I started feeling a bit off on Thursday afternoon, collapsed into an unpleasantly feverish two-hour nap immediately upon arriving home, and then continued to sleep badly after dragging myself up to eat a minimalist dinner. So I took a Covid test Friday morning and yeah. :(

I was very short on supplies since I'd intended to buy groceries Friday evening, but I was able to get some basics via Instacart (which is now incessantly advertising at me, blargh), and I have been sort of sludging along between naps and large glasses of Ocean Spray cranberry-pomegranate juice, which I honestly cannot recommend highly enough. Delicious stuff.

So far it's been about the same as my first go-round with Covid, which is to say it's like a bad cold and/or a mild flu: upper respiratory gunk, sore throat and cough, utterly drained, everything aches. Fortunately the fever seems to have been a one-off incident during the onset -- thank you vaccines for mitigating that!

I had tickets for the Cayuga Wine Trail's annual Wine & Herb Fest this weekend, but obviously that is OFF the agenda. Instead my goal is to not miss more than one additional day of work, since while this seems to be conforming to the way upper respiratory gunk usually hits me and I expect I'll feel a bit better tomorrow, I will probably still be exhausted and sore all over on Monday, plus of course there's the contagion concern.

I suspect I was infected during my end-of-tax-season Sunday brunch treat for myself, since nobody else in my office is ill and that was the time I was around a bunch of people unmasked in close quarters for a good length of time. Ah well. I rolled the dice and luck was not with me. *sigh*

Survived tax day. Was utterly useless at the rental office the following day, but I did manage to do some actual work on Thursday and Friday.

Packed a couple more boxes of books. Probably ought to assembled some more empty boxes and start sorting through clothes and kitchen paraphernalia.

Hmm. I should probably also weed my filing cabinet. I am 100% sure I don't need to bring all those papers with me to Minnesota.

But tomorrow is mostly for unwinding. I will resume productivity Sunday afternoon, after treating myself to brunch.

As the end of tax season draws near (REMINDER TO US CITIZENS & RESIDENTS: file your taxes) I start to feel like cloth worn a bit thin. It's not that I am failing to get enough sleep, or to carve out some time for activities I enjoy, but I basically spend three months working 7 days a week, and even if some of those work days are pretty short (4 or 5 hours), that is still a long time with no true break.

Ah well. Two more weeks and I'll be down to just the normal 40-hour 5-day business week grind.

Then I can swing back into planning and preparing for my move to Minnesota. *sigh*

I have decided to take the entire month of July as a vacation, during which I will road trip to Canada to meet some Narnia friends, possibly also road trip around the Pacific Northwest, and spend a week or so loafing at the family cabin. Absolutely NO work thoughts or housing search thoughts until August.

...I do want to do a bit of preemptive job hunting during April and May, though. If I can get something lined up in advance, that would relieve my mother's anxiety in a BIG way -- and the less stressed she is, the less she will inadvertently stress me. (That is particularly important since I plan to crash in my parents' basement (yes, ha ha, I know) until I have a job and an apartment lined up, and I know from long experience that I react badly when Mom frets in my direction for too long. I prefer to avoid snapping at her, so anything that reduces her reasons to worry is a plus.)

Got my last tax document yesterday so today I filed my taxes. \o/

I also had an actual client despite the vicious snow squall that blew through the area from 5 to 6pm, so that was nice.

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And now for something completely unrelated to work!

I spent pretty much the entirety of last night sweaty and overheated, to the point where I took off my pajama pants and kept shoving my comforter half off my body. No idea what was going on there, but I suspect it was the cause of the deeply unpleasant nightmare I had.

The dream was loosely based on Stephen King's Pet Sematary and ~helpfully~ featured my own nuclear family in the starring roles. (Context: Pet Sematary is one of the few books that I deliberately set aside rather than finish, not because it was in any way bad -- it's very well written -- but because I could tell EXACTLY where the foreshadowing was leading and I decided I did not want to go there. I stand by this choice.)

