the deep moans round with many voices

Some stuff, in no particular order:

1. I got roped into working in the Collegetown office last Friday, since Mom Boss was out of town for an event that had been scheduled long before the apartment fire***. Anyway, I think me being there reminded Aunt Boss that I exist on days other than Monday, and she has dumped some tasks on me on Wednesday and Thursday which are meant to be downtown-only days. Eh, it happens.

Also I need to create a spreadsheet for apartment inspections by Monday morning, which will be clear, concise, legible, and large enough to mark off with a pencil while fitting neatly on a clipboard. So that's a fun assignment.

2. In re: Yuletide, all I have to say is BEARS!!!

3. I got a nice end-of-year bonus check, and promptly dumped a chunk of that into making estimated tax payments to the IRS and the NY state tax department, because even though I won't have ACA advance premium tax credits to reconcile, bonuses are still money without a withholding mechanism and I would prefer to get a refund than get socked with a tax bill when I file my taxes in... probably early February, going by when assorted documents have reached me in the past.

4. On Tuesday morning my dentist's office called to say, "We see you have an appointment schedule for Tuesday the 20th, but we have an opening today -- would you like to come in this afternoon instead?" And since I do have to work on the 20th and would prefer NOT to get up at 7am in order to make an 8am appointment prior to an 8-hour workday, I said yes.

I got my X-rays updated and my teeth scraped and polished, and the upshot is that I still have deeply iffy enamel and slightly iffy gums, but there's no significant change over the past 6 months and none of my fillings are going weird, which is all I really care about.

5. So Chuck Tingle now has a Tumblr account, and sometimes people I follow reblog his posts, one of which involved a question about plus-sized cover models. He included examples of some of his works in his reply, and I honestly hadn't realized he wrote lesbian erotica as well as gay erotica? Anyway, I bought the three lesbian works he linked to, and they are amazingly sweet, which is not quite what I was expecting. They're also interestingly meta in places, and very big on emotional openness, healthy communication, and generally enjoying life. There are some typos, and I admit to getting repeatedly distracted in the one about the sentient planet Mercury by the way Tingle seems to have confused Mercury with Jupiter, but overall these are genuinely good reads. Also Tingle includes a bonus story in each "book," which is nice because the stories themselves are only about 4000-5000 words long.

I may need to check out some of Tingle's full-length books.

6. Ithaca is currently experiencing the big winter storm that has been sweeping across the country. So far it's been mostly sleet and freezing rain, but apparently that may change to snow overnight? And snow on top of ice is, shall we say, less than desirable for MANY reasons.

I dug out my shovel and am setting my alarm an hour early tomorrow, just to be on the safe side.

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***I will make a separate post about the fire at some point. For now, all you need to know is that it happened on Monday the 5th at about 6:15am, NOBODY DIED or was even seriously injured, and 80 tenants were displaced though we have been whittling that number steadily downward.

I loathe doing apartment staging/photos/videos in the height of summer, and yet, all our leases are based around the academic year so this is when the apartments are vacant. :(

Tomorrow will be an interesting day. I have three move-ins/key pickups scheduled between noon and 12:45pm, after which I will disappear for about three hours to attend a wine and cheese garden party held by some church people. Then I will reappear at the office for two hours, after which I hit the road and drive south to NJ, throw some clothes in my parents' washer, and fall into bed.

Sunday I'll spend a few hours doing... I dunno, maybe some cleaning? maybe packing some miscellaneous items? and then hit the road around 3pm (with my nice clean laundry) and drive back north to Ithaca, along with some additional things my parents want to get rid of. I may buy groceries once I'm back.

And then work as usual on Monday.

...

Also I may stage/photo/video an apartment in the morning before the key pickups. It depends on whether Maintenance has replaced the bed yet. I guess I'll find out when I head down to the Commons to do a security deposit inspection on yet another apartment.

...

Fuck summer anyway.

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In completely unrelated news, today I finished listening to a Great Courses series about cheese, which was okay. Not as good as the series about whiskey, and definitely not as good as the series about rum (that one has some really neat stuff to say about racism, industrial capitalism, and colonialism!), but okay. It would have been greatly improved by at least one lecture that discussed dairy products made by people who live anywhere other than Europe and the US, but there was only a brief aside about the genetic basis of lactose intolerance as a nod to the fact that people raise cows, goats, and sheep all over the goddamn world, blargh. Still, it was informative about the topics the lecturer actually covered.

