weeded through my winter closet (...for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, I have one closet for pants/skirts and winter shirts, and another closet for miscellaneous nonsense and summer shirts) and got rid of a bunch of long-sleeve shirts that no longer fit correctly or that I just don't really wear anymore. Then I finally got around to properly boxing up all the miscellaneous donations that have been piling up in my front room as I've slowly weeded various categories of Stuff, and put the boxes in my car so they're ready to drop off whenever I get a spare 20 minutes.

I also collected my trash and took the bag out to the trash bin.

Having those tasks off my list feels good!

I should probably weed my pants and skirts as well, but I think I have used up my quota of Useful Task Activity for the day and will use the next couple hours to catch up on some reading and then go to bed.

Things done recently:

1. Got my bivalent Covid booster shot AND my annual flu shot Monday after work. I am gonna be SO IMMUNIZED. \o/

2. I'm continuing to work through various tax training courses. At this point I am well over the minimum credit requirement, but learning is good. Also apparently the learn-up option for advancing to Level 3 within Not the IRS is less of a problem than I thought? Which is good, because scheduling the test-up option is always a freaking nightmare to coordinate around my main job, and I would like to get the Level 3 "commission" rates. (They're technically not commissions because of assorted complicated reasons, but effectively they're commissions.)

3. Removed my air conditioner from the window for the winter. I am pondering a rearrangement of various closet junk that might let me store it in my bedroom closet instead of having it just sit on the floor of my study. And I need to sort and rearrange my closet junk anyway, so.

4. Made roasted zucchini sticks.

5. Began looking through the Yuletide tagset to see if I want to request anything besides the three fandoms I nominated.

6. Signed up to do coffee hour cleanup this past Sunday and the next two Sundays, because it's good to get out of my house and interact with people, it's good to participate in social groups, and it's nice to have clear, defined tasks with clear, defined end-points. :) Also washing dishes is meditative for me, as I think I've said many times before.

7. Finally finished watching episode 5 of the Sandman on Netflix. I'd been putting that off because I knew it was going to be difficult, but today it occurred to me that I could use my cross-stitch project to sort of... blunt the edge, maybe? Eat just enough of my concentration that I wouldn't get too wound up with sympathetic dread and/or mortification. And that plan worked, which was very validating! I am now halfway through episode 6.

And that's enough for now. Good night!

Things done today:

1. Sorted another folder of childhood papers, this one from when I was five years old. I photographed some of the art that I wanted to document but didn't want to bother keeping in hard copy. (I will try to remember to post them online at some point, because they are intriguingly weird in the way small children's art so often is.)

2. Vacuumed my apartment. Ugh. I intensely dislike vacuuming.

3. Wrote four more fills for the Three Sentence Ficathon, only one of which is actually a 3-sentence ficlet. *sigh* Ah well, structural restrictions have never been my strongest suit.

I also wrote ~225 words of the still-untitled Narnia bridge fic, which is still refusing to get to the point about bridges. But I have successfully shoved both Protagonist and Naiad back toward Beaversdam to talk about a defunct sawmill with the tax auditor, so presumably we're at least going somewhere. *hands*

4. Not the IRS 4-8:15pm. As happened last night, we were getting ready to close at 8pm on account of having no scheduled appointments for the 8-9pm slot, when a client walked in just a couple minutes before we closed down the register program. Fortunately this one just needed a bit of advice about what tax info to include in a certain program application, so we were able to close only a bit later than planned. I had one client at 4pm and then spent the rest of the afternoon and evening reading, writing, and chatting with coworkers.

5. On that note, I started reading Crooked Kingdom, though I haven't gotten very far yet.

6. Bought groceries.

7. Looked over a draft document for next week's church Board of Trustees meeting.

And now I shall continue winding down for maybe half an hour before falling into bed. :)

Landlord Dude came over today to check out the oven, and we jointly fished out the following mess from underneath:





The tally includes

1. a second disposable lighter
2. a lipstick-sized bottle of Advil (pills still inside, ugh)
3. a mouse-shaped cat toy
4. pieces of dry pet food
5. two beer caps
6. a lump of silly putty
7. a pen cap
8. a list of things not to forget
9. a cigarette butt
10. cashew shells
11. the lid to a spice jar
12. a long piece of straw or wicker
13. various plastic pull-tab lids
14. a small bolt and washer
15. one penny
16. the metal top of a THIRD lighter
17. so much dust
18. ashes

It is pretty damn obvious that Landlord Dude and Former Landlady forgot to clean under the oven as part of the turnover before I moved in. He apologized for this, as well he should.

I have vacuumed under the oven and inside the broiler drawer as thoroughly as I could, and also vigorously scrubbed the whole area with Windex. There was so much grease and grit and gunk. SO MUCH.

I'm now letting the whole thing air out overnight, and I think I may not use it until Tuesday, since that's when I'll be able to turn the oven on for an hour or so early in the afternoon and hopefully work through any residual burned plastic smell before I cook dinner that evening.

We shall see how it goes. :)