A Cold Day in July?
Riley and her boyfriend hit the mall. My sister hits 37. Our landlord hits a new low.
Running on Fumes
Well, on Wednesday the 17th the day Athennia has been warning me and Riley about for months finally arrived:
Our Tweedledum and Tweedledee maintenance guys managed at long last to complete the elusive remodeling project in the apartment downstairs...
...but that meant it was time for them to refinish the hardwood floors...
And so we spent most of Wednesday and all of Thursday involuntarily huffing the polyurethane fumes seeping up through our floorboards from the closed-up apartment downstairs.
Many brain cells perished.
Entire IQ points were likely lost.
And time will tell whether we've been Harrison Bergeron'ed enough to finally blend in with the rest of the thoughtless idiots around here—most of whom are so thoroughly brainless that they'd survive a zombie apocalypse just by default.
By Thursday night we were all high as a kite and had the munchies; so, when Riley lamented that she was craving some chicken and Texas toast from Raising Cane's, neither Kitten nor I thought that sounded like a bad idea.
Some rotund Pecos Bill-looking bozo walked right in front of our car as we pulled into the restaurant parking lot—and then proceeded to take his time crossing the street so that we had to wait before continuing to a vacant parking spot.
But I got him back when he came up behind me at the soda fountains and condiments station to get himself some ketchup a few minutes later...
Why, I sure hope this lid I've grabbed is in a kind mood; otherwise, who even KNOWS how determined it might be to just... not quite attach firmly to my cup, ever.
Since we were stuck waiting for our food to come out anyway, I may have made the lidding process wayyyyy more drawn out than it needed to be.
But Big Dipper didn't say a damn thing—and hopefully that was because he was well aware that he was being karma'ed... and that he had no one to blame but himself.
Adventures in Markansaw
Friday morning, Athennia texted me from work that she was unable to clock in on account of the big CrowdStrike incident that was actively crippling hundreds of airports, thousands of banks, and millions of schmucks running Windows around the globe.
My project for the day was to use my Mint PC to pick through and back up any conversations worth saving from my old chat server before I spun down the virtual Ubuntu box hosting it. (And, as usual, my Android phone was sitting a few feet away on the desk next to me all day.)
We had plans for Saturday the 20th to have dinner and cake at my parents' house for Kelly's birthday; but Athennia and I ended up being free Friday night as well, and so we decided to "crash" the dinner Kelly's family was having at my parents' that night as well.
I gave my mom a heads up that we were coming; but we managed to sneak in the back door and into the living room without anyone seeing or hearing us... until Liv happened to look up from her spot on the sofa next to Kelly and exclaimed, "Uncle KEV!"
We ordered takeout for dinner; and then Kelly and Steve offered to treat everyone to dessert from Rita's. I accompanied Kelly on the drive to go pick it up, and Liv came along as well: She was telling me about having met my parents' good friend Mark and his son-in-law Paul (who had recently been by to provide a quote on redoing my parents' deck), when she got stuck in an infinite loop...
Liv: Mark and Paul!
Liv: Mark and Paul!
Liv: Mark... and Paul!
Liv: Mark and... Paul!
Liv: Mark... and—
Me: Hey Stinks, I think it's actually Paul and Mark.
Liv: Huh? No. Mark and Paul!
Liv: Mark and Paul!
Liv: Mark and Paul!
Me: But Stinks, I think it's actually Park and Maul.
Liv: Mark and Paul!
Liv: Mark and Spaul!
Liv: Mark and Saul!
Liv: Markansaw!
Liv: Mark and Skaul!
Liv: Mark and Socks!
This went on for two or three minutes and progressively broke down in ways I can't even remember now, before it eventually devolved all the way into...
Liv: Paul and... Dink!
...at which point Kelly and I were laughing so hard, we had tears streaming down our faces and I thought she was going to crash the car.
The Mallrat Has a Date!
Before we headed back over to my parents' house Saturday evening, Riley had a date!
See, the molerat has had this secret boyfriend for more than a year now—which Athennia and I were forbidden from telling anybody about: a boy named Taro whom she met at the PSSAs last April and kept in touch with until they saw each other again at the PSSAs this past April.
Athennia and I each independently met Taro's dad at the PSSAs; and he had since passed along his mom's phone number as well, so that she and Athennia could coordinate a time and a place for the kids to meet up somewhere and hang out in person for a change.
