the deep moans round with many voices

I had a dentist appointment this morning to fix an old filling that had gone bad. We were also initially scheduled to do a second filling at the same time, but the dentist decided that since one of the affected teeth was in the upper right quadrant and the other was in the lower left quadrant, doing both fillings would potentially leave me with no good chewing surfaces if either tooth was sensitive after the Novocain wore off.

So now I have a THIRD appointment scheduled for January 28. *sigh*

On the bright side, the filling replacement seems to have gone well and I am not, in fact, having any pain. I also got the dentist to shave down the little scraggly bit on the filling she replaced a couple weeks ago, so it is no longer snagging food, my floss, or my tongue. \o/

Other things done today:

1. Completed a renewal lease and made good progress on creating a key plan for the 1st floor of one of our largest buildings.

2. Uploaded a batch of my 2023 Three Sentence Ficathon fills to AO3.

3. Refilled my blood pressure meds.

4. Bought groceries (and upon getting home immediately realized several items I forgot, so I made a new list)

5. Prepped for laundry tomorrow.

6. Wrote one (1) Three Sentence Ficathon fill.

And now I shall go to bed. :)

Thanksgiving was lovely, but unfortunately I caught a nasty case of traveler's crud (not Covid!) and spent Sunday sleeping, drinking excessive amounts of tea-with-honey, and doing things that required no thought or energy (aside from driving to the grocery store to purchase more fruit juice, tissues, and NyQuill).

I also let Mom Boss and Aunt Boss know I would not be at work today, and have thus far spent Monday doing approximately the same as Sunday, though at least today I managed to dress in actual day clothes instead of just putting my pajamas back on.

I don't really feel up to a walk longer than about two blocks, but I may take a small drive shortly just to get out of the house.

I am currently undecided about whether to go to the office tomorrow. I think I will let Mr. Geniality know I may be out, and then decide in the morning based on how well I sleep tonight.

Bodies. Ugh.

...

Probably gonna take a nap soon. I am exhausted.

I begged off my (tiny, no appointments) shift at Not the IRS Friday evening, because I slept TERRIBLY on Thursday night, managing a total of only four hours despite lying in bed for a bit over nine hours. I kept almost drifting off and then jolting myself back awake with a coughing fit.

I did sleep much better Friday night (switched from soothing my throat with honey to gargling saltwater, which is both apparently more effective and less brutal on tooth enamel), but I am still pretty tired and plan to hit the sack early once more.

The cold is definitely thinning, but I still sound like a crow rasping through an old boot, I have a constant low-grade headache, and my respiratory system continues to produce upsetting quantities of goo. :(

Anyway, I had some interesting tax clients today, including ( obscured for an additional layer of anonymizing ) Which is a nice consolation prize for missing the concert, I guess?!

Tomorrow I think I will have the spoons to attempt some laundry. Am I going to wash everything that's built up while I have been languishing? Oh HELL no. But I think I can sort through and wash... hmm. Probably a load of all my underthings and socks, a load of some skirts and shirts, and a load of linens. That will leave at least two more loads' worth of dirty fabric, but that is a problem for future!Liz.

I continued to feel gross today, so I have decided Not to bake snickerdoodles for the memorial service tomorrow. Instead I will apologetically drop off three boxes of Thin Mints, because A) more sanitary and B) who doesn't like Girl Scout cookies?

I did an apartment tour this afternoon, whereupon my body smacked me in the metaphorical face and waved a "Stop exerting yourself; you have no energy reserves!!" banner until I was back at my desk and could spend a couple minutes just breathing and existing. I hate that part of being ill.

Tonight's tax prep appointment turned out to be real -- we were unsure because the client had been going to a Not the IRS office in another NY county for several years, but they moved to Ithaca in 2023 and did actually want an Ithaca-based tax preparer. So that worked out nicely.

Now I am going to faff about online until 9pm, at which point I intend to take a nice hot shower (for decongestion and relaxation purposes) and then fall into bed.

...

I have a litany I sometimes repeat in the shower when I have a nasty upper respiratory infection. It must be spoken only when the water is set very hot, almost to the point where I can't tolerate it anymore and periodically need to pull the shower curtain aside and gulp cooler air. It goes, "Mother oh mother oh mother of mine, wash me cleaner than clean. Scour me purer than pure. Burn the sickness out. Burn the sickness out. Burn the sickness out." Repeat as needed.

I am fairly sure there are some residual cultural Christian influences floating around in those words, but mostly it reflects a desire to sluice away all the gooey unpleasantness of being ill (why is producing floods and swamps of mucus the human body's go-to immune response? WHY???) and temporarily induce a sort of floaty no-mind state where I stop caring that I am sore and tired and full of snot.

Seeing that I am currently sore and tired and full of snot, I may invoke that litany tonight.

I am still tired and my throat still hurts, but I got through another day at work. Did I finish all the tasks I should have done? Not hardly! But I got through 85% of them, which I feel is reasonable for a day when I was running on about 70%.

(My home Covid test was negative, so I presume this is just a medium-ish cold -- sore throat, no energy, internal temperature regulation gone slightly haywire, and now a stuffy nose has joined the symptom list, blargh.)

On Sunday night I turned in the final graded assignment for my Coursera class on medieval European Christian women's spirituality. Last night I got my grade for that assignment, and if they are weighting the grades for the entire course as described on the grades page, I got an 89.6 for the course as a whole.

That grade is meaningless, of course, since I was doing the non-credit version of the course and signed up basically for the hell of it, but I do like to do well on things. I would have scored better, but I wasn't taking the first written assignment seriously and am a bit out of practice at whipping together a short-form essay response at the drop of a hat. Ah well, so it goes.

It was nice having a semi-structured Thing To Learn for the past five weeks. I might poke around Coursera and see if any of their other free courses catch my eye.

But tonight I am once again going to bed early, because I have to be at the rental office at 9am instead of 10am, since I am leaving an hour earlier than normal so I can go prepare other people's taxes in the evening. *sigh*

Every year I ask myself why I sign up to be stressed out and over-busy for three and a half months. The answer is that A) tax returns are fun (YMMV, but this is my truth), B) extra money is nice, and C) tax prep is a highly portable skill and I like to keep my professional registrations current at someone else's expense.

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Unrelated news: we are slowly proceeding through the eviction process against one of our tenants. New York has a lot of tenant protections, which is usually a good thing! But when you have one person who is making every other resident of a building miserable for MONTHS, and in fact has driven two other tenants out of their apartments due to fear of being assaulted and inability to sleep because of excessive noise, it is extremely frustrating to not be able to kick that person out faster.

Anyway, a little bit before I left work this evening, the cops came by in response to yet another disturbance this person caused. I let them in to the relevant floor of the building, but they didn't need me around after that and honestly I would prefer never to interact with the tenant in question, so I don't know what happened thereafter. I suppose I'll find out in the morning.