the deep moans round with many voices

Today was a good day with abundant spoons! (...I should go to bed early more often, huh.)

I managed to:

1. Attend a virtual tax prep CE class from 10am to 12pm, during which I learned stuff, participated in class discussion, and also cooked scrambled eggs and a toasted English muffin for breakfast, made tea in my new teapot, washed all my dishes, changed my sheets and towels, and made decent progress on a cross stitch project.

2. Wash laundry, dry laundry and/or hang items to air dry, and put away my linens. (Clothing can wait for tomorrow.)

3. Have a productive conversation with Downstairs Neighbor S, during which I returned a mason jar (she used it to give me a sunflower bouquet a while back in thanks for bringing in her mail); gave her an empty canning jar (I have no use for it and I know she cans fruits/veggies/etc.); and gave her $25 for candy purchases, a wicker basket, and my laminated "Take 2 Items" sign in preparation for Halloween. I also managed to end the conversation within 15 minutes without being rude! \o/

4. Attend a different virtual tax prep CE class from 3pm to 5pm, during which I learned stuff, participated in class discussions, and made more progress on my cross stitch project.

5. Buy groceries, and return a bunch of Coke cans for bottle refund credit now that I have figured out where the store moved their can/bottle return machines after their newest remodel. (They have added a tiny bank branch beside the customer service counter.)

6. Rearrange my dresser drawers to remove some items I don't use anymore and to create space for some new items I have recently purchased. This involved using some shoeboxes and USPS flat rate mailing boxes to make little designated sections, and I was therefore able to partially consolidate my collection of empty boxes.

7. Whack off the top of my schefflera, because it had gotten ridiculously leggy. I stuck the cutting in a vase to root, and might whack off another portion of the parent plant to see if I can encourage it to bush out a bit more.

8. Write and post my November rent check super early, and also pay off the rest of my October Visa bill. (I'd made a partial payment last week because I didn't have cash on hand to cover the entirety of my December airplane tickets. But! Last Friday was payday, so I can now cover the balance and not owe any interest.)

And now I think I shall mosey along in the general direction of my bed, because the older I get, the more I realize that sufficient sleep is a necessity rather than an optional bonus. *wry*

Downstairs Neighbor S has decorated the house porch for Halloween.

Mostly this is fine -- pumpkins, plastic spiders, fake spiderwebs, a plastic ghost on the door, etc. I'm cool with all that!

The problem is the three motion-activated plastic witch figurines. When something moves within a certain radius of them (or maybe just in front of them; I haven't done rigorous tests) they light up in flashing colors and emit a really annoying cackle.

Even that's not usually too bad, but tonight Downstairs Neighbor S left one of the witches on the porch railing facing outward toward a bush.

It has been raining lightly but steadily for the past twenty minutes.

The rain makes the bush leaves bob.

The motion of the leaves sets off the witch.

The witch cackles nonstop.

Right outside my front window.

...

I went outside and switched her off.

Stuff done today:

1. Cut my fingernails and toenails.

2. Wrote ~600 words of the Narnia/Naruto crossover, bringing the draft up to ~10,000 words. The end is in sight! (...And once I reach it, I will have SO MUCH EDITING, but hey. Fixing something that exists is always easier than creating something in the first place.)

3. Took my plants outside for the afternoon and brought them back indoors in the evening.

4. While I was taking the plants out, my diagonal neighbors' cat, Wilson, got into my apartment. I promptly closed all interior doors so she had limited space to roam, and attempted to pick her up and take her back out. She was very highly stimulated by exploring a new environment, however, and clawed and bit at me in protest (relatively gently, but still) so I left off the attempt and finished moving my plants. Then I shut the back door and opened the door between my living room and front room to tempt her into exploring a new area. She duly crossed the threshold and I shut the door behind us, opened my front door into the common stairwell, and opened the front door of the house to give her a clear line out of my apartment into the wider world. Then I grabbed my keys and went back into the rest of my apartment to prep for a walk and a grocery run.

She was still in my front room when I was ready to leave, but I think watching me walk out my front door persuaded her to follow. She prowled onto the front porch and I promptly shut my apartment door to keep her from reentering.

I should mention here that I cleaned the bites and scratches with a bunch of soap and water, then a generous splash of rubbing alcohol, and then some Benadryl anti-itch gel (generally intended for bug bites, but whatever) to counteract the chemical in cat saliva that is apparently one of the fundamental causes of cat allergies, since the two tooth punctures were swelling up like mosquito bites in a way the scratches weren't. The swelling and itching duly subsided, so score one for antihistamines!

