I don’t play the markets. I don’t own a business. I don’t even quite understand “the markets” or how one goes about deciding what to do once one’s gotten oneself into them. And yet, I’m always pleasantly surprised to find myself driving home from work between 6:30 and 7:00 when “Market Place” is on NPR.

I listen and wonder what “points” are and how they compare to percents. I hear about how close housing bubbles are to popping and imagine exploding spherical houses spraying cool bits of house all over suburban neighborhoods. And then there’s the whole international market in which the dollar closes down and the euro closes up and the yen… well, you never can tell with yen.

So why does it make me smile when I climb into the car, turn on the radio, and realize Market Place is on? Because Kai Ryssdal is the voice of Market Place and has been for a year and a half now. He doesn’t take things too seriously, and he always puts his own humorous twist on things. The way he delivers the news makes it seem so very accessible, and it makes him seem so very human. It takes an incredible amount of skill to sound that natural on the radio.

So I’ll keep having visions of popping houses and floating currency, and little by little I might even learn something, all because of a compelling voice on the radio.

Sometime close to 6:30 this morning, somebody in my building decided to hang pictures or build a bookshelf or something. 15 minutes later I got up. And at 7:00 Ms. Second Floor (the manager of the little paradise we all live in) telephoned me.

“Is that you hammering?” she demanded.

“No.” I replied. And it briefly crossed my mind that it’s ironic that I had thought the noise was coming from her apartment, and wondered if she was accusing me so as to cover her own guilt.

“It sounded to me like it was coming from your apartment.” She persisted.

“Well, it didn’t.” What more can I say? Should I say that it sounded to me like it was coming from her apartment? No. Probably not necessary. “I don’t know where it was coming from, but it woke me up, too.”

If challenged, though, how can you prove you haven’t been hammering? Would it be enough to point out that I’ve been laid up all weekend with some weird bug? How about showing that while I do own a hammer, I don’t own any nails? Not really. How would a little bug prevent me from getting up and hammering? And the nails would have already disappeared into the walls or furniture, so not having any more isn’t really proof. And why does she think that just because she’s the building manager she can call people out of the blue at seven on a Sunday morning?

And all this happened on a weekend when I’m particularly with her because she just sent out her first monthly apartment news letter. Here are some of the highlights.

From the “Change of Management” column:

I hope to get to meet everyone, and to hear your suggestions or concerns. I am a very caring person who strives to manage in a spirit of excellence.

Please take into consideration that I have 112 apartments to manage, and if you have an issue I will do everything possible to resolve it.

However I do not respond to angry callers or visitors. Talk to me with respect, and my team will try to resolve your problems.

Then under the heading “Friendly Reminders from Management” (which, by the way, is a two-column list of bullet points which are “just a few odds and ends things [sic] that management has been experiencing trouble with”), we learn that:

• we should remove lint from the lint filters in the laundry rooms
• children are no longer allowed to “play or linger in the hallways”
• pets will no longer be allowed because of a few “irresponsible pet owners” (I can keep my cat, but “will not be allowed to get additional pets”)
• that “there are issues concerning the cleanliness and unbearable smells of some of the apartments”
• and that “During the winter season to stay as warm as possible, make sure the thermostat is turned up to maximum” (Why would I want it to be over 80 degrees in here?!?)

And yes, she’s a childless, petless person who seems to think that it’s easier to ban things that annoys her rather than speaking individually to the few tenants who are actually causing problems. But I suppose managing like that would be too much, even for a caring person. And I can’t very well complain, if I am to follow the rules, because she doesn’t “respond” to angry people.

Oh, and this is my third week without the use of my bath because every week she tells me that “something came up” and they won’t be able to get to me until next week.

I love my apartment. I love my view of the pine trees. I love my little porch. But I hate my new apartment manager and her lies and her power trips. And even though I hate the bother and stress and expense of moving, I think I’ll be looking for another place to live before my lease is up in July.

I’ve always loved the idea of letter-writing. I grew up on a steady diet of Victorian novels, and the women in those books are always spending their mornings writing letters in their morning rooms before receiving callers or taking tea in their gardens. A few of these books even described those well-appointed writing desks, and I would pour over these descriptions and compare the many neatly-labeled pigeon holes, the pens and ink, the blotting paper, the stationery, and the trinkets of those desks with my writing utensils. It was a rather sad comparison.

