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*

Quick life update!

Today I leave on vacation -- heading to Minnesota. The plan is to spend two and a half days in the Twin Cities with Nick, and then drive up to the cabin Tuesday afternoon. I will return home on Wednesday the 19th.

I am about 90% packed, and the remnants are really just my electronics (laptop, phone, associated peripherals) and the cash and gum I intend to pick up on my way into town to catch a bus to the airport. It's a little weird to be taking a bus there in the afternoon instead of waiting for a taxi at the asscrack of dawn, but I can't say I mind the chance to be a bit more relaxed about my packing schedule. *wry*

Anyway, I transplanted all my peppers this week, and I will try to get my latest batch of gardening photos up on Tumblr tonight or tomorrow. I have asked my upstairs neighbors to keep an eye on my back porch garden in case Ithaca unexpectedly gets no rain in the next ten days. I have cleaned my bathroom just because it's nice to come home to a clean apartment.

Now I am preparing lunch, and I intend to walk out the door at 3:00pm.

Wish me safe travels!

Downstairs Neighbor S and I sat on the porch from ~4:45pm to ~8:15pm, handing out candy and complimenting kids' costumes. Trends I noticed: a lot of Marvel heroes (but all male *sadface*), several Supergirls (but oddly no Wonder Women), a lot of dragons, a lot of unicorns, many variations on zombies and/or murder victims, several variations on mad scientists, a lot of princesses (unsurprising), several ninja turtles, and several PJ Masks characters. (I had to ask about those, since it was obvious they were from one source -- they have clearly related visual designs -- but I had no familiarity with the canon.)

The most creative costumes were a high school student and his dad going as Crippling Debt and a loan shark. The runner up, in my opinion, was either the toddler in a frog costume repurposed as a dragon (dangerously adorable!) or the high school couple who went as pumpkin pie (both in orange sweatshirts, hers with a jack-o-lantern design and his with the π symbol).

When we went indoors, we left the candy basket out with my laminated "Take 2!" sign, and I checked on it periodically to see when it was time to add in my final two bags of candy. (Answer: ~8:55pm.) Our candy lasted until 9:15pm this year, which is far and away our best record. I think $150 is our target price range, so I guess I'll continue collecting $25 per apartment and relying on my mom's thwarted Halloween impulses to make up the shortfall. (I grew up in a neighborhood with hardly any trick-or-treaters -- my parents never get more than 15 kids over the whole evening.)

Things and also stuff:

1. My relationship with Wilson (my diagonal neighbors' cat) has progressed to to the point where she actively asks me to pick her up and cuddle her against my shoulder. I can only do this for fifteen minutes or so before I have to retreat and blow my nose and wipe down all my skin and clothes, because allergies, but gosh it's relaxing and rewarding!

2. I finished my NFE fic on Saturday night. It very badly wants expansion and editing, but it passes the bus test (ie, if I got hit by a bus and died between now and the challenge archive opening, it would be a perfectly reasonable gift for my recipient) and editing is always easier than creating something out of nothing, so I'm not worried.

3. Work continues to chug along. Aunt Boss finally generated the new parking lease form, so I was able to print out all the individual template leases. It's nice to have that off my back. We are also well into the "endless stack of lease folders" stage of the game. I got several scanned on Monday, but had to leave an equally large stack for New Hire 2, plus all the uploading, Rent Manager data entry stuff, and emailing. Oh well, we're not paid to sit around and websurf, nice though that might be. *wry*

4. College also continues to chug along. Prof. G dumped about thirty-odd files onto Blackboard this week, which I will need to look through tomorrow. I think most of them will ultimately be irrelevant, but she is not terribly organized so there's no way to tell which are important and which aren't without opening them all. As for my government class, I just turned in my first essay tonight, after writing it in... I think literally twenty minutes? It's far from deathless literature, but considering the general writing level displayed in the online discussion boards, I think I am quite safe in saying it will be one of the top three essays submitted. *sigh* (Also, it's weird writing an essay that boils down to "let me describe Topic to you" instead of "let me justify an opinion about Topic to you!" It's like stepping back several rungs on the ladder of intellectual complexity. I kept feeling I really ought to be doing more, but no, the assignment was to explain/describe, so that's what I did.)

5. It's a pity Former Upstairs Neighbor E and her family moved away at the end of July, because the raspberries she planted three years ago have finally come into their own this August and September, and have been blooming and fruiting like nobody's business. I have taken to having raspberries as a small sidedish with every other night's dinner. (It turns out I am not terribly allergic to them at the moment -- I have been more sensitive in the past -- and so I can eat a dozen or so if I make sure to intersperse them with a few bites of something else.) They are delicious. I hadn't realized quite how much I missed the experience of fresh fruit (aside from citrus) until it was returned to me. :D

6. I did something to my left knee last Thursday -- wrenched it, strained it, slept on it funny, whatever -- and it has been complaining at me ever since, at various levels of pain. I dug out my old Ace knee brace (from when I really dinged up my knee playing soccer in high school), which has been helping, but the discomfort keeps lingering. :(

7. And last, some sad news.

I don't think I ever mentioned Mark Pedersen on this journal, but he was my church administrator for many years, and he died very unexpectedly on Sunday the 16th.

Here is his obituary: http://www.bangsfuneralhome.com/obituary/mark-pedersen

And here is a message from the First Unitarian Board of Trustees:

( cut for length and a gesture at privacy )

I went to Mark's memorial service on Saturday morning, and cried a bunch. I didn't have a close personal relationship with Mark, but we attended an adult RE class together many years ago, we would sometimes run into each other on the bus in the mornings, and he was always willing to chat when I dropped by his office on errands. He was, in many ways, the heart of our congregation, and while I know we'll get through this in the long term, in the short term I'm not sure what we'll do without him.

