28 Days Later
A blizzard and... Febru-where'd the rest of the month go?!
On Monday, February 16th, we headed over to my parents' house for dinner. I got this picture of Liv making funny faces for Aunt Athennia...
Wednesday the 18th, my mom and I had lunch together at the Metro Diner in Langhorne.
It was a lovely pre-spring day, and Pennsylvania's state flower had sprung up all up and down the highway!
Everyone drove very carefully so as not to trample them...
Thursday the 19th, Joe and I continued work on Paula's bathroom table.
We did a glue-up of the legs and the framing, got everything perfectly square, waited for everything to dry, and then took it back outside to notch out the corners of the shelves so they can sit on the framing...
Then, Saturday the 21st, we were back at my parents' for dinner: pork tenderloin, corn, and mashed potatoes.
The Blizzard
Sunday the 22nd, we got 21 inches of snow over the course of about 24 hours!
Athennia made beef stew for dinner, and here's a quasi-timelapse of the snow accumulation as seen through our front and back security cameras...
Funny thing about how our neighbor Rob's truck is in the first parking space in all these pictures: Another neighbor, Tits McGee, had parked us in the day before while she was lugging her groceries and laundry hamper inside just as we were trying to leave for my parents' house. And, when we honked our horn, she came out and gave us this bitchy sourpuss face as though we had inconvenienced her...
Fast forward to this evening: Our other neighbors The Jamaicans had a total of eight cars parked in the lot—making it impossible for anybody else to find a space within 100 feet. We had watched Rob come home and sit there idling in our parking lot for nearly 15 minutes waiting for one of the many non-tenant vehicles to leave, before he finally relented and parked over in Building 4's lot.
So, when we happened to see Tits McGee get in her car and vacate the first parking space half an hour later, you know Athennia scrambled to put on her coat and run downstairs to tell Rob to come out and steal her spot!
Morrisville had gone completely thugless by about 8:00 Sunday evening, and I was looking forward to enjoying the silence!
My heart broke for that poor stray cat though :(
The window washer did not keep up with the snow, but the plow guy did...
Then at 3:04 A.M. on Monday the 23rd, PECO saw fit to cut our power.
Our security cams don't work so well without electricity. This was all they could see...
Jarred awake by the sudden absence of all the white noise from the fans in our bedroom, I got up and ventured out to the living room...
Just as I suspected! The entire rest of the world still had power: It was literally just our building.
These two shots are actually three hours apart, at 3:00 A.M. and 6:00 A.M., even though they look virtually identical...
I also snapped this cool shot completely by accident...
Then I stopped to pee before I went back to bed... and that's notable only because I'm thankful that PECO is not in charge of the sewer system—a reality with which I wholly credit the fact that the toilet still worked when I flushed it!
Then, depressing the handle on your toilet while the "sewer" was "out"—which you can be sure it frequently would be—would result in absolutely nothing happening... Just like flicking a light switch.
Luckily, much smarter people seem to have designed the sewer system, and they stuck it way underground where very few things can affect it. Thus, you pretty much don't ever really hear about it failing.
Hint, hint, hint, PECO. Ignorant lazy fucks.
By 10:00 A.M., it looked like the bulk of the snow had already fallen...
Jeff and Keith were already outside cleaning off their cars...
So, we decided to venture out as well...
Jeff brought Turbo out, too!
But then The Jamaicans showed up... and I remembered from last time that they'd likely all be asking if they could borrow our shovel.
And, you know what?
...When you have EIGHT !@#$%^& cars parked here, even though your lease specifies a maximum of TWO?
That's a hard no from me.
So, Athennia and I wrapped things up and ducked back inside to leave them to their fate.
And, um... they pretty much behaved exactly as you'd expect uncivilized swine to behave—bottlenecking the entire parking lot by parking their cars all willy-nilly wherever they pleased...
Then we happened to catch these nutsacks from the building next door...
Hours later, Hoodrat finally bit the bullet and came down to shovel herself out...
...though, naturally, she just pushed all her snow in front of the cars parked on either side of hers, rather than moving it to the grass like most of the rest of us had.
Oh, and look who else finally deigned to show up?
He's hard to see in that second pic—even in his neon yellow vest—but PECO sent a technician out to trudge back into the corner of our neighbor's yard and stand there to think about his crappy behavior.
Good.
I hope he's learned something about how and where to install power lines for better uptime.
By sundown, it was almost like nothing had ever happened...
...You know, except for the fact that we STILL had no electricity.
We ordered a couple pizzas from Bambino's for dinner, and then called my parents to see if there was room at the inn—since our apartment was down to like 50 degrees and only dropping.
Naturally, we were about halfway packed to head out, when all the lights and fans flickered back to life.
Back to Normal
Thursday the 26th I worked with Joe again.
We stained Paula's bathroom table what should have been a lovely shade of maple; but I forgot that pine has a tendency to make most things come out looking like it's made of Doritos. So, we're going to have to see what we can do with that.
Then we cut a mitered trim for our coffee table from two weeks ago, to make it a lot more heavy-duty-looking.
I didn't get pictures of that; but I did get one of my new six-port battery charger...
Three of our batteries were so cold from working outside all day that they didn't even want to start charging right away!
Paula cooked us up some penne with hot Italian sausage and homemade meatballs for dinner. It was awesome!
And then on Friday the 27th, Joe and I worked again for a few hours—just long enough to slap two coats of [darker] stain onto the coffee table top...
Then he had a band rehearsal to go to out in Conshohocken... which, incidentally, would take him right past where Athennia was still at work.
(She worked three 13-hour shifts this week to make up for calling out Monday and Tuesday!)
So, we jumped on the turnpike and headed west!
Athennia's workplace is a top secret facility; but I figured, if Joe and I managed to sneak into an air-traffic-controller tower at an airport back in 2012, I should probably be okay laying low in the passenger's seat of Athennia's car for an hour and a half until she finished work.
And I was.
We decided to grab dinner at China Wok before we headed home...
...and because Athennia gets lunch there occasionally enough that the entire staff knows her, the owner gave us $40 worth of food for free on our way out, after the customer who had ordered it never bothered to show up to get it!
Meanwhile, Riley went to sleep over at Kassie's Friday night.
And yesterday was largely uneventful. Mostly just laundry and chores around the apartment.
Still got a few cat pics for you though, even if Penny has dominated them this month... to the point that Lucky doesn't even make an appearance!
Enjoy :)
