got into work yesterday, and there was a message from the supervisor -- "the moving crew will be here late Thursday morning to move your office". Um. OK, then, I know what I'm doing today. Well, after I finish these other two tasks which I am in the middle of. And BC (who is back in the office with strict instructions to do nothing more strenuous than walk to the bathroom or the kitchen) is actually working, and so there's a lot of stuff that I can't pack. And there's a board meeting Tuesday evening, so there's no place to stack the boxes that I pack anyway.

So I finished the tasks I was working on, packed up my desk. Packed up the notebooks/etc on the small table. Cleared the tops of the filing cabinets. Packed the top shelf of the filing cabinet. Packed the top drawer of the lateral file. After BC finished checks, packed up the top of her desk. Called the IT guy and asked if he would be available to do the re-assembly of BC's set up (thankfully, he will be, at least for a while.)

I still need to go in either today or early Thursday and pack up the rest of the filing cabinets. And buy/assemble a shelf in the basement for the ballot boxes which are currently in the office. I don't want to move them more than I have to! I don't know if we'll be moving the other offices Thursday or not. I have the plan for our old office, but I don't know what C wants -- I think BC knew, but she didn't write it down, so hopefully she'll remember (I haven't asked).

A couple of weeks ago, I made a plan for the basement rearrangement, but yesterday I realised that we'd forgotten all the cruft that was on the side shelf in the upstairs closet, so I had to add a couple more shelving units to the basement plan. There is wall space for that, in two different areas. I think it would be best in a side room, but it could also go in the main room. Supervisor was asking about the basement rearrangement, and I said that we'd need a moving crew for at least a day, *after* they got the pile of rubbish out of the middle of the large room, and then we could start the sliding tile game of getting cabinets/shelves/desks into their "proper" places. And we could install the new shelving units, and then get the stuff out of the random cabinets/piles where it was stashed in January. Must remind the IT guy to go through the stack of old computer equipment, so we can move the desk it's on.

And there's an FCB concert this weekend, with a stage rehearsal at an offsite venue Friday night. And complete teardown between Friday night and Sunday afternoon. (I will not be unhappy if the board says that we won't be using that venue again!)

And my thumb still hurts, although not as much. I fear that moving will not help it much. Doc knows what the issue is, but doesn't know *why*, and is sending me off to a hand specialist who may be able to figure it out (with the caveat that there might not be an obvious trigger). She's pretty sure that she knows a remedy for it, but doesn't want to administer it before the specialist sees the issue.

- Doc called yesterday, following up on the conversation I had with the nurse on Wednesday. She decided that rather than sending me for an MRI which probably wouldn't show anything that the ultrasound hadn't, she'd send me off to a hand specialist and Zie could order an MRI if Zie thought it necessary. Both UMHS and Trinity are scheduling for early April. sigh.

- we didn't even get the running around to the banks finished before KB (the treasurer) had me signing checks. :)

- J's chorus is having a fundraising meal/Social Night at a restaurant in Ypsi. I wouldn't mind going, and chatting with people in the chorus, but J invited one of his friends whom I do not like to join "us". So I'm not going.

- J is not sorting his laundry, again. I get tired of it, and about every 12 months I remind him that I'd really like it if he did. He does it for a few months, and then it gets to be "too hard" or something, and I'm faced with a pile of laundry in the middle of the closet floor. Nevermind that there are two laundry baskets right there to be sorted into, and he's got to step over his heap of dirty clothes to get to the shelves.....

and two more appear; with even more lurking. Four boxes of papers to the shred bin, but I think that's mostly done, unless I find some extra copies of payroll lurking about (I found a couple yesterday when I was filing). BC went through the long-term storage, and pulled everything more than 8 years old, so now there's space in those drawers. BC is trying a new, eventually more efficient, method of preparing for the annual audit, but it's taking a bit of catch-up, and that's why my desk is buried under "originals to be filed", "copies to be filed", and "files to be copied then filed".

