the deep moans round with many voices

Today, I finally scraped together enough spare time to create my move-out packet source spreadsheet (this mostly involved taking a pre-existing spreadsheet and removing a bunch of extraneous columns and rows, and then adding a few new rows to account for subtenants) and then to mail-merge the move-out direction sheets and the key return envelope labels.

My printer went weird in the middle, which had the unfortunate side-effect of wasting several label sheets (ugh), but I triumphed in the end.

I have also printed out a bunch of security deposit return address forms, which I will need to cut in the morning. I will also need to apply the labels to the envelopes, because I did not have time for that.

Tomorrow I also have to send out at least two leases, as well as show four different people various sample apartments. If possible, I would also like to get started on distributing the move-out packets, because they're kind of time-sensitive.

...

This is not going to be an especially relaxing day.

...

In other news, I was able to collect Harrow the Ninth from the library yesterday and I started reading it this afternoon. Thus far it is, as I expected, a head trip. I very much want to know what is going on (aside from ( spoilers? )

And now I think I shall be off to bed, because I slept really oddly last night and kept having frustration dreams about being an obstetrician in training and/or a bus driver for my local high school, which at least twice mashed together into episodes of trying to deliver a baby on a moving school bus. Brains are weird.

Things done yesterday after 11am:

1. Wrote three more 3-sentence ficathon fills.

2. Left Not the IRS at 2:30pm, since I had no appointments and other people were available to cover walk-in clients.

3. Deposited the check.

4. Took a nap.

5. Folded and put away pants from Sunday's laundry effort.

And that's pretty much it. Sometimes you need an afternoon and evening to do nothing in particular. :)

I did have some very odd dreams once I went back to bed around 11:30pm -- a weird jumble of things related to apartments and real estate (which is unsurprising; I have had increasing numbers of dreams about weird apartment buildings since I started working for the rental company) and then an abrupt tangent about trying to get soldiers home from a war by riding some very tired horses up a series of hills and staircases, of all things, with brief digressions into fancy rodeo tricks and the resale value of plastic kiddie pools.

Brains are weird, you know?

Anyway, I have a client schedule for 10am today, so I will post this and go get ready. *wry*

Things and stuff:

1. I decided not to try getting a haircut on September 29th because that weekend was Apple Harvest Festival and just no. Last weekend my hair place was tragically closed. But! I called this morning to check, and my hair guy promised to be in at 9:00am tomorrow morning, so I will finally get rid of this infernally annoying shagginess around my temples and on the back of my neck! \o/

2. Prof. G gave the Spanish class amnesty on assignments over fall break, so they were all collectively due on Tuesday instead of on their original due dates. Which was good, because there were a bunch of partner dialogues and M (my partner) and I can only meet online to record them around 9:30pm, which is kind of awkward and means we're both a little punch-drunk tired while trying to think in another language. *wry* Anyway, I am now one day ahead on my assignments, and am slowly attempting to increase that to two or three days of padding... which will be super-useful for future partner dialogues since I'll be able to schedule them with M in advance.

3. My government class continues to be the easiest goddamn thing I have done in well over a decade. It's basically, read one 20- to 25-page chapter a week, take the world's most ridiculously easy 10-question multiple choice quiz, make three posts in the weekly discussion thread, and every fourth week write the world's dinkiest essay. I could have aced this course when I was freaking eight years old. *pauses* *considers* Well, no, I had no work ethic when I was eight. And probably not when I was ten, either, since my fourth grade teacher managed to destroy the fragile work ethic I'd been starting to scrape together under Mrs Skrypa's gentle guidance. But when I was nine, yeah, I would've eaten this class for breakfast.

4. I need to sign up for Yuletide, but that requires a good few hours sorting through the tagset and pondering prompts and offers, which I don't have the spoons for right now. Perhaps tomorrow night, perhaps Sunday. We'll see.

5. Proper autumn weather at last!!!

6. Still not done with my first solo rental office counter display (which is two maple trees with colorful autumn foliage, for those who don't follow me on Tumblr, where I posted a draft photo on Monday). I put up an additional branch yesterday, and finished cutting out the additional 45 leaves today, but I still need to tape all the new leaves onto the trees. I will definitely get that done tomorrow though.

7. I kind of miss being involved in RE, but I am so glad I'm not trying to facilitate the youth group this year. There is no way on earth I would have the time or the energy. Maybe next fall I'll volunteer for a younger age group again. I always did like the K-2 age range. :)

8. Mom is coming to visit Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. The plan is to A) remove my AC from the front window, B) drop off some Halloween candy for my inevitable deluge of trick-or-treaters, C) eat dinner out, D) eat breakfast out, E) talk and hang out, and F) pack the unfortunately unsuitable gift chair in Mom's car for transport to NJ.

