the deep moans round with many voices

Sunday was a throwaway day -- I slept in, stayed home, and did nothing. It was lovely. :)

Today was my weekly day at the Collegetown office, where I am still trying to catch up on backlogged scanning, emails, filing, spreadsheets, etcetera. I made some reasonable progress. I also showed two walk-ins around a 1-bedroom apartment in one of our properties, since the 2022-23 tenant vacated early and we have it cleaned up and nice. Hopefully one of the people in question will return and rent something.

I did a quick mini-grocery run that was mostly just to buy some hard cider, some yogurt (for breakfast purposes), and a little thing of sushi for dinner. I have also set myself up to do laundry tomorrow evening, and then I think on Wednesday I will do my big supply run for my long weekend at Cape Cod and fill up my gas tank once I have a 20 or 30 cent-per-gallon discount. (My grocery store does a gas points thing, which was useless to me for many years but is actually quite handy now that I have a car.)

Hmm. I should probably also check the pressure in my tires. I think I left the gauge in the glove compartment...? Must remember to check that tomorrow, as well as calling my dentist and the gastroenterology office.

In other news, I have started work on an embroidery pattern. Thus far, I have completed a tiny woven-wheel rose in the center of the fabric. Tomorrow I get to work on some fly stitch, back stitch (I already know that one; that's just a standard sewing stitch), and split stitch. This pattern is by way of being a sampler to teach basic embroider stitches, and there's a YouTube instructional video to watch and work along with.

So far the biggest problem has been threading the bleeping needle. I have never had this problem before! I can get standard thread through any size needle eye, and my cross-stitch needles are pretty forgiving, but getting embroidery floss through this embroidery needle is like... I don't even have an analogy, that's how frustrating it is. And the pattern calls for three strands of floss at a time, so multiply the frustration by three.

I think I might try waxing the thread tips with vaseline or something next time unless they shape up and BEHAVE.

But enough of my frustrations. I am now going to wash some dishes and then fall into bed.

(Oh! One final thing. I wanted to note this, because it's unusual. I have not installed my air conditioner yet this summer. I haven't needed to. I had one miserable night back in May, but otherwise I've been able to get my apartment down to a reasonable sleeping temperature with fans alone, and it hasn't been unbearable during the day. I will probably need to give in and shove my AC in the window next week, which is forecast to be very humid and to hover around 70 Fahrenheit at night, but for now? It's been nice.)

Today, after literally 20 years of living in assorted rental housing situations, I finally bought renter's insurance.

Yes, I know. I have been ABSURDLY lucky to avoid catastrophes this long!

But I was printing out my new car insurance cards just now, and it occurred to me that luck cannot last forever and insurance bundling is a thing, so as long I was logged into Geico anyway -- why not? And now I am insured for a year for the low annual cost of $158.00, paid in full to avoid installment charges. :)

As a random bonus, I can now explain with greater authority to rental company tenants why they should get renter's insurance and how it is both cheap and painless. *wry* Previously I always felt slightly hypocritical about that, the same way I feel slightly hypocritical about selling add-on products to my tax prep clients.

(I mean, I wouldn't pay for most of them... but then again, I actively enjoy doing taxes so I wouldn't pay for tax prep in the first place, and clearly that is not the case for my clients! Just because I personally don't care about paying for audit support and representation doesn't mean it's not a valuable service for other people. *hands* And I do think the Not the IRS tax ID theft protection and identity restoration aid service is a good deal, so that one I do wholeheartedly recommend.)

And now back to spreadsheets. *sigh*

My birthday is on a Thursday this year, and I am actually scheduled to work both at the rental office and at Not the IRS. I am actually totally fine with this -- I feel like maybe I'm supposed to be annoyed? But really it's just a day, and so long as I get some kind of family thing within a week on either side, it's cool.

I have requested the Saturday after my birthday off, and am pondering options:

1. Either Mom or Dad comes up to see me. They could arrive on Friday evening, we do dinner that night, breakfast on Saturday, and they go home Saturday afternoon. Or they could arrive Saturday around noon, we do something that afternoon, dinner Saturday night, breakfast on Sunday, and then I head in to my Sunday afternoon Not the IRS shift.

