the deep moans round with many voices

Tonight's forecast is for a hard freeze, down to about 25 Fahrenheit. So I brought in my banana pepper for the night, and my tiny potted fig probably for the season, figs not being especially cold-hardy trees.

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Last night I treated myself to dinner at a local restaurant, just because. I had the appetizer sized Caesar salad, the appetizer sized scallops in cream sauce, and a glass of white wine. It was very nice, and I also figured out a slightly less confusing route to reach the restaurant than the one Google maps wanted me to follow. :)

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At work, Ms. Random Numbers wants me to create a clear landing point for people who are searching for immediate availability and/or spring semester leases, since we have a lot of vacancies this year. The problem is that because of the way our website is structured (it is based on data pulled from our Rent Manager account), I cannot list an apartment as available for two separate time periods, and we are already a month and a half into renting for the 2025-26 lease year.

The website also has static pages that run through Wordpress. I already have a price chart up on the static prices page, but I don't think people use that much.

I can either create a new page or repurpose a non-used page to basically be a list of apartments with some prices, date, and links, but there's no way to make it easy to find. I guess at least it would be something I could point people at in response to email inquiries?

Anyway, the moral of this story is that you shouldn't build your website with Rent Manager.

Mr. Geniality was out sick again today, so I covered some more apartment tours, answered all the phone calls, and wrote a couple leases in addition to replying to inquiries, performing turnover inspections, and taking photos and video of staged apartments.

I do NOT have any tours scheduled for tomorrow, so even if he's out sick for a third day I should be able to listen to his backlog of voicemail and still get through all my normal tasks.

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In unrelated news, I had a bit of a scare shortly after 4pm when the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for my area!

Fortunately whatever thunderstorm element had started to rotate fizzled out shortly thereafter, and the hail and 70mph wind gusts passed a bit south of both my office and my house. On the one hand, severe weather is dangerous, so it's good we were off on the minor fringes. But on the other hand, I do love a good thunderstorm -- they're very cleansing, both literally and emotionally -- and I'm a bit miffed to have missed this one.

Ah well. The forecast for the coming week is just heat and humidity atop heat and humidity, so I am 100% certain there will be other storms.

We went to the Corning Museum of Glass -- Mom pointed out, correctly, that the thing about visiting wineries is that you tend to drink a bit of wine, and then usually want a nap afterwards, which would interfere with our relatively early dinner reservation.

So we watched a glassblowing demonstration, wandered through the scientific advancements part of the museum (Dad and I read all the plaques, watched all the videos, and played around with some of the devices -- Mom was more cursory and spent about twenty minutes on a convenient couch waiting for us to finish), and then headed to the 35 centuries of glass exhibit (where, again, Dad and I took our sweet time looking at everything while Mom was mostly off doing other things). Historical glassmaking is really cool, okay? Also, they had a working glass armonica with some headphones that played a recording of actual armonica music. :)

The museum had organized a game where they placed a small but distinctive glass sculpture in one of the exhibits, and if you found it and took a photo back to the admissions desk, you would win a small prize. I found the sculpture somewhat by accident, and won a sticker which is now adorning my laptop.

We had dinner at the Antlers, which is an excellent local restaurant. (I say "local" -- it's actually out in Varna, which is one of Ithaca's ring of hamlet exurbs -- but it takes under 15 minutes to drive there from my house which is local enough.) Mom had scallops au gratin, Dad had the porterhouse steak, and I had the Delmonico steak. Everything was unsurprisingly delicious.

With regard to presents: Nick bought me an art print I had requested, and Mom and Dad got me some useful gift cards plus a new saucepan to replace an old one whose non-stick coating was crumbling off.

Susan and Cat both called or texted to say Happy Birthday, which was nice. I also got possibly the world's funniest birthday card from my Aunt Cara. The front says Socially obligatory folded piece of paper for your birthday, and on the inside is the qualifier: With envelope. :D

Sunday morning we had breakfast at Café Dewitt -- I had their French toast special of the day (it sort of mimicked Honey Bunches of Oats? a bit odd but quite tasty), Dad had a deluxe fried egg sammie, and Mom had a ham-swiss-spinach omelet with a side salad. Then they headed south to New Jersey, where they attended a Superbowl party at my friend Susan's parents' house along with my friend Cat's mom. (I have always been a little confused as to why my parents ended up actual friend with MY friends' parents, but not really with Nick's friends' parents, but that's just how things shook out.)

Meanwhile, I enjoyed having NOTHING TO DO, and spent my afternoon taking a glorious nap and catching up on some reading, as well as watching some more videos for my Coursera class.

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Monday was pretty slow, just work as normal up in the Collegetown rental office. The previous new hire quit at the end of December because she got hired for a government job with one of the neighboring counties. It was the right choice for her, but a bit frustrating because she had been picking up the job well and had an excellent work ethic. Fortunately Mom Boss and Aunt Boss found yet another new hire in late January, who thus far seems to also be picking up the job pretty well. I have my fingers crossed that she will stick around for a while!

I managed to do laundry Monday night in case today's east coast storm did NOT miss Ithaca, but thus far we have seen no sign of snow. Over the past few days, it's been kind of funny to watch our forecast go from "OMG SNOW!!1!" to "2-4 inches" to "afternoon flurries, maybe a dusting will stick to the ground." The sky this morning was a bright and gorgeous blue, and I am beginning to suspect that even the flurries may fail to materialize. We shall see.

And now I will return to answering work emails.

Stuff that happened today:

1. I tried to clean a gross sticky patch on a bookcase in one of our vacant apartments. I was, shall we say, partially successful? I don't know what on earth that patch is composed of, but tomorrow I'm going to try again, this time with Goo Gone, steel wool, and some rubber gloves.

2. ( tedious work story )

3. I am currently reading Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen, because sometimes it's interesting to read scholarly work about one's own identity.

4. It has been SO HUMID in Ithaca, and yet no hard, cleansing rain. We do have showers predicted for tonight and Saturday morning, and I really hope they materialize.

Slow day today. I quite literally spent my first two hours at work doing precisely fuck-all before my brain finally kicked into gear and I was able to do Tasks. Not sure quite why I'm so tired -- perhaps the rain? -- nor why it's borked my brain instead of just making me physically draggy and sore, but I am not a fan.

I got no apartment staging done at all, due to weather, but I did knock through a bunch of annoying backlogged emails, and I spent half an hour sorting out some key storage nonsense, so that's something.

Annoyingly, some of the apartments I wanted to stage on Saturday are STILL not ready, but I think I should be able to knock two of them off my list, and I'm gonna at least peek in on some others to see where they stand in the turnover process.

And now I think I'm going to break my NY Times crossword victory streak and go to bed rather than attempt anything that requires actual thought.