We settled on the Willow Grove Mall as a suitable rendezvous point that was both midway between our households and not one of the top ten most boring places in America (like the Neshaminy, Oxford Valley, and Franklin Mills Malls have all become in recent decades).
So, Athennia and I spent a few hours hanging out and getting to know Taro's mom in the food court while Riley and Taro trawled all three floors of the mall to see what 2024 mall life had to offer.
We had a blast, and the kids assured us that they had fun as well. The only "bad part" was when Taro's mom texted him that she was hoping to get a picture of him and Riley before we left...
...which he must've immediately relayed to Riley...
...because 20 seconds later, she texted Athennia...
You KNOW I'm like an inverse Dorian Grey and I'll melt into a puddle of awkwardness if anyone photographs me!
What do I do?! HELP!
But, somehow we managed to convince her to let us just get ONE :)
Kelly's Birthday v. 2.0.1
Then we proceeded onward to my parents' house for the continuation of Kelly's birthday.
As always, Liv put Riley to work washing dishes in her kitchen... and forced the rest of us to stuff our faces with all the plastic fruits, vegetables, and breakfast meats we could pretend to eat.
Then my dad grilled barbecue chicken and my mom made potatoes, corn, and broccoli for dinner. And of course Kelly had requested my mom's homemade chocolate cake for dessert...
It's... Foul
After dinner, my dad and Steve sat down to watch the game—which was "P00P," as Athennia and I pointed out to each other simultaneously (being the mature adults that we are)...
This guy definitely smells it, too...
Hannah opted to listen to the game on the radio...
But Liv wanted to hang out with Pop instead.
Monday the 22nd, my friend Fotini came over for a few hours: I was supposed to help her edit a paper for publication; but it turned out that she hadn't even written anything yet... and so I set her up at our kitchen table to get started while I went back to the air-conditioned bedroom to continue working on my own stuff.
Our New Humidifier
Just before bed on Tuesday the 23rd, I happened to step in a random puddle on our bedroom carpet—which soaked clear through my sock in a mere fraction of a second.
Penny has always had a penchant for splashing the water out of her water dish; and, though I wondered how she had managed to splash so much water so far away from the bowl (a good 12-14 inches), I thought nothing of it otherwise, got the annoyed grumbling out of my system, and climbed into bed a short while later—hoping that the air conditioner would evaporate most of the water by morning.
Buttttt...
That's not quite how things played out.
When I got up in the morning, there was a full-on splash this time, as I stepped on a completely different part of the floor and found that the puddle had grown considerably throughout the night.
I think our... humidifier... is working better than expected.
And flooded, it was! The carpet was thoroughly saturated from the wall under the AC to a full five feet out to our bed—including all around Penny's food and water bowls, underneath our cat tree, and right up to my dresser.
It turned out that Athennia had already been planning to stay home from work because of a migraine anyway; and so she called our emergency maintenance line to report the issue, I moved my dresser and the cat tree to dry land... and (very begrudgingly) shut off the air conditioner.
We lugged our carpet shampooer out of the closet and teamworked the flooded half of the room—with Athennia providing forward momentum while I bore down on the shampooer with all my weight to force it down against the carpet and the underlying pad to suck up as much water as it could.
How'd we do?
I'd say that's at least two pints, and perhaps closer to three.
(On the bright side, the carpet hasn't looked this nice since Athennia deep-cleaned and shampooed the entire apartment with bleach after Ahlina finally moved out.)
In the meantime, the maintenance guys told Athennia they were simply "too busy" (their words) with the downstairs remodel today but they would "try" to squeeze us in if they could.
Why is a prospective tenant taking precedence over an existing tenant? ...Especially when Athennia has an unblemished 14-year track record of paying her rent on time and in full, even during the height of COVID when the government essentially told everyone they didn't have to pay their rent anymore?!
It completely boggles the mind. And not only do I NEVER forget things like that; but I had already noted that the parts of the air conditioner that needed to function were still functioning just fine: If I got hot enough that I couldn't go without AC, I'd be turning that bad boy right back on and would not have a single fuck to give if the landlord had no interest in addressing what would ultimately be their issue.
Payback's a Bitch
While we waited, we popped the unit open to try to diagnose the problem ourselves: After all, we'd been running this thing for two months straight with no issues at all; so it was rather strange for it to just arbitrarily start leaking out of nowhere.