Construction on the new office space continues. The walls are done, the phone/network drops are done, carpet is down, floor registers are installed. Still need a thermostat and blinds and proper lights. And while the HVAC peeps have been working hard, they've still got a way to go. The rest of the runs and returns in the old space need to be installed, and they discovered a few more 'shortcuts' that need to be remediated. HVAC says that he should be able to move the furnace next week, so that's a big step toward completion. We've started discussing long-term storage plans for election infrastructure (voting booths, signage, privacy sleeves, mailing envelopes, etc) -- I think a couple of sturdy shop-grade shelving units will be fine. The stuff's not heavy, just bulky, and doesn't need "secure" storage. I think we should get a tiger cage for the ballots and election records (and bolt it to the exterior basement wall), but BC is dithering on that.

Neither band had rehearsal last week, so this week's rehearsals were fairly intense. I could wish that Livingston actually paid attention to dynamics without being reminded by the director. I'm getting a bit tired of Holst's First Suite, as both bands are playing it. The only saving grace is that Farmington is not really rehearsing it, more just doing play-throughs to get it "under our fingers" and get us familiar with the tempos he wants. Livingston wishes he could do that....

I did get the holiday lights out of the trees before it got cold, and discovered why one strand wasn't working -- the solar panel had fallen off the stake and was face down in the pine straw....

Ji is very annoyed with my inability to fix the weather. The wind we've been having makes it much less pleasant than it looks, and this annoys him. "what's this stuff! I didn't ask for cold breezes -- I want the sunny day I can see through the door!"

The project is mostly done. What remains is the cleaning up afterwards, which is apparently my job. The bathroom floor needs to be washed, not just swept; there is detritus in many corners of rooms; there are unused tools and parts lurking in other corners; the boxes that came in from the garage need to go back out there, etc. But that's not the "cool" part of the project, so J's not interested in doing it.

Especially since he's already mentally moved on to the next project, a late 1990s Honda Goldwing motorcycle that he's going to Roscommon to pick up. He's also in the middle of the long-awaited "put some sort of light on the driveway" project -- it requires putting a fixture on the garage, and we've only been talking about doing it since we finished the garage. Why it didn't get done when he was renovating the garage, I do not know.

I was able to find a useful shoe rack at Menard's, but I really do still need to get the one from IKEA -- it's got a taller space between the floor and the bottom shelf, so it's actually useable space there. It won't be a problem having shoe rack space, as there's no rule that says you can only put shoes on a shoe rack. :)

It's nice and sunny and warm today, but that won't last -- they tell us it's going to get ridiculously cold next week. I need to take the holiday lights down today, while it's nice (precipitation is expected tomorrow). There's no rehearsal on Monday (school holiday), and if it's as cold as they say it will be, I will skip Tuesday's (assuming that Howell doesn't cancel school due to the cold). I have to be in Mason at 9am Wednesday, and that's gonna be fun. It will be interesting to see what the car does in below zero weather....

We spent Thursday's office hours doing the file sorting that we'd been not doing because we were so busy with election and moving stuff. I have a stack of paper on my desk that needs to be filed downstairs, and another stack that needs to be copied for the auditor. BC has similar stacks. We took a piled-high banker's box of paper out to the shred bin, and when we actually get into the basement to work on the files there we will have much more.

{edit for grammar. sigh}

J started the bathroom demolition/reconstruction last week. (The old shower stall is being removed from the hall bath, and the space is being shifted to the closet in the master bedroom.) The same day, we started clearing spaces at work for the HVAC contractors. I am already tired of boxes everywhere....

