Downstairs Neighbor S has decorated the house porch for Halloween.

Mostly this is fine -- pumpkins, plastic spiders, fake spiderwebs, a plastic ghost on the door, etc. I'm cool with all that!

The problem is the three motion-activated plastic witch figurines. When something moves within a certain radius of them (or maybe just in front of them; I haven ( Read more... )

In the "how is this my life?" department, I had an interesting experience last night.

I was out sprinkling crushed eggshells on my garden, as one does (plants need calcium to bear fruit!), and as I climbed the stairs to my back door, there was a sudden vrrrrrr-fzzzsht! noise and a small cascade of sparks from the electric cable that runs (inside a ( Read more... )

Things done:

1. Gave blood! \o/ This was at the local BOCES campus (I think it's officially the Tompkins-Seneca-Tioga BOCES?) where I donated last time. I could not get there effectively without a car, but with a car it's quite simple.

2. Activated my new credit card. (My old one was set to expire in September so the company mailed a replacement.)

3. ( Read more... )

Yesterday and today were kind of exhausting due to perfectly ordinary -- well, I mean, perfectly ordinary considering the decidedly not ordinary circumstances -- crunch time at work. By which I mean, we are now into the part of the year when we get swamped by the start of turnovers (old tenants move out; apartments get cleared, cleaned, ( Read more... )

Things done today:

1. Bought groceries, which included picking up my Celexa renewal (yay storebought serotonin!) and some vegetable seeds.

2. Bought 2 cubic feet of potting soil plus a refill of my 3-in-1 fungicide/insecticide/miticide spray. While at Agway, I ran into one of my old smoke shop coworkers whom I haven't seen in years. We both ( Read more... )

I got through eight more pages of the Narnia/Naruto crossover yesterday evening, for a net daily gain of 32 words. Yay progress!

Once again, a lot of what I did was cut extraneous words and rephrase things for better flow and more punch. The new words here are mostly a couple bits of "person does thing" text to surround bare dialogue, and a few ( Read more... )

I did not get nearly enough sleep last night/this morning, due to... I don't even know what it was, really. Some kind of intestinal discomfort that wouldn't resolve into either diarrhea or vomiting so it just went on and on and on, and kept causing a combination of queasy warm cramps and random stabbing pain.

Fortunately I still have a few ( Read more... )

Given that I have lost a fair bit of income due to Covid-19 and my consequently reduced hours both at Not the IRS (for the tail end of regular tax season) and at the rental company office (ongoing, no specific end in sight but I assume we'll be running short hours through June at least), tonight I updated my health insurance application via New ( Read more... )

Things I have done recently:

Friday:---Dealt with more lease guarantee forms. Began sticking labels on key return envelopes in preparation for distributing move-out information packets. That's going to be interesting this year. Also, apparently we are now encouraging tenants to participate in a sticky note window art challenge, for which I sent ( Read more... )

Stuff done today:

1. Cut my fingernails and toenails.

2. Wrote ~600 words of the Narnia/Naruto crossover, bringing the draft up to ~10,000 words. The end is in sight! (...And once I reach it, I will have SO MUCH EDITING, but hey. Fixing something that exists is always easier than creating something in the first place.)

3. Took my plants outside ( Read more... )