getting to know our tenant

Our ability to move in properly still rests on finishing boarding up the wall to our tenant's side and our side of it still isn't finished. We're gonna hopefully buy the remaining lumber and some sound insulation today, and then we'll be able to tape over the seams and then we can (possibly skim coat?? or at least paint) that whole wall, and then we will be able to move the giant cabinet from the middle of the livingroom into that corner where it is going to go, which will enable us to rearrange the livingroom furniture so there will finally be room for the armchairs in here.

We've been over to our tenant's side helping her move furniture, hang and put together bookshelves, etc, three or four times this week, which is very nice. She's so easy to talk to and it's great getting to know this intelligent and wacky seventy-something queer lady. Yesterday I painted the topcoat in the boarded-up-doorway alcove which is going to be a bookcase on her side (her kitchen); one of the things we're gonna obtain today is shelves to put in there. Apparently she has enough cookbooks and stuff to fill it up. Cool.

Example: one of her exes, a lady who used to be her psychotherapist (decades ago?) and then confessed to falling in love with her while they were having therapy (!!!) whom she later dated and then broke up with but who apparently primarily calls her for... relationship advice???? nowadays??? and she's like "Ugh, rejecting that call, I have NO interest in being a relationship counselor for an endless string of online dating attempts". SO MUCH TO UNPACK HERE!!! It's amazing. Every conversation with her is like that. Also she got out a giant Nelson Mandela flag that she bought in South Africa in the period of his first presidential campaign and she told us it used to hang over her kitchen table for a long time and she once published a literary fictional "conversation over tea in my kitchen between me and Nelson Mandela" (in some kind of magazine?? It sounded like written in Swedish??)

We've been lighting the woodstove daily because the temperature has dropped outside - it snowed yesterday, but it's +4 today and melting. Still 17 inside, though. She has a spare radiator she offered to loan us though (she doesn't need it, it's overly warm on her side as mentioned, and that's with the radiators mostly turned down).

Fandom malaise

You know when you find a surprisingly great fanfic, usually an au, novel length or novella at least, that would still be great if you didn't know the canon? I really want to read something like that. Failing that, a fandom that's new to me but has tons of fic in it already so there's plenty to read and lots of variety to choose from, but not old enough to throw me out of the story with since-vanished fad tropes and clichés.