The maintenance guys said they thought it just needed to be readjusted in the wall to tilt it back toward the outside; but Athennia and I suspected that a speck of mold or something had perhaps been recently knocked loose and clogged the drain outlet.
Whatever the case, here's how it looked back in May when we cleaned it out, versus how it looked now. Note the bone-dry tray on the left, compared to the full tray on the right, just one drop away from spilling over again...
We set up some box fans to get started on drying out the carpet, and I tilted the cat tree as well since that was also carpeted and the base had absorbed a fair amount of water as well.
At least someone was having fun: Odin thought he was at the cat-parkour olympics!
By some stroke of luck, Wednesday afternoon and evening stayed just cool enough that we got by without needing the AC; and then Thursday followed suit.
Athennia ended up calling out of work again on Thursday—and spent the entire morning and afternoon hanging out on our sofa and waiting for maintenance to show up, but they never did.
By Friday, it was back to work for her—although at least Fridays were one of the two days a week that the property manager Kayla was actually in the leasing office for a few hours; so we called her to complain about maintenance's dereliction of their duty.
Kayla was much more sympathetic to our plight, and assured us that she would see that maintenance came out sometime before the end of the day.
Sometime around this point I walked by our bed and stepped on a rectangular lump about the size of a modern phone under the carpet.
That's when I realized that there must have been so much water that at least one of the floorboards had warped within the space of a mere day or two.
Whoops!
So, after all those polyurethane fumes coming up through the floor a week prior, I guess our air conditioner had had enough and decided to piss itself in retaliation.
The maintenance guys said they didn't see any signs of water damage on the freshly-painted ceiling downstairs; but I guarantee there's damage in there somewhere between our floor and their ceiling.
But... we're not the ones who chose to ignore the problem for three days!
<shrug>
Conditioned Response
Friday evening, Athennia and I popped over to my parents' house to check our garden and harvest the excess of tomatoes I knew we'd have.
Then on the way home we stopped to grab dinner at Domino's and SaladWorks.
But first, we found ourselves behind this guy in the center of Langhorne...
Now, I'm not gonna put it in text on the blog... but I know how I read this plate... and when I said it out loud to Athennia, she confirmed that she had read it the same way.
So, we had a mild chuckle... until the very next traffic light, when I saw this Chevy in the right lane and whipped my camera out to snap another picture...
Athennia: Haha! Are you getting a picture of the "cox.com" now?
Me: Cocks dot... What?! No! I was getting a picture of the "MJS" because that's my cousin's initials and I thought it was cool. Holy crap—I hadn't even noticed that "cox.com" until just now!
And so, that was that: We were officially stuck in rush-hour traffic...
...and not just any traffic, but traffic whose email address was apparently FG_4ever@cox.com...
...which I could only assume was the universe sending me a message...
Context Is Everything
So, yeah... I did have two dudes in my bedroom late Friday afternoon:
Maintenance finally decided to show up at 3:46 P.M. (14 minutes before the end of their workday).
And, yeah; it was pretty hot and steamy:
Duh. We hadn't run the AC for the better part of three days at that point.
And, all in all, I liked it:
What can I say? They fixed* the problem... or at least the part that was our problem.
Now, technically, I wasn't an active participant so much as I was just sort of voyeuristically watching from the sidelines; but at any rate, here's photographic proof that two dudes were in my bedroom on 26 July 2024 ;)
"Leon handles the girth with ease as Ralph pounds his wood into the slick crevasse."
In all seriousness though, things went even more stupidly than I had anticipated:
Leon (on the left) showed up first, with a handful of scrap wood to serve as shims—which he started inserting underneath the air conditioner by attempting to hammer them in with the butt of his palm until I offered him the actual hammer from our tool box.
He lasted about 45 seconds before he just stood up and walked out without saying a word... only to return a minute later with a COVID face-diaper pulled over his mouth and nose. (Turns out he's allergic to cats and he'd forgotten that we have... well, one, as far as he knows.)
Then Ralph (right) showed up and took over the hammering duties while Leon kept the AC wrenched upward so Ralph could put about half a dozen makeshift shims in place.
Then Leon fired up the unit and told me to put a few paper towels on the floor under the unit and call them if we still noticed it dripping again going forward.
