A Power Lunch, and Dinner behind Bars!

Global Warming Strikes Again!

Welp, when we woke up on December 14^th, we found that global warming happened and the entire East Coast is underwater just like Al Gore insisted it would be.

Whatever it is, water's not even a liquid anymore. It's a solid now.

And it's beautiful!

I snapped these just after 6:00 in the morning...

And then Athennia took basically the same picture shortly before noon...

We'd all been craving cheese steaks recently; so, for dinner, I treated to Bambino's... or at least I intended to. But I accidentally ordered us a trio of chicken cheese steaks instead, because I hadn't anticipated that the schmucks who developed Bambino's online ordering system would have the Cheese Steak item set to chicken by default instead of to steak.

Oddly enough, Bambino's steaks rank in within the bottom five worst cheese steaks we've ever had; but their chicken cheese steaks were in the top three.

Make that make sense.

Passing the Buck

On Tuesday I got an email from Home Depot, regretfully informing me that the shipment I'd been expecting that day would be late—ostensibly because UPS had dropped the ball.

Unsurprising. And we'll see what that's about in a moment.

But first?

Oh, how I wish that someone at these big companies would take a look at what one of their average messages looks like to those of us who strip all images and HTML code out of our incoming mail for security purposes...

What a mess!

But anyway, the situation seemed clear enough: Home Depot had done their part of the job perfectly, but shitty old UPS had flubbed the mission.

Let's see what they had to say for themselves...

I made a mental note to contact Home Depot later that evening and call them out on their lie; but then my package ended up arriving on time later that day anyway.

So, I don't even know what to think now.

Except that these companies should clean up their email content.

Planing and Gardening

Meanwhile, Joe and I fired up the planer again and spent a couple hours processing all the wood from the five pallets we've procured so far. That's all looking much more presentable now—though we'll still have to clean up the edges before we can look at gluing up a panel to make a coffee table or something.

(That's not a job for the planer though.)

Later on, Paula offered to treat the two of us and Athennia and Riley to dinner.

We got a late start, on account of Athennia making a pit stop at AutoZone after her headlight went out on her way home from work.

But after some deliberation, we settled on Olive Garden...

During dinner, Athennia lamented that she had not been able to replace her headlight after all: She'd taken a look under the hood and found out exactly what she needed to do, but she simply lacked the grip strength to do it.

So, being a lifelong car guy himself, Joe took a crack at it when we headed back outside right around the Olive Garden's closing time.

The two of them got the job done together... but not before the Garden went fully dark!

Later that night, our camera also caught Ruth sneaking Boytoy's Christmas present up the steps.

Spoiler alert: Judging from the noise and the strenuousness of her efforts, I'm pretty sure she got him an anvil!

On Wednesday the 17^th, Joe and I processed more of my parents' old deck boards until the planer blades were completely spent: The pressure-treated stuff really just eats right through them and dulls them in no time.

(Luckily, replacement blades are only like $14. Not a huge deal.)

I found out that Joe has been feeding a pair of stray cats next to the GIANT around the corner from his house; so, after sundown, we headed over there to drop off a meal for them...

...and then we watched The Boondock Saints.

Power Lunch... and Apologies to the Bubble Boy

On Thursday I enlisted my mom's help with Christmas presents, because she's something of a titan in the gift-wrapping world.

I'd say she's among the top 10 in the Western hemisphere, for sure—whereas most things I wrap on my own tend to come out looking like some sort of surrealist Picasso soccer ball.

In exchange for Mom's labor, I treated her to a four-star lunch at Arby's.

Later that evening, Riley asked Athennia if she had heard back from Nina about trying to set up a day when Riley and Taaro could hang out over their holiday break.

I'm pretty sure we've documented Kenny and Nina's general weirdness here in the past—like the time last autumn when we suggested all going for a hayride together at Shady Brook Farm, to which Nina responded with a resounding yes... only to renege half an hour later and insist that she and Kenny weren't sure that that was "the positive energy that was right for their family."

But anyway, Nina had in fact responded the evening before; and Athennia just hadn't had the chance to tell me.

You're going to love this...

Now, a bit of context is in order: Kenny and Nina seem to be under the impression that their son is made of glass, and they basically treat him like a bubble boy.

His phone is locked down tight.

They massively over-police what video games they let him play.

I'm not even sure that he's allowed to watch PG movies.

And, perhaps most insultingly, they send along a little Teletubbies lunch box with little snacks and his own special dinner every time they let him come over—despite the fact that Riley has eaten Nina's food on numerous occasions and lived to tell the tale.

