the deep moans round with many voices

The shared office drive was still down today, and the first attempt to restore it failed so I spent the day unable to do about 80-90% of my job. :(

Anyway, I answered some emails, responded to some inquiries, and worked through some of the paper filing I've been ignoring all summer, but overall it was a long and tedious day. There are few things more annoying than not being ABLE to do work when you are all geared up to tackle it.

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Tonight my mom called around 7:30, so I caught up with her and my dad for about 45 minutes. They are expecting their furniture to be delivered early this coming week, after which they've scheduled delivery of one of their two pods -- this is the big one with a bunch of furniture rather than the small one that's entirely books, because it's a bit counter-intuitive to unpack all your books before you have shelves to put them on. *wry*

Also my childhood house went on the market Wednesday morning and my parents are already close to accepting an offer as of this afternoon, so that's going well!

None of us live there anymore, so I am going to share the link for the walkthrough: http://www.sueadler.com/167GreenVillage. The furniture is not remotely like ours, but you can still get a general feel for the house.

(It is a FAR bigger house and yard than we needed, but it's literally four blocks from Drew University where my mom worked for decades; the property taxes are significantly lower than they should be for a lot that size because the yard has a weird shape that renders the back half legally unbuildable; and it was a serious fixer-upper. What you see in that walkthrough is thirty years of repairs and upgrades, and we never did get around to finishing the attic or basement.)

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In other news, Nick has discovered that physical labor like packing/unpacking and intensive gardening/yardwork helps with some of his symptoms -- or at least distracts him from them, whereas reading and writing just exacerbate the problems -- so he's been throwing himself into that kind of activity over the past month or two.

I worked 9am-1pm on Friday, then drove down to NJ where Mom and Dad cooked me a very nice one-day-belated birthday dinner of steak, scalloped potatoes, and green bean casserole, with pflaumenkuchen for dessert.

Today I slept in, after which Susan came over for lunch and conversation for several hours.

Mom and Dad continue to sort through their stuff and divest themselves of various items in preparation for moving. As part of that, I am taking eight boxes of books up to Ithaca to donate to the Friends of the Library book sale. One box is a bunch of children's books from my and Nick's childhood, which we sorted through on Friday night to claim anything we wanted to keep. I have made off with a modest collection of Dr. Seuss and some other items. :) We also offered Susan the chance to take any she wants for her own impending baby, and she nabbed a few which should now have a good home. :D

I took advantage of my parents' washer and dryer to do my biweekly laundry, and my car is mostly packed. Tomorrow I will get up at 7am, hit the road by 8am, and drive directly to Not the IRS for a 1pm shift start.

And then it's back to the regular grind, as one does. *sigh*

Still, it was good to see Mom, Dad, and Nick, however briefly -- and Susan, too! -- and I think I needed the mental break and the chance to sleep in of a Saturday rather than sit around the rental company office attempting to edit photos while someone repaints the walls. *wry*

And now to bed.

On Thursday evening, I had a brief phone chat with my parents to catch up on general stuff, during which Mom mentioned being a little worried that Hurricane Ida might have done some water damage to their basement and garage, which they were in no position to do anything about. (Mom and Dad are currently at the cabin in Minnesota.)

Today I recalled that I have a three-day weekend thanks to Labor Day. (I mean, technically it's one day offset, because I work Saturdays and have Tuesdays off, but whatever, three days are three days.)

So... why not drive down to NJ to A) check their house for water damage, B) retrieve the small birdseye maple table they sold via my church recycle sale so the buyer can get it before October, and C) possibly do a flying visit with Susan?

So that's my Sunday and Monday abruptly filled up. :)

I think I may also haul my dirty laundry down and take advantage of their washer and dryer, because why not.

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In unrelated news, Dad was very pleased about his birthday present, because I bought him a book he'd been considering tracking down himself but had not yet done anything about. :D I have a well-tuned sense of what he'll be interested in reading -- the trick is to make sure I don't buy something he's already acquired on his own.