2. Same but both Mom and Dad come up.

3. Same, but Mom, Dad, and Nick come up. (Nick is currently staying at their house in NJ because of ongoing medical issues.)

4. Reverse it: I drive down to NJ! This requires me to take at least half a day off on Friday in addition to all of Saturday. I would drive down on Friday, we do some kind of fancy dinner either Friday or Saturday, and then I drive back either Saturday evening or early Sunday morning.

...

Option 4 is more personally inconvenient for me, but allows me to see all three family members and avoids aggravating Nick's health problems as much as possible. I am strongly leaning toward it, but I need to make sure that's not going to cause staffing issues at the rental office first.

Also I need to see if I can figure out why the washer fluid I poured into my car a few days ago doesn't seem to be spraying correctly when I trigger that action. Maybe I just need more fluid, but it's equally possible a hose got cracked or gashed when I had the ice encounter that munged up the bottom right front of my car a few weeks ago.

...

Anyway, back to my very busy evening of writing Three-Sentence Ficathon fills while not doing anyone's taxes because I have no scheduled clients. *wry*

Things that happened to me today:

1. Drove over a big chunk of ice that tore loose part of the plastic shield under my car engine. The plastic segment is now hanging down and scraping against the road when I drive, which makes a horrible racket and cannot possibly be good for my poor car. I have made an appointment with Goodyear to get it looked at tomorrow, and will get Mr. Geniality to drive me from Goodyear to work.

2. My kitchen sink clogged up again, the same way it did at the end of October. I dumped as much of the standing water as I could into my bathroom sink (which is draining fine), and have texted Landlord Dude to come unclog it tomorrow.

3. Found a dead mouse in the cabinets under the kitchen sink. *sigh* It had been there at least a day, long enough for ( gross details about dead animals ) Anyway, I flicked it out into the snowy waste of the back yard (I didn't want to shovel my back steps just to dispose of a mouse), scrubbed down the shelf, and bleached the daylights out of the snap trap.

I will need to set a new trap after Landlord Dude fixes my drains.

...

In other news, the Three Sentence Ficathon fill that got away from me is now 2,075 words and counting. What even is my life. *headdesk*

I got up a bit later than intended, and then took a little longer getting ready to leave than intended, with the net result that I left at 12:15pm instead of 11-11:30am, but my drive was pretty smooth and I made it to NJ before sunset, so it's all good. I listened to the latest episode of Enthusigasm, and then several lectures in my current Great Courses series, which is called "Tocqueville and the American Experiment". (Political analysis courses are always interesting because they date very quickly. This one was recorded in 2004, and there are multiple portions that I am 100% sure would be different if Professor Cook were recording it anew today.)

My poor car is in desperate need of a wash -- there was intermittent snow from Ithaca through about the NY/PA border, and that means a lot of road gunk kicked up into the air which then insta-dries on cars -- but I stopped in Throop to wash my front and back windshields at a gas station, which helped somewhat.

I dropped by Susan's parents' house for a 1-hour visit and to exchange gifts, which was good. Susan's pregnancy is going well so far!

Mom and I had corned beef and salad for dinner and sampled some of this year's more experimental cookies. Then she and I set up and made the sofa-bed in my childhood bedroom (which is currently acting as a catch-all storage room), after which I wrapped a bunch of presents and caught up on some internet nonsense.

Tomorrow we plan to be at the local Verizon store about 5 minutes before 10am to ensure we are the first customers, whereupon I will upgrade my phone. I have preemptively logged into my work email because I'm not sure how my Microsoft Authenticator app will transfer over, and I need that to, you know, keep an eye out for disasters. *wry* I am pretty sure everything else should transfer fine, but security programs can get finicky.

After that I think we're doing some food and alcohol shopping, and then I will probably hole up and finish some paid training for Not the IRS which I have been putting off on account of being excessively busy.

And now, to bed. :)