Three elections worth of boxes are in the Clerk's office, one under my desk where it's almost-but-not-quite in the way; and there are other boxes on top of filing cabinets. Another year's worth of elections is boxed up and on the floor in the furnace room. They'll just have to live with it for the next four weeks or so (the space is quite large, and seems at least partially intended for storage of municipal broadband equipment). I only did one row of boxes down one side of the space, out of their way. BC and I went down on Friday and got everything off the top of the file cabinets and desktops and floor and sorted into Recycle/Shred/Trash stacks, with one box of "we need to see if we have copies of these before we Shred them, but we don't have time now". There are still two rooms of cruft that need to be sorted, but they aren't our responsibility. One is the treasurer's space, and one is Zoning's. We're still waiting to hear when the remodelling crew wants to start work on the office spaces upstairs, because we'll have more stuff to move then. In an ideal situation,, the HVAC crew will be done, and we'll be able to move most of the stuff from that closet into the basement, but that's a bit unlikely, based on the amount of work the HVAC crew has to do. It'll probably have to go into the shed, which is a faff -- either down a narrow half-flight of stairs and out the side door; or halfway across the building, out the front door, and then halfway around it. Nothing really heavy, per se, just bulky and hard to carry, and many pieces of it.

On the home front, everything had to be removed from the closet. There are boxes and stacks of clothing everywhere. And drywall dust, and broken chunks of drywall, and the old closet shelves+rods. The old shower is in pieces on the deck. (The closet will actually get painted now! Have no idea what color it will be -- there may be enough usable paint in the basement, or we may have to buy some. I think there is enough of the almost-boring-beige(*) left from the master bath for the hall bath.) We need to figure out closet flooring and cabinetry colors, too. And a layout, so we can get everything out of boxen and into the closet ASAP. I want lots of shoe cubbies (will also work for J's tshirts) and mesh drawers for sweaters and wear-to-work shirts.

(* -- I thought it would have more color in it. I did sizable test patches, and it was good, but once the whole room was done it was beige. kind of a taupe-y beige, but still beige. sigh.)

It's the coldest it's been this winter, but I'm not entirely convinced that it should be termed the "bitter cold" that the weather app said. It was cold enough that I was glad of my hat when I did the outdoor chores. I deployed the heated birdbath early last week, when the other birdbath was frozen solid (and I had time to go digging through various garage bays to find the basin and the extension cord). They tell us that it will warm considerably over the next few days. This is good, because now J can get the pump out of the pond -- the rill is completely frozen over, and it has the lovely 'running water under ice' effect. But I think it will get cold enough (eventually) this winter that the pond will freeze solid, and that will not be good for the pump.

Another positive of the warmer weather is that I can put up the outdoor Xmas lights -- they're solar powered, so as soon as I put them out they'll start coming on, and I don't like having Xmas lights on before Advent. I also need to replace the lights on the house -- they were not really very good lights when I put them up six or seven years ago, and they're really worse for wear now.

I have got my desk at work sorted out, and most of the voter list reconciling done. Next week, I think we (read "I") get to start moving things out of the storage closet upstairs so they can start working on it in January. The GC for the office renovation will also be GC for the HVAC renovation, so he will be a busy man. The entire HVAC in the old building needs to be redone -- there are so many things wrong with it! (But they all come down to the manager in charge wanting the renovation to come in fast and under budget, regardless of what the contractor said. And it's not his problem anymore, so it worked! Never mind that the twp now has to spend more money that it really doesn't have to fix his mistakes....)

At least it's not actually raining -- it's been doing that mostly overnight or when I'm at work this week. I did get rained on a teensy bit yesterday when I was out running extended errands -- hadn't done anything since before the election, so I was way behind, although we hadn't run out of anything. Only three cans of cat food left, though.

Today I need to clear the living room of all the things that I've just been dropping there to deal with "later". It is now later, so....

BC and I did a layout of the new office space (so they know where to put the outlets and the network and phone ports). Once I got the room plotted out, and post-its of the furniture sizes, it took about 5 minutes, and we tried a few different configurations. :) She was impressed. There's a desk in the corner with the person's back to the door, but as that's the second clerk, I don't see it as an issue -- that person will rarely be in the office by themselves. There is space to shift the desk away from the wall, but then that person will be between the wall and the desk. This may be preferable, I don't know.