I still have the same writing set that I did then. It is a green binder, a cast-off of my dad’s from a conference he attended, with one of those dangerous claw-like clips to hold paper, and pockets to hold more paper. I would collect beautiful stationery and store it in this nondescipt binder, and whenever I wanted to write a letter (which wasn’t particularly often because I’m so self-conscious about my horrendous spelling), I’d go find an old yellow pencil or ball-point pen and then scribble with my tortured handwriting while balancing this binder on my knees.

These days, I only pull out my green binder a few times a year. By far, most of my correspondence, such as it is, is in the form of emails and blog posts. And unfortunately, any of my friends can tell you that I’m very, very bad at maintaining a good correspondence even via these relatively painless modes. Even so, I write literally thousands of words every week that gets sent off into the ether, instantly arriving at it’s destination, beautifully spell-checked, and without any cost on my part.

And yet, this weekend I feel like I’ve actually accomplished something because I have a stack of correspondence by the door, stamped, addressed, and ready to be mailed. Granted, most of this stack is made up of bills and taxes, but two are actually letters (and I even have one more letter to write). Real life letters. Letters bearing my almost illegible writing and all my scribblings to obliterate misspelled words, letters that will not arrive instantly and that each cost money to send. But somehow this stack signifies a productive weekend, an accomplishment.

Now if I could just find a house with a morning room and desk… I probably wouldn’t write any more than I do now.

Woohoo! I finished my taxes today. And they were a lot easier than they’ve been for the past few years because a) I didn’t have any of those annoying 1099 forms that automatically kick you into the longest tax forms there are, and b) I only lived in one state this last year. This means that I went down from about 6 or 8 schedules and the long 1040 form to absolutely no extra schedules, the medium-length 1040a form, and (like I said) state forms for only one state.

The only reason it took me as long as it did today was that I was working on making a spreadsheet for myself so that next year I can fill in a few numbers in a spreadsheet and it’ll give me all the numbers to fill in on my tax forms (a mini-tax program on the cheep). I can even have this thing tell me whether to itemize or take the standard deduction without wracking my brains every year! (In all fairness, my dad is the one who came up with the foundations of this spreadsheet, but this year I tweaked it to get rid of all the things he needed and I don’t, and to add all the things I need that he doesn’t.)

On the down-side, I’m now quite a bit poorer than I was 4 hours ago. I have to remember to talk to HR about taking more out of my paychecks. It’s a lot happier to get money back at the end of the year…

Church choirs are curious things. As the director, I get to work with some of the most friendly people in the church. These are the people that come to services every Sunday (people that travel a lot or don’t attend regularly generally don’t want to commit to a group like this where they might have to let everyone down by not singing with the group in church), and they’re also the doers in the church (after all, they’re committing to yet one more evening every week). But unlike a professional choir, they don’t practice at home, and they don’t worry too much about not coming to practice if their grand kids are in town or if they’re out traveling.

At my church, I have the added challenge of having very few people in the choir. 5 women sing soprano, 2 sing alto (one of whom hardly ever comes to practice), 1 man and 1 woman sing tenor, and 2 men sing bass (one of whom can rarely come to practice, and is also a tenor who’s kindly agreed to help me out by singing bass). Clearly, having one person decide to stay home to visit with the grand kids makes quite a difference as we practice four-part harmony on Tuesday nights!

But the week before last, another woman with an incredible alto voice joined the choir out of the blue. And last week, the janitor joined the bass section.

This janitor has gone out of his way to be near the choir whenever we practice for the last several months. He’d come talk to me while I was prepping for practices or picking out music, and he’d make reasons to do anything that wasn’t vacuuming in the sanctuary while we rehearsed. I’d asked him to join the choir several times, but he always declined saying that he doesn’t read music. He never seemed to believe me when I told him half the choir couldn’t read music. “Naw,” he’d say, “I’d just mess everyone up and slow you all down.”

Well, last week he gave up all pretense of cleaning in the area and just sat in one of the pews listening to practice. And half-way through practice, after much encouragement from me, our pastor (who sings with us), and the rest of the choir, he finally consented to listen to practice while standing with us and holding the music in his hands. He wouldn’t commit to actually singing, but he would hum along.

That didn’t last long. He’s such a quick study that pretty soon he established himself as a key bass voice in my now-augmented choir.

It’s amazing what two more strong voices can do in a choir. Suddenly all the music sounds exponentially better, and every learns their parts faster. I was so pumped after our last rehearsal that I had trouble going to sleep that night! I hope this is the beginning of an expansion trend.