(no subject)
Jun. 1st, 2020 10:27 amI think I am doing a really good job of not totally losing my shit at someone this morning.
(no subject)
Apr. 4th, 2020 09:21 pmI owe Sovay (and perhaps the rest of you) some more explanations on Spare Oom, various friends more directly affected by the pandemic, and my AH Germany of 1920, but I thought I'd better begin with a general update.
It's been pretty quiet here. The roommates and I have more or less settled into our working from home routines. For me, as I think I may have said, this isn't actually THAT big a change, since 95% of my job is dealing with email and online databases, and EDC was ALREADY set up to have a chunk of its personnel working remotely--it's just that that percentage has now gone up to 100. Biggest challenges are (a) productivity (although I'm getting better at that, though that leads to (b) obsessing about whether you're working enough, with the result that the workday tends to expand,* and (c) most importantly, the fact that the non-ergonomic chairs are killing my back AND my knee.**
The roommates (and![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sorcyress) are trying to adapt to online teaching. I don't envy them. Online teaching isn't fun even if you're well prepared, have had lots of time to GET prepared, have good support from people who manage online learning all the time, and have students who specifically signed up for it. Obviously, pretty much none of these things is true for public high school.
Anyway, aside from that, things have been pretty dull. We've livened things up a bit by doing weekly singing evenings, by roommate M. getting out a "build it yourself Connect Four only with catapults" game, but mostly it's like...
...it's like one of those public holidays where schools are out and EDC treats as a "floating holiday", but I've decided to work a full day anyway (so that I can bank the vacation time for later), AND both of them are in, like, grading/grad. school hell so they're spending basically the whole day working too, except that (a) they're not nearly as stressed (very little grading!), (b) we're all doing a HELL of a lot more videoconferencing, and of course
(c) this is not one random Monday, this is EVERY DAMN DAY.
Without grading, visiting nieces, or ringing, though, weekends have opened up quite a bit. We've been going on a lot of long walks and baking a lot.
...I really miss ringing. And church, and seeing people face-to-face generally. Ringing's coming to mind, though, because one SLIGHT ray of light is that we've been doing virtual practices. Bryn and Leland cooked up a completely new online ringing program, and we had our first practice on it on Wednesday. So my skills may not completely rust, and it was great to be able to talk to everyone.
But it's not the same as being in the same room.
Hugs to you all, and be well.
* Fortunately--and despite the fact that he himself does this even when there ISN'T a pandemic on--our VP realizes that this is bullshit, and has told us to not obsess about working exactly to the clock.
** Pretty bad flair-up yesterday PM, seems to be better today. The four-mile walk this morning probably helped.
It's been pretty quiet here. The roommates and I have more or less settled into our working from home routines. For me, as I think I may have said, this isn't actually THAT big a change, since 95% of my job is dealing with email and online databases, and EDC was ALREADY set up to have a chunk of its personnel working remotely--it's just that that percentage has now gone up to 100. Biggest challenges are (a) productivity (although I'm getting better at that, though that leads to (b) obsessing about whether you're working enough, with the result that the workday tends to expand,* and (c) most importantly, the fact that the non-ergonomic chairs are killing my back AND my knee.**
The roommates (and
sorcyress) are trying to adapt to online teaching. I don't envy them. Online teaching isn't fun even if you're well prepared, have had lots of time to GET prepared, have good support from people who manage online learning all the time, and have students who specifically signed up for it. Obviously, pretty much none of these things is true for public high school.Anyway, aside from that, things have been pretty dull. We've livened things up a bit by doing weekly singing evenings, by roommate M. getting out a "build it yourself Connect Four only with catapults" game, but mostly it's like...
...it's like one of those public holidays where schools are out and EDC treats as a "floating holiday", but I've decided to work a full day anyway (so that I can bank the vacation time for later), AND both of them are in, like, grading/grad. school hell so they're spending basically the whole day working too, except that (a) they're not nearly as stressed (very little grading!), (b) we're all doing a HELL of a lot more videoconferencing, and of course
(c) this is not one random Monday, this is EVERY DAMN DAY.
Without grading, visiting nieces, or ringing, though, weekends have opened up quite a bit. We've been going on a lot of long walks and baking a lot.
...I really miss ringing. And church, and seeing people face-to-face generally. Ringing's coming to mind, though, because one SLIGHT ray of light is that we've been doing virtual practices. Bryn and Leland cooked up a completely new online ringing program, and we had our first practice on it on Wednesday. So my skills may not completely rust, and it was great to be able to talk to everyone.
But it's not the same as being in the same room.
Hugs to you all, and be well.
* Fortunately--and despite the fact that he himself does this even when there ISN'T a pandemic on--our VP realizes that this is bullshit, and has told us to not obsess about working exactly to the clock.
** Pretty bad flair-up yesterday PM, seems to be better today. The four-mile walk this morning probably helped.
Right, the other news. (And sorry this is late: I started this post like a week ago, and then never got around to actually posting it.)
Roommate #4 - a.k.a. the one we never see - moved out at the end of last month, so we started interviewing potential replacements. Fortunately, he was able to find several, and we now have somebody who's hoping to be at grad. school at Tufts in the Fall. She seems nice enough, although she's been here only slightly more often than her predecessor (I think a week elapsed between when she signed the paperwork and when she actually spent an actual night here), so it's hard to say for certain.
But that's not the big news.
The news is that all of this meant we met with our landlady a couple of times, and in the course of that it emerged that, contrary to what she'd said on earlier occasions, she's not going to raise our rent by much next year. Possibly even not at all.