And then word came down from 'on high' that they wanted a third estimate, and they wanted to ponder some of the results of the energy audit. sigh. It's not going to be plausible to replace two small gas furnaces (new one is 5 yrs old, old one is only 10) with a heat pump, especially if it means redoing the HVAC system in the entire building. [The HVAC in the old building needs to be fixed anyhow, because the person acting as General Contractor (to "save money") for the remodel 5 years ago screwed it up, and exactly how badly has now become clear. It was apparent shortly after the remodel was finished that there were issues, but the "GC" said it was fine. It wasn't, and still isn't, but BC and I went poking around in the basement/ductwork with a flashlight and chalk and figured out what was wrong. Short version? Penny-wise and pound-foolish. (or, as Papa used to say "you'll always remember how much you saved".)]

My TSax compatriot at Livingston will not be playing the Holiday concert -- his wife scheduled a "I gotta get out of this town" vacation for that weekend, so.... It'll be OK, although I will have to pay especial attention to Christmas Festival, which I'm used to playing in a different key. It's important to play a Bflat instead of a B, really it is. And I need to work on the flying-finger bits in Home Alone. (I needed to work on them anyway, because he was very clear that he wasn't gonna try for the 8th notes at 160bpm, much less the 16th notes.) And there's another piece where I'll probably be playing the 2nd ASax part -- both of the AS2 players are new to the instrument, and are scared of the accidentals and syncopations.

One positive from this result -- I don't have to worry about repercussions of being an election official in a state that he didn't win in an election he didn't win. (I heard from various sources that there was concern about civil unrest should he lose. He did lose in both the jurisdiction I work in and the one I live in.) (We had people decline to work the election because they didn't want to deal with potential fall-out. Our non-Trump Republican workers are all seriously thinking about retiring from working elections, because they don't feel comfortable with the R label anymore.)

We processed nearly 1100 absent voter ballots over the course of two days. It was a long two days. Tomorrow, we go in and deal with the things that didn't get dealt with on Tuesday -- clearing leftovers (baked goods and other treats - the meat/dairy was dealt with Tuesday) out of the lunchroom, cleaning and putting away the extra tables we put in the lunchroom, sorting secrecy sleeves, pulling papers out of binders and into file cabinets, moving old election records into long-term storage, etc. DC will be retiring at the end of the month, *and* the township will soon be beginning a remodeling project for the hall that will (ideally) give the Clerk's office more space, so it's gonna be "fun" for a while. Next week I need to remember to bring in the one-quarter graph paper so we can work on room layout. [Office musical chairs -- we're moving to a larger space that's being combined from an extant office (A) and a storage space; office A now will be sharing with C for a few weeks, but as zie is only in one day a week and this is the slow time for both A and C, it shouldn't be too onerous; then we move, and B moves into our old space and A moves into B's old space. B wants the windows. :)]

I skipped all rehearsals this week. It will be weird going back next week!

I had plans to do garden work over the weekend, and then the predicted "most areas will get half an inch of rain" turned into an all day rain with occasional stormy bits such that we got 2 inches of rain.

Monday and Tuesday were chilly (highs in the 40s!).

Monday's FCB rehearsal was stressful. The business manager (BM) had made a comment to PB (the NFHS band director) that made PB think that we weren't going to be rehearsing on Monday, so she had her band kids stage out of the bandroom for their Festival trip. Which is perfectly fair! But it really messed with my evening. *I* wasn't going to try and move their gear. The stage was set for a choir concert, and while I'll move risers and music shells, I will *NOT* move a concert grand piano without permission (at the very least) and preferably supervision. (BM and PB are in text communication at this point, trying to figure out a space to use.) We wound up in the choir room, which is considerable smaller than the bandroom. But everyone fit (as did most of the percussion). We had to take every moveable table out of the room, and scrounge chairs from various storage places in the music wing. And then we rehearsed -- down one BSax and two Tubas, with a concert in one more rehearsal. Then we had to put everything back where we found it. gaaah! (I don't get paid enough to do that regularly!)