5. Took a walk, nominally with the goal of buying a BLT for lunch, but also just to get out of the house and move around for my physical and mental health. I took a slightly longer way home than necessary because it was a lovely day and it's nice to see people even from a safe distance.

6. Took a nap.

7. Bought groceries.

8. Zoom meeting with my church's Board of Trustees to catch up on the past week and do some preparation for our regular monthly business meeting next week. I have agreed to look over some financial documents in case we decide to apply for an SBA Payroll Protection Program loan. The application isn't really geared to nonprofits, though they are clearly marked as eligible for the loan, so pulling together some of the required information will be tricky.

We are also unsure if we want to apply at all, since although we are going to take a big hit (lost rent, reduced pledges and offering plate intake, may not be able to run our big summer fundraiser) we should be able to limp along through 2020 as-is. It will just be hard, and then we might hit a wall in 2021 if we use up our rainy-day options now. The UUA is in favor of member congregations applying, but some wealthier ones have decided it's morally wrong for them to get loans when they don't need the money. That's cool and I support it! But my congregation doesn't fall into a clear-cut "we definitely DON'T need the loan" or "we definitely DO need the loan" category, so we're waffling.

...

I think I'll go websurf a little more and then fall into bed.

This day has too many obligations.

By which I mean I agreed a couple weeks ago to attend (and bring a dish to) Downstairs Neighbor S's holiday potluck dinner. Which is at 5pm. Which means I need to start making my food item (I have decided upon Laddie's hotdish, because it is dead simple and I forgot to buy supplies for anything fancy anyway) by 3:45 at the latest. Which is in two hours.

In the intervening time, I need to finish my laundry (gather it from the laundromat, fold things, put them away), do some general housecleaning (unsure whether I want to dust all the flat surfaces or wash vegetable planters so I can then stack them and stash them out of the way), and also package the batch of veggie sidedish I currently have in my crockpot.

I think I can probably excuse myself from the potluck after an hour, following which I need to... do more housecleaning, probably.

Nick arrives Monday afternoon while I'm at work (I will leave a key in the mailbox for him) and I have no clue what we'll do for dinner. Then we do who knows what on Tuesday morning and afternoon until our parents arrive and we collectively head to the early Christmas Eve service at Sage Chapel. It's at 5:15pm, but we should be there around 4:30pm in order to make sure we get seats and that everything's organized for me to do one of the readings (which I agreed to last week).

Um. That's no longer today, is it? Also at some point in there, I have an overdue library book to finish and return, a Yuletide story to edit (and maybe expand?), and some other writing I'd like to get done. And I need to vacuum at some point. Maybe that's my housecleaning task for this afternoon?

Anyway, I'm going to go deal with laundry now.

1. I made it through work today without A) falling asleep on my keyboard (an occasional risk with cold medications) or B) sounding TOO gross TOO often when blowing my nose, though there were definite moments of "oh gods how can so much snot fit in a human body?!" Ugh.

There were two studio tours scheduled for the afternoon. Both people were no-shows and didn't bother to notify us they'd cancelled. I was not terribly surprised, because rain set in around 1:30pm and has not let up since, but still. If you request a tour and we schedule a specific, personal one just for you, I think it's rude not to at least drop a line to say, "Sorry, the weather's horrible, can we reschedule for another day?"

On the bright side, we rented the 10-bedroom apartment! So that's one millstone off our necks, though we still have too many unrented 6-bedroom units. *sigh*

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2. I arrived home around 7:30pm, having stopped to buy a sandwich en route, and found Downstairs Neighbor S on the porch distributing candy to trick-or-treaters brave enough to venture out into the pouring murk. She seems to have knocked off around 8pm, and we are now completely out of candy, as per usual. This is actually pretty impressive, considering the weather! (This year I let S organize the candy/cash collection and just contributed my mom's stash plus a couple bags of my own, since I knew I wasn't going to be home for the majority of the evening.) Anyway, I nicked one Baby Ruth bar as tribute and will shortly eat it as my dessert. :)

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3. Current temporary family consensus seems to be that we will do Thanksgiving in NJ at my parents' house -- exact schedule TBD, based on my aunt and my brother's itineraries, though Mom thinks no winery tour this year -- but Christmas may be in Ithaca. This is partly because of my work schedule, but also a little because it's quite likely to be my last Christmas while living in Ithaca and it would be nice to finally get to the Xmas Eve service my congregation does, because we do the service in Sage Chapel on the Cornell campus. So I have been delegated to ask how the logistics work, vis a vis parking on campus or buses or whatever.

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And now I'm going to browse the Yuletide tagset to see whether there's anything I want to request besides my three nominated fandoms, and what I can offer without regretting all my choices once assignments go out. *wry*