Ack, where did the time go?!

Um, anyway, I am alive! I've been a bit swamped at work as we gear up for the 2022-23 rental season (Ithaca is a college town; our rental market is completely skewed by this) and try to finish up the dregs of move-in maintenance problems and virtual tour videos.

What else, what else...

I remembered I had a copy of A Desolation Called Peace checked out from the library when I got a very disappointed second overdue notice, so I dug it out of the stack it had gotten lost in and finished it. I enjoyed it! Not quite as much as the first book of the duology, but I think some of that is just that I am personally a little more into culture clashes among humans and human-like beings and less into ( spoilers? ) But I continue to love Mahit and Three Seagrass a lot, and enjoyed getting to meet Nine Hibiscus and Twenty Cicada. Eight Antidote is also pretty cool for an eleven-year-old with almost no frame of reference for a normal childhood; he definitely has the "but the world should be FAIR, why is it not FAIR, we should FIX THAT" attitude I remember from my childhood and teens.

Two days ago my Kindle phone app broke. I asked it to open a particular book and it got hung up in an infinite loop I couldn't disrupt even by force-stopping the app, closing it, and restarting my phone. So I uninstalled and reinstalled the bloody thing, after which I had to manually go through and remove a whole mess of books from my home screen and re-download the thirty-odd books I am in the middle of reading or intend to read soon. (I nibble at books a lot.)

I have been working on a Paint-by-Number project for the past few weeks, which has been very psychologically helpful. See, I've been having trouble doing anything creative-creative, like writing, but I still want to Make Things, and paint-by-number pictures do a good job of giving me that nice serotonin/dopamine boost of I Made A Thing without requiring me to, you know, actually design anything. (I have also had to mix and rejigger some of the paints due to either errors in packaging or just shades that were too close to each other, which is a small thing but does make me feel a bit more like I am supplying some creative input and not just a pair of hands. *wry*)

I got the bus version of my NFE fic posted, so that's good. I do want to tweak it some before the collection goes live, though.

I have a plan for my Remix Revival assignment, but it involves some canon review so I've been working on that rather than outlining or writing just yet.

A few of my peppers have started to ripen. \o/

This past Sunday, my congregation held our annual Sundae Sunday bash in Stewart Park, where we had enough space to be somewhat socially distanced (and were also outdoors). This was welcomed with great enthusiasm -- I think as much because people are hungry for in-person gatherings as because it was a way to meet our new interim minister and, you know, eat ice cream sundaes.

(I think I've mentioned before that Ithaca is the birthplace of the ice cream sundae, yes? Pay no mind to any other towns and cities that try to claim otherwise. Also, it was invented by a pair of UUs -- the minister of the time, and the church treasurer who owned a local soda fountain. So we celebrate that historic event every year. :D )

And I think that's about all I can be bothered to dredge up and write down.

After I finally managed to convince Amazon's rec algorithm that I like both lesbian romance and space opera, it kept pushing Gideon the Ninth at me, which I have heard various people both adore and bounce off hard.

So rather than purchase a copy, I put a hold request in at my local library system for their one ebook copy. That was about three months ago (I was, amusing, ninth in the hold queue), and a couple days ago my download link arrived.

...

I dunno if I'd say I love the book, but I'm certainly enjoying the heck out of it. It is gloriously tropey in ways I like a lot, and it's hitting my loyalty kink hard.

Also, even if I didn't already know Tamsyn Muir used to write Homestuck fic, I think I would have suspected that very strongly based on some of her character tropes and narrative voice tricks. That both amuses me greatly, and strikes me as one major reason some people bounce off the book, because the narration is a very specific tossed salad of dead serious to memey to sarcastic, then whiplashing back around to dead serious, and while it's mostly in moderately tight third person, occasionally the narrator steps forward for an omniscient sentence to better foreshadow plot/irony/drama.

Anyway, I hear the second book is a headtrip, which I am looking forward to. (This time I've put a hold on a paper copy, because I would once again be ninth in the hold queue for the library system's only ebook copy of Harrow the Ninth, and I don't really feel like waiting another three months to read it.)