I am a semi-lucid dreamer, which meant I was aware that I was dreaming, but I am not a fully lucid dreamer and was therefore unable to successfully derail the dream or force myself awake. Any minor alterations I managed just fed back into the narrative, which of course made the whole thing worse.

When I did finally wake up, I experienced what I am pretty sure was a type of night terror/sleep paralysis. I will swear to any god you like that I saw the translucent, ghostly form of Catherine Tate (yes really. no, I have no idea why) hovering over me and rippling like smoke in the air, and I knew that she had caused the dream, and if she touched me I would get sucked right back into it. And I couldn't move. Couldn't even blink.

In the back of my head part of me was calmly cataloging this, all "This is a night terror, you are hallucinating, ghosts aren't real, there is a perfectly rational scientific explanation for this experience," but that did sweet fuck-all to convince the irrational gibbering occupying the majority of my brain for that handful of seconds.

Anyway I did eventually manage to blink, and then blink again and sit up and wake my phone to create a bit of light. And then I spent about 45 minutes reading about ancient Mesopotamia in hopes that I could create enough of a mental/emotional gap that my brain wouldn't attempt to recreate the same dream when I went back to sleep.

This mostly worked -- a bloodthirsty reanimated cat did appear in my next round of dreams, but my family was not involved and the emotional weight was gone.

I devoutly hope the experience will not repeat itself tonight.

Had my first shift at Not the IRS today. It was a little weird, as first shifts always are -- occasional computer glitches, figuring out what new nonsense has happened to the physical office, etcetera.

On the computer front, I could not log into the full version of our calendar/appointment program in Chrome, so I had to do that in MS Edge which is always annoying. Also apparently our NY state forms are not yet ready for efile, so I had to put my single client's state return on hold until that's ready in a week or two. *sigh*

On the physical office front, there was a leak in the roof sometime during the offseason and a portion of the drop ceiling tiles rotted and fell in. Fortunately this was over the desk we don't use because we never had proper equipment for it anyway! Unfortunately it looks incredibly cheap and unprofessional. Also the toilet in one of the two bathrooms is broken and we completely ran out of paper towels. *deeper sigh*

On a related note, the toilet paper holders in the currently functional bathroom are one of those annoying designs that doesn't have an internal rod -- it's like a paper towel holder where there are two arms that swing shut and each have a little disk that is supposed to slip inside the roll of paper. Except they were designed for a wider roll than the cheap-ass ones corporate currently authorizes us to buy, so the paper is always falling out.

I have ordered a 2-pack of cheap plastic spring rods from Amazon and will install them on Tuesday, because I am completely fed up with that and corporate will never in a million years spring for actual new fixtures. $6 is a low price to eliminate a persistent minor annoyance, tbh.

I have another 4-hour shift on Sunday, but last I checked I have no client scheduled. I may bring a cross-stitch project or a book with me, or I may write some Three Sentence Ficathon fills, depending on my mood. We shall see.

I have a mental stumbling block that hits me a lot on weekends, which is that I sort of halfway get up for half an hour (to eat some crackers and take my meds) and then go back to bed, and by the time I get up "for real" it's nearly noon or perhaps already past noon. And then I kind of don't want to get dressed for just the afternoon, but my brain has Opinions about doing tasks or eating meals before I have dressed, and also about dressing without showering, and it just kind of spirals and I lose the day.

But! Today I gave myself permission to just not shower or get dressed and do stuff in my pajamas. Which meant I got some assorted chores done and by the time 3:30 rolled around I decided I might as well take a shower and at least change my underpants. And then I did more tasks.

All in all a surprisingly productive day, and I short-circuited the weird guilt spiral over sleeping in and being useless.

Brains, man. So annoying, yet occasionally so easy to do an end-run around.

I have basically spent Sunday through today sleeping with intervals of reading, and I am so tired of being ill. Since I stopped working retail, I get sick much less often, but upper respiratory ailments still tend to hit me like a tractor-trailer. I am distinctly unfond of the experience.