But, that internal tray has remained filled to the brim ever since, and we hear a lot of water dripping somewhere...
Whether it's going outside or down through the inside of the wall, I neither know nor care.
Not my problem, as long as the room stays cold.
Thanks for stopping by, guys. Let's never do this again sometime.
Low-Rent
I spotted Hardhat and his son sharing some quality bonding time in the back of Hardhat's pickup truck later that evening...
That's quality time right there: Is this how country singers are born?
That kid's gonna write a few albums' worth of material someday about his three failed marriages, before he finally makes it big with a ballad called "Ode to My Truck (Dealer), My One True Love."
Got an email from truck_me_now@cox.com: It's a message from my Ford dealer, Mike."
He said, 'Hey there, bud; long time no see. I was wonderin' if you like to wrestle.'
'And if you do, why don't you come on over? I'll be the mortar, and you be the pestle.'"
Catchy, eh?
Music and lyrics copyright Hardhat, Jr. All rights reserved.
In other news, after several weeks of putting up with the "party lights" in our living room, I finally decided to shoot a quick video...
Then on Sunday the 28th, we headed over to my parents' house for dinner. My dad grilled up burgers, hotdogs, and chicken; and Riley baked some delicious brownies for dessert.
And after work on Monday, Athennia met our new realtor Lucas a few miles from her job to do a walk-through of a house we were casually interested in.
At 784 square feet, it was definitely on the tiny side (even our apartment is 900 square feet); but it had the potential to be a jump to something a little cozier—and far closer to Athennia's job—for a couple years while we continue socking away some savings
Unbeknownst to us until the moment Athennia arrived, the current owner John is still living here... And so, it was Kitten's turn to have an adventure with two dudes!
Anyway, take a look...
The house 22 years old, the central AC compressor is busted, and we would obviously need a full-sized fridge instead of this little dollhouse version...
Also, the bedrooms would definitely be tight...
But anyway, the owner has it listed for $60,000.
And, after discussing the situation with Brody, he said he could probably get us into a brand new house that's basically an exact clone of this one for around $85,000. (Not that we'd actually consider shelling out that much for a house this small; but, I wanted to better gauge what this one might actually be worth comparatively.)
Given the age and the busted AC, I don't think this is worth more than $40,000 at most; but it's still a competitive housing market for the time being; so on Tuesday we put in an offer for $50,000—which I had honestly believed the owner and his realtor would be sane enough to accept immediately.
But, they must really think they're sitting on something special, because they decided to counter at $57,000.
—wintermute
(And, if they call us back in a week to say they'll accept $50,000, we're going to say no: The more time we've had to make our peace with not getting the house, the surer we've become that it's not worth anywhere close to $50,000, or probably even $40,000.)
Back to the drawing board!
PECO's "Reliability" Strikes Again
Wednesday the 31st, PECO sent out a notification to all their customers. I don't remember it verbatim, so I'll summarize...
As part of our ongoing commitment to "reliability," we will be shutting off your electricity yet again for the second time in this, July, the hottest month of the year.
We're sorry about any convenience we may have caused by not shutting the power off until now; but please rest assured that, as always, we are not happy until you are not happy.
Sincerely,
your fiendly neighborhood crony-capitalist power monopoly
Since the forecast was calling for yet another day on the higher side of the 90-degree range, Riley and I decided to get out of dodge and escape to my parents' house... where she took a two-hour shower, while I took the opportunity to dismantle my childhood bed (and finally trash the attendant mattress that's been totally shot since probably 2011 or so).
Putting the offer in on the house two days prior—and being faced with the potential reality that we'd have 30 days until settlement—reminded me that it will be scramble time when the day eventually comes that we do finally get out of here... And, with all the boxes we packed and lugged over to my parents' house around this time last year, we had no space left in my old bedroom with which to sort through what we've already brought (much less to bring over additional boxes whenever we resume packing).
So, getting the bed out of there definitely mitigated that for whenever that eventuality arrives...
My mom reached out to Kelly mid-afternoon about possibly doing dinner together; and so, Athennia came directly from work; and Kelly, Steve, and the girls came over, and my parents treated all of us to pizza that evening :)
Felineus sleepus
Finely, felinely, and finally, here are this month's pictures of our beloved cats...
...mostly sleeping...
...in the most asinine places...
Enjoy :)
