I worked 9am-5pm at the rental office today instead of my usual 10am-6pm, so that I could then go work 5:30-8pm at Not the IRS where I had two tax prep clients.

The main thing I did at the rental company today was take a whole bunch of photographs of the stairwells, hallways, trash/recycling areas, and assorted utility rooms in one building, which I will use as references for my floor plans. I am not going to create total accuracy, but I do like to ensure I have doors in the right places and to reflect the places where there are random angled wall sections versus 90 degree corners.

When I got home, I spent a while putting away the remnants of my air-drying laundry, and then doing a quick tidy-up in preparation for my parents' arrival tomorrow evening. To be perfectly honest, a lot of this consisted of just straight-up chucking several containers of leftovers into the kitchen trash bin, along with a grotty old car cushion wedge that I had failed to throw out for... uh... several years now, and then chucking the trash bag outside into my trashcan. But I have produced a cleared off table we can eat at, as well as a cleared off armchair my dad can lounge in, so I will count that as a victory.

Last night I weeded out a bunch of clothes I no longer wear from my closets -- I think that was part of the same general tidy-before-company-comes impulse, though directed slightly diagonal to my usual efforts. Anyway, I now have a whole stack of neatly packed boxes in my front room, ready to be donated to one of the various re-use and goodwill operations in town. I must remember to load those into my car.

And now I think I will read fic for half an hour before falling into bed. :)

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. :)

1. Changed linens.

2. Added nose-piece to the last facemask.

3. Reorganized some stuff in my sewing basket to be more readily available and also let me get rid of a far too large pincushion my great-grandmother made. (I should probably acquire a more reasonably sized pincushion at some point. At the moment I have some pins in a little cloth circle that's built in to the basket lid, and a bunch of others stuck into an old index card, but that's not ideal. I also have a bunch of needles stuck through an index card or a scrap of really thick and awful fabric that serves a similar purpose.)

4. It rained steadily all day, ranging from medium-light to medium-heavy, so I only went for a quasi-walk. By which I mean I drove to Cascadilla Creek to take my daily photograph, and then walked the rest of the way into town to buy a BLT for lunch, walked back to my car, and drove home. So it was maybe... half a mile? Two thirds of a mile if I'm being generous. Still, it was better than nothing, and I didn't get completely soaked like I would have if I'd walked the whole distance to the Commons and back.

5. My period started, blargh. I'd predicted Monday, so this is well within my one-day margin of error. (I don't have the world's most regular schedule, but my body sends very clear "hey, we could make a baby now! have I mentioned that we're currently super fertile? because we are!" signals. *sigh*)

6. Wrote a tiny Iron Fist ficlet, and did some more editing on the Narnia/Naruto crossover. I am through the violent part of the fight/confrontation scene, and the next bits are more tense negotiation than action, so hopefully they'll go faster. (The main problem with this whole scene has been that my POV character is not doing a lot of the fighting and couldn't see what anyone else was doing. Now she's going spend the rest of the scene getting progressively woozier from blood loss until she passes out, but at least she can see the other characters again.)

And now to bed. :)

Stuff done so far today:

-bought groceries.
-changed linens
-prepped for laundry
-potted onion
-enlarged drainage holes in carrot planters
-preliminary tidying of cluttered flat surfaces
-moved overwintered peppers and onion out to back porch for the afternoon

Stuff that still needs to be done:

-laundry
-transplant carrots
-finish tidying cluttered flat surfaces
-dust ceiling corners
-dust bookshelves and flat surfaces?
-vacuum apartment
-scrub toilet

...

I should go get started on the laundry. *sigh*

---------------

ETA, 6:00pm

Stuff done:

-laundry has been washed and dried and partially put away
-dusted ceiling corners (and the weird fiddly bits under my two tables while I was at it)
-dusted bookshelves and some flat surfaces
-scrubbed toilet
-took daily walk and snapped daily photo of Cascadilla Creek
-listened to four chapters of my latest Great Courses installment via Audible

Still needs doing:

-fold and put away remaining laundry
-transplant carrots
-plant the chard while I'm at it, since it will be sharing space with the carrots
-vacuum? (maybe put this off for tomorrow; I am tired and sore)
-oh right, dinner needs to happen at some point...