So...

Just what was the unforgivably hurtful, insensitive, judgmental comment in question?

It happened at the dinner table (us eating our meal, while Taaro ate the Lunchables tacos that Mommy had packed). I noticed that the cheese was unusually white for a taco cheese; so I asked him what kind it was, and he said it was American—to which I replied,

American cheese on tacos?! What kind of dark sorcery is that?

Bear in mind that I inevitably rip on Taaro for something or another in this same fashion every time he's over. Always in front of Athennia and Riley. Always perfectly jovially. And, since I'm genuinely laid back with him in all our interactions, he knows full well that I'm just kidding around with him.

Taaro is very much like Kassie when he's here, in that you can just see the anxiety melt away when he realizes he can relax around us (because Athennia and I aren't psychotic like his parents or Kassie's are).

We're refreshingly sane, and rational, and predictable—and, yes, pretty liberally permissive, unless Riley were to give us a good reason not to be (which really isn't her style).

So, it's just so laughably bizarre, knowing that not only was Taaro was 100% unbothered by my comment, but that I thought it so thoroughly innocuous that I repeated it later that same evening in front of his dad when we met at a Wawa midway between us.

It turns out, then, that Kenny is apparently the one who got offended... over a mindless comment about the unusualness of American cheese on Mexican cuisine.

Had the roles been reversed and we'd gone to pick Riley up, and Kenny said something like, "You know this Martian of yours put ketchup on her Oreos?!" I'd be teasing her about that on a daily basis for the rest of my life.

But, no. Not Kenny.

This is a guy who has such a stereotypical chip on his shoulder that it may as well be an entire Pringles can: He walks around with a body-cam recording everything he does, while concealed-carrying a loaded gun (which, I hear, he's pulled out at least once on a neighbor, over an incident involving a lawnmower).

He claims to have decades of experience in virtually every sector of IT and presents himself as a Linux expert and a privacy aficionado—yet I've inadvertently caught him flubbing relatively basic concepts on numerous occasions just in casual conversation; and when Riley googled his name after she first met him a couple years back, she found basically every aspect of his life online—whereas she apparently couldn't find anything about me.

The dude's just an unhinged walking contradiction (and quite possibly a grandiose narcissist, to boot) so the idea that he and Nina would claim to be even remotely uncomfortable with Taaro coming over here—in a reality where we've continued to deliver Riley into their custody—is truly the proverbial riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

Riley was (understandably) pretty miffed when Athennia explained the likelihood that she and Taaro probably aren't going to be seeing each other in person any time soon—if ever.

But Kenny and Nina don't want to bring him here; and Riley knows as well as we do that I didn't say or do anything to even remotely warrant the apology they seem to be expecting.

It's not like we were ever super stoked to drive her down to Nina's in North Philthy, either. But even that just become a whole lot less likely.

Plus, there was some incident the last time Riley was there anyway—where Nina secretly got pissed that Riley had gone into the refrigerator at some point to get herself a drink.

Oh, and the evening wouldn't have been complete without a Ruth sighting. This time she went full Halloween...

47.76 Shades of Gray

Friday the 19^th was shaping up to be a pretty gray day: It looked like July outside...

Our neighbor Ruth upgraded her stupidly-wired floor camera to a full-fledged door-mounted cam—naturally pointed directly inside our apartment just like her old camera was, but this time even more so.

Is she really so stupid as not to realize what a show she was putting on for our camera, practically bursting out of her pajamas the entire time?

Incredible. I feel like I just inadvertently manufactured pornography!

Here's Part 2. Gotta love when she drops the thing on the ground around the 43-second mark!

Athennia promptly called the front office to share her concerns about our privacy—specifically regarding where those recordings might be going in the event that Ruth's camera happens to capture "our teenaged daughter walking around half naked through the living room."

But Athennia explained the fact that, while our camera is pointed at the stairwell and our welcome mat, Ruth's camera seems to be deliberately trained on our door; and so, just what are the rules when it comes to cameras that can see into other people's apartments—since there's no verbiage about such things one way or the other in our lease?

The matter still pends for now.

But, when she got home from that evening, Athennia couldn't resist letting Ruth know that we're gunning for her...

Dinner behind Bars

We had plans to take Joe and Paula out to dinner that evening as a thank you for all their dinner-treating generosity over the past few months.

We'd instructed them to come to our apartment—from which we would proceed onward to dinner at a top secret location.