I had to go out on Wednesday and buy a new set of headphones-with-a-microphone, because my old set (...which I don't even remember why I had? possibly I bought them when Vicky and I had a plan to Skype each other regularly? (which didn't end up panning out, for various and sundry reasons)) A) had one broken earpiece and B) had separate headphone and microphone jacks and my laptop only has a single combined audio input/output jack.

I needed these for my Spanish class, both for our weekly Skype meetings (tonight was the first one; it went well) and for recording various exercise as part of the online course activities. They were super-cheap, just $20, and uncomfortable on my ears if I wear them for extended periods, but they do what I need them to do.

(I appreciate my lovely, comfy noise-cancelling headphones even more by comparison. *pets them*)

Anyway, I am now caught up on all my Spanish exercises, and a little bit ahead on the ones due tomorrow, so that's nice. Tomorrow night I intend to get some reading done for my Government class, so as to be a little ahead of myself there as well.

Hmm, what else?

In church news, I did arrive half an hour early, but had almost no set-up work to do since a whole bunch of people had gotten there even earlier and already done 90% of it. I'm not complaining! Cleanup also went smoothly, and we only had two loads of dishes to run -- that's light even for a summer service. We also didn't bother boxing up most of the leftover snacks, since this afternoon was the semi-annual Restoration Day, when a crew of volunteers show up to deal with various maintenance tasks that are too large and/or irregular to be on our sexton's duty list, but not so large that we need to hire experts. I have never yet participated in one of these, because until today they have, every single time, been schedule for a day and hour when I had to be at work.

I missed this one too, because I hadn't gotten enough sleep last night. Instead, I went straight home after closing up the kitchen and took a three-hour nap, which was wonderful and very much needed. *wry* Perhaps next time, though.

Hmm...

Oh! And in everyday life news, two things. One, my parents reached Cass Lake this afternoon, and are settling in to enjoy their vacation. Two, my new upstairs neighbors left me a piece of delicious sweet dessert bread and a note with their phone numbers. I must remember to write them a thank-you note with my phone number. Possibly I should also give them some brownies. *ponders* Well, if brownies are part of the plan, that will have to wait a few days since I won't have time to bake another batch until Tuesday or Wednesday. And I can take whatever's left (after keeping a couple for myself, and maybe giving a few to Diagonal Neighbors T & Z, and Downstairs Neighbor S as well) in to work for Aunt Boss, Mom Boss, and New Hire 2. I will also have to remember to buy some more box mixes on Wednesday, so I'll be able to bake brownies for next week's church coffee hour.

(Completely tangential, but! Potential nickname for New Hire 2: Miss Tree? Pros: thematic match with Miss Cactus. Cons: not very imaginative or indicative of personality and/or interests. Hmm. Hmm... Eh, I think I'll wait another week and see if something more meaningful comes to me.)

Things I meant to do today: MANY

Things I actually succeeded in doing: some of that

...

Also I took a 2.5 hour nap, which was two hours longer than I intended. Apparently I needed the sleep. *wry*

Hmm. In other news, I wasn't entirely sure whether my kidney stone had passed, since the piece I managed to catch in the strainer was much smaller than the 2mm-3mm size estimate the hospital and urology clinic gave me, and I was still having some background abdominal achiness, but it turns out that those were preliminary menstrual cramps rather than continuing kidney stone pains, so. Thank you, body. That was very helpful and not at all confusing. *headdesk*

I bought a couple pairs of socks specifically to wear with my fancy stompy boots. They arrived yesterday, I washed them today, and I may try one pair out tomorrow.

I repotted my variegated hoya carnosa since it needed both better drainage and a more sturdy trellis than I could fit into its old pot. In other houseplant news, I have acquired a nice large pot to hold Castor, my baby-mad spider plant. My hope is that if I give it more space to stretch its roots, it may stop sending up flower stalks every four to six months, because seriously this is ridiculous.

I knocked off another continuing education tax course. Just four credit-hours left to go -- plus the ethics course, obviously, but the ethics course for 2019 isn't available yet, so whatever.

Upstairs Neighbors E and T, and Mini Upstairs Neighbor C have moved out, though they haven't entirely finished cleaning up the apartment and clearing out all their miscellaneous stuff. I am mostly waiting for their houseguest to finally move his car out of my driveway, because I will need the driveway myself starting in mid-August. (Yay temporary car! Someday I hope to have a permanent car, but that must wait for either a better-paying job or a significantly cheaper apartment.)

I worked intake for my church's recycling sale on Wednesday evening, and made off with a few items: the aforementioned nice flowerpot, a set of 5lb hand weights, some small polished rocks for improving houseplant drainage, and an interesting carved-rock votive candleholder. I left an IOU in the box, obviously, but it's nice to get first dibs on stuff as it comes in. :) The sale itself will be August 18-20, and I've volunteered to work on Sunday.

This morning was my hospitality team's first Sunday in our four-week shift, so I brought in a bag of pretzels for coffee hour snacks and then worked clean-up during and after coffee hour. Those are my staple volunteer positions, because they are easy and give me a defined way to contribute without standing around in a crowd feeling awkward and out of place. I also made off with some used coffee grounds, which I am drying out in preparation for use as fertilizer (mixed with my leftover store of crushed eggshells). So that's nice.

And now I think I will go to bed, so I don't lose all the benefit of my midday nap. :)