The handyman came this afternoon, took our air conditioners out of the windows, and moved them to the basement. First, he met [personal profile] cattitude at our storage unit, so he could transport another bookcase and several boxes of books. We have also brought some boxes of books from the storage unit in a Lyft, but that doesn't work for moving bookcases.

We have now hired the same guy a few times; we also hired him and his brother to put up curtain rods and hang curtains. (The ceilings in this apartment are too high for us to have sensibly installed the curtain rods ourselves).
I went on NextDoor this morning, searched for a handyman to install our window air conditioners, and found someone quickly. A guy named Dani answered my message in less than ten minutes, offered to come over this evening, and did so. We are now equipped for whenever it gets hot again. (I had thought I might have to wait until after Memorial Day; instead, he said that he would like to come over this evening, because he's busy tomorrow.)

We won't need them in the next couple of days, but we've already had a couple of days when I needed to hang out in the study (where we have a free-standing air conditioner).

Adrian tried contacting the guy who had installed and removed the air conditioners in previous years, but he hadn't answered her messages after a couple of days, so we decided to look for someone else.

Dani asked us to post a review of his work, so I did, on Thumbtack, a site I hadn't previously heard of.
After three days of applying and re-applying a skin "healing cream," my fingers are basically back to normal. In particular, typing doesn't hurt my fingertips, my hands just generally look better, and I'm not carefully avoiding touching anything acidic (like oranges). Now I need to remember to keep using this lotion (though not a dozen times per day) even when nothing hurts and there's no obvious damage.

This is I think a recurrence of a problem I'd had in previous winters, possibly made worse by the couple of days of using space heaters while we waited for them to fix (replace) the boiler.

Also, we had someone come today to remove the air conditioners from our windows and carry them down to our basement-level storage area. This is the same person who put them in the windows when we first moved in (we never got around to removing them last winter, which was a mistake, because having them in the windows let cold air leak into our apartment). He again arrived later than he had originally said he would; he may just be over-optimistic about Boston traffic.
Major good thing: we now have an air conditioner. We ordered it on Amazon, it arrived late this afternoon, and [livejournal.com profile] cattitude installed it in the bedroom window. This is a small air conditioner; if we decide we want a larger one for the combined living/dining room, we'll need to pay someone (or some two) stronger to get it up the stairs and into the window. But just air conditioning the bedroom makes a big difference on hot days.

Minor good things: We have unpacked more books.

Minor not-so-good things: I decided to try vacuuming the porch, and discovered that a piece of our vacuum cleaner is missing. For values of "missing" that might include having been randomly packed into a box labeled "books" (as I think and hope my old external backup drive was), somehow put away in the attic without our noticing, or never unloaded from the moving truck and long since lost. OK, I guess we keep sweeping for now, and worry about the rugs later.

We set our printer up, and tried it first as a photocopier; it seems to do okay in black and white, but not in color. I don't know if this can be fixed with careful shaking and/or replacement of the color cartridges, nor whether it's worth trying rather than getting a new one. (I haven't needed to print much since we got here, and have been using the library, which lets me send a print job from my home computer to their printers for 15 cents/page.)
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