Tuesday we processed incoming ballots. Well, DC did incoming ballots, I did outgoing ballots (applications come by mail, through the voter system, and voters can come in and get them), and BC did bills. I scampered out the door at 4:40 to make it to the PO before the mail left at 5. (DC was not yet done processing the 120 ballots that had come in since Friday. She apparently came in on Wednesday to finish them up.)

Then I went to LCCB rehearsal. (Thank Ghu I'm not playing bari in that band this time around. I didn't realise how tired I was until I got halfway to rehearsal.) But music is a thing I do, so I rehearsed well and made a few notes on my music. At this point in the session -- the concert is Sunday! -- rehearsals are mostly just run-throughs and picky bits. (there are still a couple of notes I missed, so I made notes to myself on the music.)

Wednesday I slept in. Then I sorted in the workroom and did some more in the laundry room. I re-thought the boot tray positioning, and the tray that I bought will work, just in a different place. (Upon further thought, I realised that my original plan for it was a bad idea anyway....) And I got the box of mealworms (for the birds) out of the hall and into the laundry room.

Today is errands and an evening at Hill Auditorium, and hopefully a cart or two of stuff out of the gardens. Between things that need to be cut back because they're dead and weeds that need to be pulled, there's a lot of work to be done out there. Maybe I'll do the groceries after the concert -- Meijer is still open then. But I do have a couple of local stops, so I do have to go out. Sigh.

whew. That was a week.

At work, we mailed over 1000 ballots this week. Monday AM, we finished the accuracy testing (three different ballot styles each had to be tested in two tabulators, each test takes about 45 minutes). Then we started the process of getting the ballots ready to mail. ack. fortunately (fsvo), somebody has to take the flats of ready to mail ballots to the PO, so the day usually ends about 4:30. I took the last flats into the PO yesterday (Thursday), then came home and sat down for longer than it takes to put on socks & shoes!

Monday, I had rehearsal in Farmington, for which I leave about 5:15. It's a long drive, so I always check with Google to see the best route. This week, there was a 60 minute backup on my usual route. Yeah, I'm going the other way.

Tuesday, I had rehearsal in Howell, for which I leave about 6. I actually had time to make dinner between work and rehearsal!

Wednesday, I had to be at the HS in town at 4:30. That was a weird staffing day, as Wednesday is not a usual office day, so we all had something scheduled that day, but all at different times. I left work at 4, came home and changed into my Band Mom shirt and 'layers suitable for standing around outside until after 9pm', and dashed off to town to work the Marching Band Exhibition. I had actually only signed up for the second shift, but I went early, assuming that there would be something for me to do, and there was. The people who were supposed to be doing that task for the first shift were too busy yammering about band trips and the tours that the specialty groups could go on to do the task they were signed up for.

SR claimed that the theme song for Michigan high school band was "it's a small world", as it seemed that every time she'd come across a new director/clinician, they knew somebody that she or I had worked with. Wednesday's iteration of that was one of the Western Michigan graduate assistants played with the Farmington band during his gap year between BS and grad school.

He came up to me with a slightly perplexed look on his face "do you play bari sax?",
"yes, in a couple of community bands."
"which ones?"
"Farmington mostly, but also Livingston"
"I played with Farmington for a season. I thought you looked familiar."
(I mean, who expects to see someone you met in Farmington at a high school football field in Chelsea? His confusion was not surprising.)

One of the band directors (who's been at every one of the shows) pointed out that most of the kids on the field for this event weren't even born in 2008 when we held the first one. sigh.

In other news (hurricane Helene), the telephones to the senior complex where my mother lives are down. She lives near Greensboro, NC, so this is not actually surprising. The house phone here rang with a call from her number, and when I answered it there was nothing there. So I tried calling her back, and got a fast busy. Yeah, that system is down. I'll probably hear from her sometime next week. Meanwhile, I'll try not to worry. They're in a stable part of town, well up a hill, so I don't expect her to flood out, but they'll undoubtedly lose power (the emergency generators will run out of fuel, and they'll have to prioritize the rehab wing) and have already lost phone. The only real source of danger from Helene for them is tornado or general disruption. They're not in a high tornado threat area, but that is subject to change.