A Dog Day Afternoon, Then 13 More

After taking Riley to the carnival, we didn't have much planned in advance going forward for the next two weeks or so. Mostly just busywork and endless property research, with little bits of joy sprinkled here and there.

Friday night, I prepared chicken pesto with tomato and mozzarella again for dinner since Riley and Kevin both enjoyed it so much last time.

Then on Saturday, Kevin and I finally made time to tear down Riley's bunk bed (which she has been insisting for a couple months now that she has finally outgrown and is ready to stop climbing up a ladder to go to sleep against the ceiling every night).

We popped over to Home Depot and finally managed to get them to cut us some plywood we could use in lieu of a boxspring: We needed significantly less than the 4' x 8' sheet we purchased, but apparently Home Depot has a rule where there needs to be at least 12 inches of lumber on either side of the saw for every cut. So, we had to get creative about how we asked the guy to do it, and what could have been one long piece ended up having to be two instead (which were admittedly far easier for us to transport home).

Disassembly was just as fun when we got back: Several dozen bolts strategically placed in corners to ensure that we could only turn our Allen wrenches about 60 degrees at a time. (And we basically had to take the bed all the way down to its component parts. I don't know whether we would have been allowed to put something like that in our dumpsters here at the apartment, so Kevin's parents were nice enough to let us bring it over and put it out at their curb for trash!)

Meanwhile, we kept watching the sky as we neared completion. There was definitely a storm coming, and we knew we wouldn't exactly be able to get my trunk closed all the way once we'd loaded everything.

Fortunately, a random (and positively delightful) neighbor of ours saw fit to keep us company out in the parking lot:

She happened to be parked right next to us and decided that right then was the ideal time to let her two little yappers run around (un-leashed, of course) while she pushed an empty baby stroller around and ate a cup of yogurt (which we found discarded in the grass when we got back later).

Finally we had everything loaded and secured as best as we could with the four bungee cables I keep in my car. It looked like something out of Looney Tunes as we pulled away!

Luckily, Morrisville has apparently made a blood pact with itself to never pave its streets no matter what. So as we turned onto Woolston to get onto the highway, I told Kevin this would be the ultimate test to see if we had secured everything well enough.

Nothing budged even a millimeter :)

And, we managed to get all the way over to his parents' house and unload everything in time to beat the rain, though it hadn't even occurred to us that Riley's futon mattress (which was never used as an actual mattress per se) would need to be put in a mattress bag to go out for trash.

So we stashed that in Kevin's parents' garage for the time being, welcomed the long-awaited rain, and got on our way back home.

We came across this gem passing through Richboro on the way home:

Kevin and I were exhausted by this point, so we caved and stopped in at Qdoba for probably the first time since back in February. (It just isn't the same since our friends Larry and Nai'mah left without warning back in the winter.)

We took Qdoba home (since we got some for Riley too), ate a well deserved early dinner, and resolved to do absolutely nothing the rest of the day. (Kevin and I ended up binge watching five episodes of Lucifer and calling it a night around 9:30.)

Nothing noteworthy happened for two days, and then on Tuesday I brought home a healthy dinner of fried chicken and ice cream.

After dinner Kevin showed me a property he had found and begun researching earlier. 1.27 acres, nice and flat and open. All green and idyllic looking.

And, he gushed,

...it already has a brand-new sandmound septic system installed, which saves us an easy $35k just by itself.

Yes, my love, but where is it located?

Ermmm... Kutztown.

So, it'd be about an hour to work for me. Same as it is now, more or less, although obviously not on the turnpike.

Granted, that would be $200 in E-Z Pass tolls back in my pocket each month. But, we'd also be an hour and a half from our families.

Kevin assured me it was totally a "last resort" option, as some of our other favorites have begun to look less desirable the more we research them. (He keeps joking about how adept he has become at crushing our hopes and dreams, the better he gets at analyzing land every day.)

Wednesday, Riley went over to my mom's from late afternoon until shortly after 9:00pm to hang out with Taylor and Ahlina.

Earlier in the day, Kevin was out running an errand and sent me this:

So, this guy's hauling... Bitcoin?

Do you think it's a few hundred GPUs trying to mine new coins, or just a private wallet on a flash drive with hundreds of millions' worth that he's been holding since back in 2009—and a truck full of armed guards to ensure that nobody steals it from him in transit?

Or maybe he just cashed it all in for fiat! Hence, a giant truck to lug around all those precious "Federal Reserve notes" ;)

Thursday, I picked up dinner unannounced on the way home so I could surprise Kevin (with Qdoba) and Riley (with McDonald's). I went to the Qdoba by the Neshaminy Mall for a change, since that's on my way home from work. They PACKED our bowls to the brim:

Nothing too exciting happened on Friday, although Taylor reached out in a panic: She re-enrolled herself in charter school through K12 last week so she can complete her final year of high school next month. They had told her everything was great... and then days later, they sent her another email telling her how sad they were to see that she hadn't registered for the upcoming year. And so, she was freaking out.

In true K12 fashion, it turned out to be a bogus mix up in their system. A few phone calls later, we were assured that everything was fine and Taylor was already ready to go for the fall. (Fingers crossed that the school gets that memo as well!)

We took it easy on Saturday, although Riley has been requesting chicken gnocchi soup for several weeks now. So I decided to make that for dinner :)

Sunday evening, Kevin and I finally buckled down and wrote the thank you notes for our wedding gifts that we had been pushing off for two months.

He suggested that we make them more personal by writing them together, switching off at the end of every line/paragraph. We ended up having a lot of fun with them :)

Wednesday was Kelly's birthday, so we had plans to be at Catherine and Ron's house for dinner and cake that evening. But Kevin decided to take Riley over early in the afternoon to give her some pool time.

Midway through the afternoon, she somehow decided she wanted to go biking instead. (Exactly what Kevin wanted to do, I'm sure, while wearing a black T-shirt on a nearly 90 degree day.)

But...

He took her anyway :)

And here's a bonus cicada they came across on their travels:

Then evening finally rolled around, and Kelly arrived with the girls, and Steve and I made good time on our respective commutes from work.

And it was time to party... even if only in a low key sense :)

Liv wanted to read Riley a story. She turned to the first page and declared,

Those people are eating watermelon!

Riley took a look too... and matter of factly disagreed.

Mmm, not really.

Then she spotted Kevin trying to get pictures of them, and that was the end of that:

Catherine and Ron made chicken, potatoes, and zucchini for dinner, which were all delicious!

Then it was of course time for presents and cake!

And finally, Kevin and I received an email from the Department of Agriculture yesterday, telling us that their Rural Development program has approved us for a mortgage!

So much to do, so little time!

We decided to start with two episodes of Lucifer to finish up the second season before bed last night ;)