Mom is harder to buy books for, because her reading leans more toward mysteries than nonfiction and I have very little feel for that genre, let alone for what she has and hasn't already read. Fortunately, Mom's birthday is also close to Christmas and she provides excellent wish lists. ♥

Yesterday I met Susan for breakfast at Bagel Chateau, after which we walked around downtown a little to see what stores have changed since the last time I was paying much attention. She gently mocked me for not knowing the name of the tuxedo rental place and asking what kind of business it was -- but I always just knew it as "the tuxedo rental place on Main Street" so the idea that it even had a name was mildly surprising to me. *wry*

Mom, Dad, Nick and I then went to a matinee showing of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, which I enjoyed. There was some intense mental dissonance at the start when Tom Hanks came on as Mister Rogers, but you get through that after a while.

In the evening we went to Osteria Trevi for dinner. I had veal with eggplant, Mom had a different veal dish, Nick had a fillet mignon with gorgonzola and a red wine reduction, and Dad had fancy lamb chops. (I mention this because Mom is into asking about "what restaurant did we go to at such-and-such occasion, and who ate what?" and I will never on earth remember any of that if I don't write it down.)

Today I have done some Thanksgiving set-up, started a load of laundry, and re-taught Mom's printer and laptop how to speak to each other. I am not remotely an IT person, but that was really just getting into her settings and telling the computer "use THIS device" and then following the printer's own instructions on how to hook it back into the house's internal wi-fi network. So, you know, pretty simple. I also showed Mom how to access the settings menu on her laptop, so hopefully she'll be able to do some of these things on her own in the future. :)

And now I'm going to check on the laundry and take a small walk despite the gray skies and strong winds, because walking is good for both body and soul. :D

I got the bus version* of my NFE fic up by Snacky's belated 9am deadline (I was actually aiming for midnight but decided I would write better if I slept a full night and got up at 6:30am than if I tried to write coherently after just a two-hour nap starting at 8:30pm, so), and the bus version of my remix up by the actual deadline (thank you, Colorado, for being two hours behind me). So this week is mostly for editing -- both my fics and one NFE fic somebody else wrote, and which I have high expectations for based on past experience. :D

Anyway, today I drove down to NJ. It was a slightly weird drive, since I straight-up missed the exit to Dunmore and Throop where I usually get off for a bathroom-and-leg-stretch stop. So I basically drove nonstop from the NY/PA border to the Delaware Water Gap, which is not normally that long in the grand scheme of things but today I hit a whole bunch of traffic... not jams, precisely, but definitely slow-downs. And of course they started about two miles after I missed my usual mid-trip stop. *sigh*

But I made it to Madison, I raided my parents' fridge and freezer for a makeshift dinner (a microwave chicken pot pie and some box white wine; yum, I guess?), and I think my first load of laundry is about ready to come out of the dryer so I'll have pajamas to sleep in tonight.

Tomorrow I have my final session of both my Cancellation of Debt and my Vehicle Expenses tax courses, and then Susan and I plan to do some as-yet unspecified Thing in the evening. I'm thinking maybe going out for sushi? I mean, we always seem to end up with either sushi or takeout pizza, but what the hell, I like both those options. I also get to pick up and sort through my parents' accumulated mail and drop of their next stop-mail order, which I believe will take effect on Friday or Saturday. So I think the plan is as follows:

1. Get up and have breakfast.
2. Pick up mail.
3. Cancellation of Debt course at 10am
4. Editing and lunch and maybe a walk
5. Vehicle Expenses course at 4pm
6. Do a Thing with Susan, probably involving dinner
7. Water Mom's plants at some point in here

That seems like more than enough for one day. :)

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*The bus version of a story is one that may not be all that you would like it to be, but that would work as something that fulfills the assignment in case you get unexpectedly hit by a bus and can't make any edits before the reveal. I think this is a wonderfully useful bit of fannish jargon. :DDD