Kitten and I had selected The Cage in Huntingdon Valley as a cool place that was new enough that Joe and Paula (who have eaten just about everywhere in a 300-mile radius) probably hadn't had a chance to try out yet.

I could tell that the hostess was visibly stoked to see me when I walked in wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap. The look on her face screamed,

His shirt claims he's an engineer; but I see no evidence of that in the rest of his overall presentation.

Then she addressed me like I was a lost feral cat who had wandered in from the cold.

I would've thought context clues alone would have been sufficient for her to reason her way through...

• this is a restaurant
• temporally, we're well within the societally-recognized realm of dinnertime
• the fact that I'm attended by a party of four makes it probabilistically unlikely that I've merely popped in to grab a gift card, ask for the bathroom, or any other task that would typically be a solo venture

But, it turned out that they did have tables there.

We even got one!

And Kitten did her best to fit all of us into the frame for a photo...

Our waitress was the polar opposite of the hostess: Polite, pleasant, knowledgeable, well-spoken. Helpful.

We started with some drinks. The espresso martinis sounded good to everyone except Athennia, who just had to be a nonconformist and get some strawberry-vanilla foamy thing instead.

And, I guess the hostess must've put in a word about me to the bartender...

So, Joe and Paula's drinks spelled out a lovely "Ho-ho-ho! Merry Christmas"...

...and I got the glass featuring Santa grunting a metric ton of ass-coal down someone's chimney...

Then we got appetizers...

I knew I'd be ordering pizza as my entree; but I ordered what was basically "also pizza" as an appetizer, too: A chipotle chicken flatbread loaded with jalapenos, bacon, and mozzarella cheese.

Here's a contrast between the two—although apparently I was either drunk by the time dinner arrived, or my pizza was moving at about 120 miles per hour...

We also got two orders of cheese steak roll-ups, which were phenomenal.

And then Athennia and Paula each ordered the almond-crusted salmon; and Joe got a southwest chicken salad the size of a manhole cover, with a bowl of soup that looked like a pumpkin pie...

Presents and Presidents

Back at the apartment we agreed to exchange Christmas gifts early, given the likelihood that we might not see each other again until after Christmas.

We gave Paula a welcome sign with Stevie and TT's likenesses on it; and, for Joe, well...

Joe and Paula gave us a bottle of Chardonnay and a lovely set of wine glasses, as well as a gift card to the Metro Diner (which they frequent).

I kind of dropped the ball on the picture-taking midway through the exchange; so we'll be sure to get pictures when we crack open that bottle and head over to Metro.

After presents, we had dessert: coconut-cream and chocolate pie...

More Snow?

On Saturday the 20^th we got some more snow—this time inside the apartment...

The code enforcer was not amused!

Then, having not spent enough on dinner the evening prior, we decided to get cheese steaks from Bambino's that night... but, cheese steaks this time. Not cheese chickens.

Master of Disguise

I'm starting to wonder whether our neighbor Ruth is actually CIA or something.

On Sunday the 21^st, she left her apartment as some sort of ghetto derivative of Cruella DeVille. Let's call her Cruella daHood...

...but then she came back looking like a professor of cultural studies at the local community college...

Truly a master of disguise!

Christmas Begins...

On Monday the 22^nd, our camera detected motion in the stairwell and I detected the landlord slipping paperwork into our door and Ruth's.

What could it be?

...A ruling on the camera situation?

...A heads up about the stupid code enforcer coming back?

No, it was a Christmas card—complete with a $10 Wawa gift card inside for some reason.

Meanwhile, some prick on the turnpike decided to smash his car into someone else's car in such spectacular fashion that they closed all three lanes... and so it took Athennia more than three hours to get home from work that evening.

So...

We ordered Bambino's yet again.

But dinner on Tuesday night was considerably better: It was our Christmas Eve-Eve lasagna at my parents' house!

My dad found some old fire brick logs in the garage recently; so he's been making fires for the first time in probably more than two decades.

Hannah was so mesmerized, we could barely pull her away for a photo!

But we got her eventually :)

It would seem that Liv has reached the age of "I'm too cool to smile; so I'll either throw up gang signs or I'll just sulk in every picture."

But then she found out that Uncle Kev has reached the age of, "Well, then I'll just take the killer Christmas present I bought you, and I'll give it to Riley instead."

And suddenly, by some Christmas miracle, Liv remembered how to smile again!

Meanwhile, Hannah has never forgotten how; and Riley is getting better at it every day :)

Dinner was great.

The lasagna was moist.

And Christmas is officially just over the horizon...