the deep moans round with many voices

I just read "Balancing Stone" -- Victoria Goddard's new novelette ancillary to the Greenwing & Dart sequence of the Nine Worlds series, and OMG I love Hope Stornaway so much. Who needs faith when you have sources, indeed!

(Listen, I love Cliopher and Fitzroy and the others from Zunidh and the Red Company as much as anyone, but my heart will always belong foremost to Jemis Greenwing and his expanding circle of friends. I am very much looking forward to the impending socialist revolution in Alinor.)

I spent most of my workday updating one particular spreadsheet, with pauses to scan (or manually correct and re-scan) the source documents as needed.

Context: For various reasons most of which can be summed up as "college students living on their own for the first time are not great at forward planning," with a heft side-helping of "the local electric company is deeply unhelpful and always runs late," my company has a policy of making all incoming tenants complete a NYSEG new account application form which we then email to NYSEG on their behalf. We also have a standing request with NYSEG that if a tenant cancels their account, it should revert back to us rather than being shut off entirely. This ensures that new tenants do not arrive to apartments and discover they have no electricity.

However.

The Collegetown office was running understaffed until a couple months ago, and the new hire, while enthusiastic and trainable, does not pick up new skills fast and frequently Mom Boss and Aunt Boss were both too buried under their own tasks to walk her through assorted projects step by step. And I only work in that office one day per week, about half of which I usually spend dealing with downtown emails.

So the NYSEG requests got put into the "we'll sort this out later" basket for a little too long, and I am the person who is now sorting it all out. *sigh* This is especially annoying because, for data security reasons, we only ever store NYSEG forms on local drives so I literally cannot do any of that work from my downtown computer.

But our tracking spreadsheet is now up to date, I sent in all June and July account request forms, and I took a stab at a few August forms for good measure before I called it a day and spent the remaining 45 minutes trying to catch up on my email.

Also apparently nobody updates the office whiteboard calendars when I'm not around? On the one hand, this pleases me because I enjoy that task and like making little thematic header illustrations for each new month. (July is fireworks. August is grapevines. September is trees with fall foliage. October will be pumpkins and maybe a haystack.) On the other hand, I'm not going to be working there forever and somebody needs to step up.

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In completely unrelated news, I continue to enjoy the Brother Cadfael mysteries and am currently reading book #9, Dead Man's Ransom.

Things done today:

1. Caught up on replying to rental inquiries and incomplete applications.

2. Restarted my computer before it could force-restart at the worst possible moment. (It's been nudging me for two days, but I needed to get some files into a place where a restart wouldn't scramble everything.)

3. Worked with Mom Boss and Lawyer Man to provide evidence of what had gone wrong with our website contact forms, which apparently had been broken for over a month. This has now been fixed.

4. Scheduled a bunch of apartment tours.

5. Floor plans.

6. And then, at my tax job, I discovered I had four new drop-off returns. I got one completed and started a second before my scheduled client of the night arrived. And there my troubles began, because somehow the client and their spouse had BOTH earned significantly more money than last year (yay!), but their employers had BOTH withheld less income tax (boo hiss). So they had an unexpected massive bill due, which is never good news. Hopefully this year they will actually take my advice and adjust their W4 forms. :/

...

In unrelated news, I read Lyorn yesterday (Steven Brust's latest entry in the Vlad Taltos series), and am now about 1/4 of the way through a reread because I need to think about it some more.

Very good book! Resolves some things, sets up a bunch more, tugs on various threads that have been laid at various points in multiple earlier books, etc. But yeah, definitely something that merits a closer read.

Also, can someone who has finished the book and has ANY SKILL WHATSOEVER at extrapolating sources from parodic lyrics PLEASE tell me the original songs the chapter-opening numbers are riffing off of? I count myself very lucky that I recognized THREE, and I feel my enjoyment of the book would be greatly enhanced by knowing what fucking tunes are supposed to be running through my head.

Today I had some tax clients with Problems.

( cut in a gesture at privacy, though this is already fairly anonymized )

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In unrelated news, on Thursday the 15th I accidentally broke my 1140-day reading streak on my Kindle app. This is mildly annoying, but only mildly. I would have been VERY annoyed to break the streak in 2021, since my New Year resolution that year was to get a 365-day reading streak, but after that I kept going just sort of because and it's nice not to have that nagging little "oh, have I read on Kindle today?" voice in the back of my head. I don't know if I'll put together a 3-year streak again -- that may end up being a weird one-off aberration in my life. Or I might trip and fall into a 4-year or 5-year streak at some point, if Amazon and Kindle still exist and still do streak tracking. Who can say.

(I mean, I will NEVER go a day without reading SOMETHING. But reading on a specific app is a very limited definition of reading, you know?)

As of a couple years ago, I accidentally got myself onto all four of FUSIT's hospitality teams.

The idea behind hospitality teams is that you sort the congregation into quarters, and each quarter does ushering, coffee hour, etc. for one month before handing off to the next team. Taking summer services into account and doing either September or May on an ad hoc basis, this means every member is only on the hook for a few small things on a couple weeks each year, and hopefully it spreads the labor across a broader swath of the congregation. In practice, there are some stalwarts on each team, a bunch of other people who will maybe volunteer for one task one time per year if you poke them multiple times, and a LOT of people who ask to be removed for whatever reason -- that's standard for any opt-out volunteer project.

But because I actively enjoy washing dishes, I tend to volunteer for cleanup on every week my team is up -- and because the people coordinating the teams noticed that, I got put on the "will fill in when needed" mailing list, and made an official member of every team.

This is not really an issue -- like I said, I actively enjoying washing dishes, and I usually volunteer to bring snacks as well, because baking brownies or buying some cheese and crackers is not a hardship for me. But it does mean that once tax season gets into full swing, I have to remind people that nope, I can't do cleanup until tax day. I am going to be at work instead.

Today was the first day that really kicked in, so I did a quick drive-by to drop off this week's cheese and crackers and then vanished to the sound of lamentations :)

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My shift at Not the IRS was very boring. I had no appointments, and there were no phone calls. The only thing of interest I did was scan some documents for other tax preparers, since I have been stuck sitting at the desk with the scanner because the computer in the cubicle where I prefer to sit has been broken for three weeks now.

I mostly killed time by watching some videos for a Coursera class I am taking for free (Christian women's spirituality in the European middle ages), and reading another chapter of Bridge and Tunnel Boys, which is a book about Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel. The course is interesting, but I need to watch the videos with subtitles. The book is also interesting, but DESPERATELY needed another proofreading pass.

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I left work a bit early, after blocking off my schedule with a fake appointment. (I have begun using Nick as my placeholder client.) I had to resort to this scheduling sleight of hand because management did NOT take me off the schedule even though I told them two weeks ago that I wouldn't be available after 2:30pm.

I then attended a chamber music concert by the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra. I very nearly decided not to go -- this is because I parked, got out of my car into the pouring rain, and then suddenly realized I'd forgotten to bring my ticket. By the time I got back to my apartment to retrieve the ticket, I was feeling grumpy and uninclined to go back out into the rain. But I reminded myself that animals need enrichment in their enclosures and that I knew I would enjoy the concert, and managed to prod myself back out the door.

I did, as predicted, enjoy the concert. :)