I think I'm going to turn on the oven and then go deal with the remaining laundry while it heats up to ~425F. :)

---------------

ETA, 9:30pm

Stuff done:

-cooked and ate dinner (and washed dishes afterwards)
-folded and put away laundry
-moved peppers, onion, and tiny fruit trees back inside for the night
-transplanted carrots
-planted chard
-reconciled credit card statements
-weeded some junk out of my filing cabinet
-backed up my laptop

Stuff to do tomorrow:

-VACUUM!
-move carrots and onion outdoors?
-finish tidying clutter off flat surfaces
-put away laundry that's air-drying overnight
-call Mrs. M about the lemon tree
-text/call Susan to work out Friday evening details

So apparently in the almost TEN YEARS I have lived in my apartment, I have been courting disaster every time I turned on my oven.

How do I know this, you ask?

Because tonight something underneath the oven exploded in a small FIREBALL that sent a shockwave of accumulated dust, insect wings, and various other bits of dirt around my kitchen.

What caused this, you ask?





A cheap red plastic Bic lighter, which is now shattered into at least three pieces.

No, I have no idea how that got under my oven.

No, I have no idea why it didn't blow up sooner.

Yes, my kitchen smells of gross burning dust and plastic, but the fire didn't catch or spread and the plastic shrapnel missed me so I'm unharmed. (Also my dinner was thirty seconds away from being done, so I still have edible food.)

...

I am going to yank out the bottom drawer and do the MOST THOROUGH CLEANING OF MY LIFE before I use my oven again.

Because fucking YIKES.

Things I have done today:

1. Got through some general apartment-tidying, though much still remains
2. Put away laundry
3. Potted a spider-plant baby and put a few others in water to root
4. "Worked" 2-7pm at Not the IRS, where I did three case studies
5. Started reading The Harbors of the Sun
6. Wrote three more 3-sentence ficlets (two Homestuck, one Narnia)
7. Took my compost to the communal bin (must text Landlord Dude to tell him it hasn't been picked up since December)
8. Listened to 2.5 lectures of a Great Courses series on the Black Death

I think I will now eat a few oatmeal raisin cookies while reading a bit more of The Harbors of the Sun, and then fall into bed. Mmm, cookies. Mmm, books. Mmm, bed. :)

This Christmas, my parents bought me a new computer chair from Ikea (Renberget model) which I put together tonight. None of the parts were missing or damaged, the instructions were clear, and the screws were generally well-behaved.

I needed a new chair because my old one was A) gross (pro-tip: do not get computer chairs with fabric arms), B) falling apart (the seat cushion was there to keep the seat screws from stabbing me in the butt), and C) not great for my back. I mean, considering what I paid for it (i.e., nothing; I stole it from the trash room in a former apartment building because some other tenant had abandoned it), it served me very well for the past decade-plus. But its run was clearly up.

The new chair is far from perfect -- the arms are a good 4-6 inches lower than I'd like (no support when I'm typing, boo; also they poke at my thighs when I try to sit in funny positions), and there's something uncomfortable about the angle of the seat and back that will require cushions to adjust (which also makes sitting in funny positions tricky *sigh*) -- but for now it does not attack me when I sit down, and doesn't make me worry what hideous diseases may be lurking in its upholstery, so all in all? An improvement. :)

(Still gonna replace it within a year or two, though. And next time I will test the chairs out myself. *wry*)

[[photos of both old and new chairs available via this link!]]

1. Took weekly Monday photographs of my vegetables, but forgot to post them online. Ah well. I will do a two-weeks-in-one post this coming Monday.

2. Walked to the Cayuga St. bridge to watch my town's fireworks display at 9:45pm Monday night. (Ithaca usually does fireworks a day or two before the 4th. I am not sure when or why that offset started, but at this point it's a tradition and continues through sheer inertia.)

3. Wrote four fic DVD commentaries. :)

( more items under the cut )

21. Applied to TC3! (I mean, I fudged some dates because I don't remember the exact end dates of my association with my high school and previous colleges. I can tell you month and year, sure! But exact day? Pfff, no. I assume they will understand and cut me slack on that front.) Tomorrow I will start arranging for transcripts. I believe I can do that online for the two colleges. For my high school, I think I have to make a phone call, so that will wait for Monday.