(Chair backstory: I had a violently purple computer chair that I nabbed from an apartment trash room back in... 2005, I think? which had long since worn out and desperately needed replacing. So Mom and Dad bought me a new chair last year, but because they were working sight unseen, the chair they purchased ended up not working for me for various reasons. I have since acquired a new chair that does work -- by nabbing it from the verge of a house several blocks down the street (this is perfectly reasonable! leaving stuff out on the verge is the Ithaca way of telling people to take it if they want it! it's like a city-wide unofficial free garage sale!) and then giving it a thorough vacuum and scrub to remove absurd amounts of cat hair -- so it's not as if this will leave me chairless. And hopefully the chair will turn out to be useful for Mom, who could probably use a replacement for her own computer chair.)

9. Someday I will figure out why people traveling (and often on various forms of public/communal transportation) is such a common recurring theme in my dreams. I mean, I know why the "lost my map," "lost my ticket," "lost my passport," "got delayed by traffic jam," "bus stop was moved," etc. elements are common -- those are hallmarks of frustration and/or stress -- but I don't know why travel is the medium through which that frustration expresses itself most often. And I tend to have travel elements in all my other kinds of dreams, too. In fact, I'm now trying to think of dreams that didn't have a travel element, and I'm having a hard time coming up with any. Even the ones that exist mostly in one setting tend to have travel in the backstory.

Which is really weird because I'm a homebody. *hands* Brains man. Brains are weird.

(This last item brought to you by the two dreams about trains and the one very long dream about airports/airplanes I had last night.)

Last night I dreamed that my parents, my sister, and I were on a road trip like we used to do when Vicky and I were kids -- actually, I think that in the dream, Vicky and I were both teenagers again. We were heading to Minnesota, which is normal. But we were driving around in a big white van with, like, folding beds and curtains in the back instead of a regular car.

Vicky was fooling around online and found a report of a woman who'd come home with her young daughter and found three strangers in her attic laying out bodies on the furniture and floor. Obviously she panicked and ran out.

Vicky decided we should investigate this, and for some reason Mom and Dad thought this was a great idea. I was really tired and just wanted a nap, but didn't object.

( cut for length )

But that's another dream. :)

My weird Celexa dreams continue, and I continue to find them vastly entertaining. Also, aside from the general free entertainment, dreams are a fascinating snapshot into the way my brain plays cut-and-paste-and-twist with a deeply random grab-bag of things I've noticed or thought about over the past few days.

Like, a couple nights ago I had a dream that was mostly weird porn (no seriously, whatever you are thinking it was weirder than that; it was kind of like a sociological study of "why the fuck would anyone think this was sexy???") except randomly a bunch of it kept taking place in raw-timber cabins and there was a digression in which two of my friends and I had to build a cabin in order to have a place to set up the projector to watch more weird porn for this sociological study. Which I am pretty sure is because a person I follow on Tumblr sometimes posts pictures of pretty cabins.

And there was a dream in which I kept trying to make a terrible bilingual Spanish pun, which failed miserably because I don't speak Spanish. I think that was because a Spanish class (and a person struggling in it) featured in a fic I'd read a couple days beforehand.

And last night I had a dream in which... well, it was long and full of weird digressions, but the basic plot thread was as follows: after some kind of zombie apocalypse struck, I was with a group of people who'd holed up in a sort of fortress wilderness area (creeks and gorges and stuff, readily defensible). We discovered that people who'd been bitten by the zombies could be kept from degenerating into ravening monsters if -- and only if -- they ate a certain number of printed pages per day. (This varied between literally eating the pages and sort of mystically "drinking" the printed words through vampire fangs, because dreams do not have to be consistent or make sense.)

We were all very worried because of course we had a moral obligation to keep victims from turning into mindless beasts, but we didn't have an infinite supply of books, not to mention the books we did have were mostly practical reference material that we desperately needed since we were not wilderness survival experts. There were some raids into the nearby city library, and I think we were debating the possibility of building a printing press when I woke up.

This is clearly allegorical and stuff, but also might make an interesting variation on a typical zombie apocalypse, because who cares about guns and patriarchy when there are BOOKS at stake. *wry*

Also I have reconfirmed that I cannot do math when I'm asleep -- or rather, I can do math just enough to realize that my sleeping brain is getting wildly wrong answers, at which point I get so frustrated that I force myself awake until I am coherent enough to find the correct answer. Once I reassure myself that I haven't forgotten how to do basic subtraction, I fall back asleep.