However today I am definitely on the mend -- I had significantly more physical energy and mental focus, to the point where I pulled myself together enough to order Chinese takeout and actually go pick it up -- so I think I will manage to get ONE day at the office tomorrow.

I might then do a make-up day on Saturday to catch up on photo and video editing (I think tomorrow will mostly be emails and advertising updates), but if not, oh well.

I am also considering signing up for Get Your Words Out in 2025. I think that I will go for a habit pledge rather than a wordcount pledge, because what I need to do is build writing into my daily routine. We shall see.

Tonight I have been prepping for my flying (...pun retroactively intended) Thanksgiving visit to Minnesota.

Context: we used to do Thanksgiving at my parents' house in New Jersey. This worked because A) tradition and B) it was halfway between Ithaca and DC. Then Vicky moved to Minnesota, but we still had east coast Thanksgiving because my parents still had the best house. (Also we randomly did Thanksgiving in my apartment twice over the past 15 years, but that was a logistical pain in the neck so it never caught on.) Then our parents finally retired back home to Minnesota, but! Instead of Minnesota Thanksgiving we did a few years of Chicago Thanksgiving because that's where my Aunt C lives and it's drivable from Ithaca in a pinch. (IIRC we had also done Chicago Thanksgiving once previously while Grandma D was still alive but was no longer able to fly -- Aunt C picked her up from Iowa and drove back to Chicago, while Mom and Dad picked me up from Ithaca and we drove west. I don't recall how Vicky got there.)

Anyway, this summer Aunt C retired back home to Minnesota, so now family holidays are in Minnesota and I am traveling by plane because I am not driving 20+ hours for a two-day visit.

The point of this story is that this afternoon it occurred to me that, given the short duration of the visit, I might not need to pack a suitcase -- instead, I could get by with a backpack and a tote bag. This would be preferable since then I would NOT need to planeside check any items and therefore wouldn't need to wait for any such items to be returned on the jet bridge after landing. That is important because I have a RIDICULOUSLY tight connection on my way west Wednesday afternoon/evening, and anything that saves time could be vital.

So far this plan seems to be working out in practice as well as in theory, but we'll see how the final few items fit.

Also the weather in Minnesota is proper wintry so I will be wearing my new winter coat to the airport and stuffing my all-purpose black hoodie into my backpack. Oh! Which reminds me that I must remember to bring my scarf and some gloves. Yes. I will go add them to my packing list.

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.

I have spent the past two days doing very little at work. I'm not doomscrolling or anything, but I am definitely not focused on my actual job. By which I mean I have answered a few emails, talked to a few people who walked into the office, reviewed a few apartment videos, uploaded a few other videos to YouTube, and talked to the Maintenance department about a few issues. And that's it.

Admittedly I didn't want to leave the office to take care of some pending tasks because Mr. Geniality is out of state visiting his family and it's not great to leave the office entry unattended, but still.

I was out sick Wednesday-Friday last week (general exhaustion, full-body aches, minor but persistent headache, minor but persistent upper respiratory gunk, minor but persistent lack of correct internal temperature regulation) and used paid sick leave to cover two of them, but I need to save some paid time off for Thanksgiving and Christmas visits to family in Minnesota.

So I'm thinking I might come in tomorrow afternoon to stage a couple studio apartments and take photos and video. The forecast predicts sunshine, and this way I could make up at least part of that missing day.

Next week I will be in the Collegetown office Monday and Thursday, and downtown Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Hopefully this is a sign that I will be able to return to my normal one-day-per-week in Collegetown before the end of the year.

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Unrelatedly, I had a paid training session for Not the IRS on Monday evening, which included a 1-hour Teams meeting and then some online assessments. On Monday the 11th I will get the results of those assessments in the form of personalized additional paid training. Apparently there's like 55 potential training modules, but you only get assigned ones to covered points where your assessment results were a bit wobbly.

The thing about tax training is that if something is a government requirement (continuing education in order to renew your PTIN) that's unpaid. But if the company assigns additional training/education beyond the government's requirements, and makes completing that training/education a condition of employment, that usually has to be paid.