And that, perversely, puts me in something of a dilemna. I mean, I hate moving. Likewise, it's seems relatively unlikely that I'll be able to find an apartment that I can actually afford that's as well situated as this one is. Double that if I'm trying to find a place of my own; and if not, I have to find new roommates,* which is something I view with extreme trepidation.
But in a weird way, I was looking forward to moving out. No, let me rephrase that: I want to move out. (I'm just not sure that there's going to be anything I want to move in to.)
---------------
My roommates are nice enough, but I often feel like I'm the only one who ever really cleans around here. And more than that: This apartment has been continuously occupied by an overlapping series of renters for...as least the last fifteen years. That's fifteen years since the carpeting was replaced; there may be stuff LIVING in the heating system; and let's not even talk about the back side of the fridge. Or the cracks in the flooring.
Or anything about the bathrooms.**
Plus of course all the upstairs bedrooms leak heat like anything, so that our heating bills are alarming even while I'm sleeping under a -20°-rated sleeping bag so I don't freeze.
And then there's my stuff. My roommates have plates and pans and glassware; the apartment has plates and pans and glassware; and that'd be great except that it means almost all of my kitchen stuff is in a box in the cellar somewhere. And I stress "somewhere": one of the roommates broke the one wine glass I had upstairs the other week, and now I can't even find where I put the rest of them. When I tried to locate them, I instead found a set of milk/margarita glasses that I'd forgotten I owned.
It should go without saying that this also applies to books.
So I don't know. I guess what I'm going to do (if I can get off my arse) is to look at the market and see what's out there and what I can afford. If it turns out that I can't afford anywhere where I'd want to live,*** I'll deal with this apartment for another year, save up some money, and hope serendipity happens. That's how I got into THIS apartment, after all.
*wiv' aaahlll tha' that entails.
** New!roommate has, admittedly, been working on cleaning the upstairs bathroom; but there's nothing we can really about the tiling, or the fact that getting the sink to train occasionally requires a plunger.
***I have been asking around among my coworkers a bit. Several of them rent, but mostly they moved into their current apartments years ago, and so don't really have a good sense of current market conditions. The one dude in the department who DID move recently was moving as a group with three of his friends; moreover, he says that one-bedroom apartments in his area go for $1500/month and up. And granted, that's in Newton, but still. I ran the numbers, and I can probably, technically afford that much; but there'd be no margin for error, and I wouldn't have a cent left over for savings.
Roommate #4 - a.k.a. the one we never see - moved out at the end of last month, so we started interviewing potential replacements. Fortunately, he was able to find several, and we now have somebody who's hoping to be at grad. school at Tufts in the Fall. She seems nice enough, although she's been here only slightly more often than her predecessor (I think a week elapsed between when she signed the paperwork and when she actually spent an actual night here), so it's hard to say for certain.
But that's not the big news.
The news is that all of this meant we met with our landlady a couple of times, and in the course of that it emerged that, contrary to what she'd said on earlier occasions, she's not going to raise our rent by much next year. Possibly even not at all.
And that, perversely, puts me in something of a dilemna. I mean, I hate moving. Likewise, it's seems relatively unlikely that I'll be able to find an apartment that I can actually afford that's as well situated as this one is. Double that if I'm trying to find a place of my own; and if not, I have to find new roommates,* which is something I view with extreme trepidation.
But in a weird way, I was looking forward to moving out. No, let me rephrase that: I want to move out. (I'm just not sure that there's going to be anything I want to move in to.)
---------------
My roommates are nice enough, but I often feel like I'm the only one who ever really cleans around here. And more than that: This apartment has been continuously occupied by an overlapping series of renters for...as least the last fifteen years. That's fifteen years since the carpeting was replaced; there may be stuff LIVING in the heating system; and let's not even talk about the back side of the fridge. Or the cracks in the flooring.
Or anything about the bathrooms.**
Plus of course all the upstairs bedrooms leak heat like anything, so that our heating bills are alarming even while I'm sleeping under a -20°-rated sleeping bag so I don't freeze.
And then there's my stuff. My roommates have plates and pans and glassware; the apartment has plates and pans and glassware; and that'd be great except that it means almost all of my kitchen stuff is in a box in the cellar somewhere. And I stress "somewhere": one of the roommates broke the one wine glass I had upstairs the other week, and now I can't even find where I put the rest of them. When I tried to locate them, I instead found a set of milk/margarita glasses that I'd forgotten I owned.
It should go without saying that this also applies to books.
So I don't know. I guess what I'm going to do (if I can get off my arse) is to look at the market and see what's out there and what I can afford. If it turns out that I can't afford anywhere where I'd want to live,*** I'll deal with this apartment for another year, save up some money, and hope serendipity happens. That's how I got into THIS apartment, after all.
*wiv' aaahlll tha' that entails.
** New!roommate has, admittedly, been working on cleaning the upstairs bathroom; but there's nothing we can really about the tiling, or the fact that getting the sink to train occasionally requires a plunger.
***I have been asking around among my coworkers a bit. Several of them rent, but mostly they moved into their current apartments years ago, and so don't really have a good sense of current market conditions. The one dude in the department who DID move recently was moving as a group with three of his friends; moreover, he says that one-bedroom apartments in his area go for $1500/month and up. And granted, that's in Newton, but still. I ran the numbers, and I can probably, technically afford that much; but there'd be no margin for error, and I wouldn't have a cent left over for savings.
(no subject)
Mar. 10th, 2017 08:38 pmIt’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is like you made a show about the latter rulers of Charn - who looked as though they "had done dreadful things and also suffered dreadful things" - and then declared it a comedy.