1. Gave blood! It's extremely frustrating trying to find a blood drive that fits into my schedule these days. The only times I have free are Tuesday, Sunday, and very early Saturday mornings. Nobody runs blood drives on Sundays, and for reasons that escape me, almost nobody within twenty miles of Ithaca runs blood drives on Tuesdays, either! So it's either wait for a rare Tuesday drive that falls within my eligibility schedule (that is, more than eight weeks past my last donation, but not more than twelve weeks or so because what is the point of wasting time?), or try to find a Saturday drive that starts in the morning instead of around noon.

This time, it was 8:30am, and I had to drive to Trumansburg, but it was worth it. :)

2. Finished creating a spreadsheet for Mom Boss to use to sort which tenants get what renewal email. This was extremely frustrating for two reasons. First, I had to create a Rent Manager report from scratch and it took me three tries to figure out all the fields I needed (and also for Mom Boss to remember some fields she hadn't requested the first time), and then I had to combine them because I'd already edited stuff on the first version and didn't want to recreate the wheel on each successive spreadsheet. *sigh* And then, I had a couple columns that I had to fill in by hand because the information was locked in .pdf files within Rent Manager instead of entered into searchable fields. (One item doesn't even HAVE a searchable field where we COULD enter it. This is one of the main reasons the Collegetown office prefers to use FileMaker, which is a lot easier to customize and also to export from.) But I triumphed!

3. Took down all the staging materials from a studio that rented yesterday and moved them into an as-yet-unrented studio. I am proud of that rental. That was 95% my work. :D

4. Steamed broccoli, and then chucked a bunch of it into my leftover pad see ew from lunch. The local Thai place on the Commons does good food, but as with a lot of American versions of recipes, they don't include nearly enough greenery. So I ate all the provided greens (gai lan, I think?) with my lunch portion, and supplemented with my own greens for dinner.

Note: when I say dishes don't include enough greenery, that's not a criticism of authenticity or anything. Nor is it a request to have a dish that's mostly veggies with just a hint of meat for flavor. I like meat! I just also like vegetables, and I feel they ought to be on at least an equal footing, leaning toward 2/3 veggies to 1/3 meat. American meals lean toward 2/3 meat and 1/3 veggies, and sometimes don't even get past 3/4 meat and 1/4 veggies, which is kind of sad. Meat can stand up for itself! You don't need to insulate it from other ingredients!

...

Anyway, moving on.

5. Audiobooks continue to be a thing. Last week I finished listening to David Barrie's Supernavigators: Exploring the Wonders of How Animals Find Their Way, and have now moved on to another Great Courses series: Introduction to the Qur'an by Prof. Martyn Oliver.

I liked Supernavigators, though I think it suffered a bit in audio version from a lack of clear text dividers. After a while I concluded that the sudden non-sequiturs toward the ends of chapters were likely a sort of... oh, an addendum or a tangent on a similar theme; there just wasn't any spoken "header" to set them off so they felt a bit jarring at first. Also, David Barrie goes for a big thematic reach in the final chapter which I felt was A) not justified by the rest of the book and B) really not thematically in keeping with the rest of the book. It was like a lovely dinner where at the last moment they give you a mint right after you've eaten something citrus flavored. There is nothing wrong with mint! It just doesn't work in that position, you know?

Anyway, I have never actually gotten around to reading the Quran, but it has been on my "someday" list for a long time. I figured it might be helpful to get some context before diving in: hence the Great Courses series. Thus far it's been both interesting and informative, though I suspect it was recorded as a DVD course first and released for audio-only as an afterthought because there are occasional lengthy silences in the audio track where I suspect some visual display is meant to bridge the gap.

6. I gave in to temptation and ordered another tiny clementine tree earlier this week. It arrived today, and I will take yet another stab at keeping a tree alive. (My last one died for reasons I have learned from. The one before that is still alive, though I'm a little worried that I may not have managed to give it enough drainage despite deliberately working to mitigate problems I've had in that direction with previous tiny citrus trees.) I have basically given up on keeping succulents at this point (aside from my jade plant, which is functionally immune to death), but I am going to master citrus plants if it kills me in the process. One of these days I will get it right!

...

Now I am going to do some more tax prep continuing education and go to bed, because sleep is extra important when you're recovering from significant blood loss. *wry*