the deep moans round with many voices

Survived tax day. Was utterly useless at the rental office the following day, but I did manage to do some actual work on Thursday and Friday.

Packed a couple more boxes of books. Probably ought to assembled some more empty boxes and start sorting through clothes and kitchen paraphernalia.

Hmm. I should probably also weed my filing cabinet. I am 100% sure I don't need to bring all those papers with me to Minnesota.

But tomorrow is mostly for unwinding. I will resume productivity Sunday afternoon, after treating myself to brunch.

I got to the Collegetown office this morning and discovered there was no heat. We reported this to Maintenance, who sent a guy to fix the boiler... but we still had no heat. So they sent a second guy to come stand on a ladder and stick his head into the ceiling next to the fan, whereupon he discovered that the motor had died. Completely gone. Unrepairable. Needs to be replaced.

When will that happen? *shrug*

So we got two space heaters, which raised the temperature by perhaps 4 degrees Fahrenheit, but it was still miserable and my toes were slowly going numb even though my lovely oversized winter coat was keeping the rest of me warm.

Mom Boss and Aunt Boss left at 4pm and I closed up the office at 5pm, an hour early, because Collegetown is dead as a doornail during winter break and I prefer not to freeze.

Anyway, after 30 minutes at home to eat dinner and toast my feet on the radiator under my desk, I felt much more human and ventured forth into the dark and the cold to belatedly take care of my laundry. Everything has been washed, the air-dry items are home and hung up, and as soon as I hit 'post' I will head back to fold and retrieve the machine-dry items.

I think that is quite enough for one day.

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.

The Collegetown rental office was eerily quiet today. All of Collegetown was, actually -- and Ithaca in general was subdued. New Hire called out sick (Aunt Boss and I suspect it was stress/grief rather than germs) and Mom Boss stayed home and did a bit of remote work.

Fuck.

Anyway I have set up a monthly donation to the ACLU. Gonna look into some other options next week once I am less numb -- I need to pick things that don't require a big in-person time commitment (or making cold calls, or knocking on doors) because I will 100% flake out on that and it's better to find some activity I can stick with.

In a tiny silver lining it looks like my House district may have swung to a Democratic challenger instead of the Republican incumbent? The margin was very tight, though, so a mandatory recount may be triggered. We shall see.

Today's minor adventure:

So we have a freight elevator in one of our buildings, right? Mostly our maintenance staff use it to move trash and recycling bins outside without needing to stink up the passenger elevator (and also because you can fit so many more bins per trip), but we also let tenants reserve it for an hour when moving in or out. It's especially helpful for people who bring their own furniture, but also for people who just have a lot of boxes.

Normally we get one of the maintenance staff to operate the freight elevator, but I am also trained to run it in case of schedule conflicts. Which we had this morning. So I spent 9am to 11am helping a tenant move in. There are two reasons the move took that long.

Reason 1: he had hired a couple people to help move his stuff but they had trouble finding the location and showed up 30 minutes late.

Reason 2: this is the adventure part.

This tenant was bringing his own furniture, which mostly wasn't an issue since it was either disassembled or relatively small. However, he had an absolutely MASSIVE sofa. Getting the sofa out of his U-Haul truck into the freight elevator wasn't terrible. Getting it out of the freight elevator and into the hallway, however, was more of an issue. There are two doorways to negotiate, and the sofa, as previously mentioned, was MASSIVE. So the tenant and the movers played applied geometry for a while.

They got through the first doorway, spent five minutes judging angles, then attempted the second doorway.

I leaned in to help squish the cushions.

They s q u e e z e d through by the skin of their teeth...

and slammed the sofa corner into a fire alarm (one of those little emergency pull-boxes), set off the fire alarm for the whole building, and summoned the fire department complete with heavy suits and helmets and a fire axe.

We did call to report that it was a false alarm, but the fire department takes precautions anyway, which is an extremely rational choice under the circumstances.

Anyway, the whole pull-box has to be replaced now. It was absolutely smashed and could not just be put back together.

So that was my small adventure this morning.

(Other mishaps during this particular move-in included me having to shove 5 pieces of our own furniture into random empty apartments because a guy was laying new carpet in one unit and had obviously moved the furniture out... and consequently blocked the hallway. *sigh* And then there was the time the tenant was helping me close the freight elevator doors, lost his balance, and almost got his leg smashed in the jaws of the rapidly closing door. But! We persevered, nobody got more than bruises, and the fire department let all the evacuated tenants back into the building pretty quick.)