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.

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.

Sunday was for sleep, which I direly needed. :)

Today I worked downtown instead of in Collegetown -- Mom Boss gave me preemptive permission to continue doing so for the rest of August, though she may steal me for several days in September as the Collegetown office starts the 2023-24 rental season. I got two apartments staged, photographed, videoed, etc. I am ready to do another three ASAP tomorrow morning -- I just need Maintenance to vacuum one and do some plumbing and kitchen stuff in the other.

(I have made the executive decision to work Tuesdays -- or at least Tuesday mornings and early afternoons -- this week and next week, in order to have a chance of getting through all the apartments that need new photos and videos. I want this project DONE, and done RIGHT, dammit.)

After that I think I may actually have a break from stagings on Wednesday? None of the apartments with Wednesday lease start dates are on my "to stage" list, though obviously if something with a later start date is ready, I will stage the living daylights out of it.

Tomorrow the forecast is for a rainy morning followed by a hopefully clearing afternoon. Regardless of the cloud situation, the interminable heat will FINALLY break -- we'll have a low of 59 F overnight!!! -- so even though Wednesday will have a high in the low 80s, it will still be vastly more bearable since the temperature will have to climb up to that point instead of using ~80 F as the starting point.

And now to bed. :)

I thought about staging an apartment today -- the whole photos and video rigmarole -- but due to its location, that would involve either schlepping a tote on a cart along two city blocks and then through the edge of a construction zone, or hauling that same tote up a flight of stairs, along the whole length of a building, and then down a different flight of stairs, not to mention shooting an introductory video segment outdoors in 97 F heat.

So I decided not to do that.

I'd already sweated enough running the freight elevator for two separate tenants, anyway, not to mention done a move-out security deposit inspection in an apartment where the AC had been turned off for about 16 hours and the place had consequently turned halfway into a sauna. :/

I am really hoping for a proper thunderstorm on Sunday night.

So today I spent 11am to 3pm staging apartments, taking photos and videos, and unstaging apartments. I also reviewed a bunch of packages lying around the mail room of one building in order to weed out items sent to tenants who have already moved out.

The heat was not quite as horrendous as yesterday, but very draining nonetheless, and my feet are still screaming bloody murder at me nearly five hours later. :(

Still, victory is sweet!

Tonight I have unboxed my newest tiny citrus tree, which will get a couple weeks to recover from shipment before I move it into a more permanent pot.

I have also received my NFE assignment, which is delicious and full of fascinating possibilities! >:D

...And I am still drained as hell, and will probably collapse into bed around 9pm, because holy FUCK I am tired and out of spoons.

(My peppers and zucchini, incidentally, should no longer be wilting because I watered the hell out of them when I got home from work. In theory Ithaca will get rain Sunday night, but it's been weirdly dry for the past few weeks, and I am not holding my breath.)

A few days ago I got an email from Delta saying one of my vacation flights had been cancelled (no details as to which), they would try to auto-rescheduled me, but I should contact them to make sure I got rescheduled onto new flights that worked with my plans.

This has been A Week, and I have come home basically fried and useless every day, but tonight I finally had a free hour and enough spoons to take action. So I looked up my trip itinerary on the Delta website, and discovered... that I was booked on the exact same flights at the exact same times as the last time I checked. Which was baffling, so I called Delta to see if I was missing something.

After about thirty minutes of hold music from some hell dimension, I explained the situation to a Delta agent, who confirmed that my itinerary was indeed what I had found on the website. She had no explanation for the email. Current best theory is a random computer glitch. I mean, it's possible it was triggered by the multiple schedule changes Delta ran me through in April, but that was literally a whole month ago, so that feels threadbare.

I am annoyed at having to emotionally deal with this stress over what turned out to be nothing. :(

...

On a brighter note, tonight I went to a very nice concert via NYS Baroque, featuring the Diderot Quartet and baritone Jesse Blumberg. They performed various Lieder by Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn, as well as a Haydn string quartet and a Felix Mendelssohn string quartet, with a Robert Schumann Lied for an encore. It was lovely, despite the continuing heat. (Today hit about 95 Fahrenheit, and was humid to boot. UGH. Tomorrow should have a high of about 85 F, after which a thunderstorm should break the heat for a few days.)