10 days or so of... wait, why is it all paperwork?

• Voting: one of the first tasks after return from Spain was my mail-in ballot, with its annoyingly long list of 10 ballot questions. I figured out my opinions and dropped it off. Then later the town called me and asked me if I'm still free to work the polls on voting day! Yeah! I am psyched, I will do it. Turn that democracy crank.


• Crossword victory: another acceptance of a puzzle by the Fancy Newspaper! This one's a Sunday, which is bigger and pays more; I also think it's going to be considered difficult. The commenters who hoped not to see my name again are going to be disappointed... sometime next summer. In the meantime, I'm thrilled to get confirmation that I'm not a one-hit wonder; maybe this is something that's actually going to happen from time to time.


• Paperwork victory: with the bug, finally opened a new bank account for my building's condo association! This is the end of a long story involving a dead guy, a lost IRS letter, many phone calls and a couple of years. Emboldened by the victory, that same day I sent off forms to the IRS to update both my condo associations' contact information. (Did you know that's theoretically supposed to happen within 60 days of the contact person leaving a condo association? LOL. I bet it almost never happens.)


• Insurance expiring: as I come to the end of my COBRA's tail, I squeezed in one more annual checkup (with pap smear) and one more dermatology look-over. The derm grew quite suspicious of a large mole on my foot which, to be fair, I'd always considered a birthmark rather than a mole. So she removed it, which actually hurt a lot and continues to hurt somewhat. My final move is probably to use my vision insurance to partially cover a pair of prescription computer glasses -- which I've been living just fine without, but which should also work for reading -- and then I'll fall off the snake and onto my High Bronze plan.


• Condo budgets: I've pretty much figured out condo budgets for both my condo buildings for next year, with some talking yet to be done about how much slush to add in to each budget. I didn't want that to take me all week, but here we are.


• I'm doing some easy reading and some hard reading. In easy-reading news, I paused on How To Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying in order to read Dungeon Crawler Carl. This is kind of interesting since both of them play with bringing (violent, bloody) videogame mechanics into real life. Both make me uncomfortable, and in both cases they are fun reads and I wanna know what happens, so I'm gonna finish them. In hard-reading news, I'm nearly to the end of The Deluge, where the last several chapters in a row have brought deaths that really matter. In two more hours of listening I'll be giving it a devastated 5-star review... and going off to research climate change to see how realistic it really is. Ugh, it'll be hard to pick a new audiobook after that.

I also did some India trip prep; in particular, took all my typhoid vaccine pills. These had some, well, splattery, downstream side effects. But it's done, and I'd rather have a little annoyance at home than a serious disease while in a foreign country. Speaking of this, I also booked one more hotel and a Bangalore tour, which might be pretty much everything I can do in advance. What a project. People keep asking me why my planned trip is so short; gah. It seems quite long enough and complicated enough for me already, that's why.

Next week's excitement should include the completion (?) of my cottage renovation. The contractor sounded really confident about being done by Nov 1, and paint happened last week, but it's still all dusty and the appliances aren't installed so I'm fretting a bit. Will Birdie be able to move in time, or will she have to bounce around to friends' couches for a few days? I guess when I put it that way, it's not super high stakes.