22. Emailed Vicky about some super-secret plans we may or may not be conspiring over. ;)

And that is that!

For the record? My productivity was wildly uneven this week. Points 1 through 8 took four days (Monday-Thursday), whereas points 9-22 were all done in a single day (Friday). This is because I knocked my sleep schedule completely out of whack and did not manage to yank it back on track for several days, during which I kind of zombied around doing nothing in particular. I can't even say I was relaxing and enjoying myself; I was mostly just going through the motions and hoping some spark of emotion/inspiration would light me up.

I really need to stop letting my sleep schedule drift. That is utterly devastating to my ability to be a functional person.

1. Called Cat Saturday night to catch up, since I was too buried in work to arrange a call over the past few months.

2. Boiled a dozen eggs.

3. Went to church Sunday morning to hear Rev. Weis preach. Then attended the special congregational meeting, in which we voted (98.6%!!!) to call her as our new settled minister. She accepted! \o/

( more items under the cut )

20. Cleaned AC and otherwise prepped for installation on Friday.

21. Organized another coffee table box (this one containing hundreds of photographs and some photo albums) into a nice basket. I still really need to get the rest of my Germany trip photos from the 90s into the albums and label all of them, and then do something to organize all the others -- because they are completely disorganized. But that is a project for another day. (Uh. Days, probably. Whatever.)

22. Called parents to organize a few more details of their visit Friday and Saturday, which is a thing that is happening. :)

snowflake_challenge Day 3: Set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.

I have various and sundry goals for the year, but I think the biggest ones are... hmm...

Okay.

1. Starting in April, get really serious about finding and applying to full-time jobs, because my current one (though it's nice and has a reasonable hourly wage) is only part-time and therefore has no benefits. I'm keeping it for now because it meshes well with my seasonal tax-prep job, but I want something more stable going forward.

2. Finish at least three chapters of "The Guardian in Spite of Herself," because I failed miserably on that front last year (ugh, depression) and now that I'm feeling less pervasively gray, I would like to get back to more regular writing.

3. Relatedly, write something every day. This can be as little as a single sentence, but I find that I do best in life when I arrange my days (or weeks) to have reliable structures and patterns. Last year I was pretty successful at finally training myself into making daily flossing a reliable habit, so I'd like to try that with writing this year. :)

4. Also relatedly, keep up my daily to-do lists! I have used to-do lists off and on over the years, mostly when I am having particularly bad problems with depression (I always list a few gimmes, like meals, to make sure I have things I can cross off and point to as 'see, I am NOT doing nothing!' evidence), which is why I started up the habit again in 2016, but I've been trying to regularize it a little more, and plan some items a few days in advance, and it's been very helpful in creating a sense of stability when my greater life has felt too big and terrible to ever be within my control. I'd like to keep that up in good times so the habit will be in place whenever bad times roll back again. *wry*

(They always do. These past couple years were only the second time I've had long-term depression; it's been almost entirely situational, which was also the case with my first extended depressive period, so I was pretty sure it would clear up when my life got less chronically stressful. (Spoiler: I was right.) But even when I'm doing well, I still get my blue funks -- I have periodic clinical depression, which means that a few times a year, my brain chemistry randomly conks out for a few weeks -- and I like to have a well-honed set of tools for getting through them.)

5. Continue my decluttering project. I have a bunch more boxes and cupboards that need to be sorted through, and there are still a bunch more clothes I should try on and decide whether I'm ever going to wear them again. I think I'd also like to get a new computer chair, and maybe some kind of shelving unit I can use to store my spare gardening stuff instead of having it randomly stacked on my kitchen floor.

6. Figure out a way to get more physical activity into my life. It needs to be sneaky and low-key, and it needs to be easily slipped into a daily routine rather than a special-purpose event solely about exercise or flexibility. I already walk 1-3 miles a day -- this is easy, because I don't usually have a car and I have an established routine of going to take a photograph of Cascadilla Creek from the Tioga St. bridge every day that this is physically and temporally possible -- but I want to add something a little higher intensity, and maybe also something to improve flexibility since I've been getting a bit stiffer as I get older and that annoys me.

Any advice on the exercise front would be very welcome, btw! :)