A Septuagenarian Celebration

Friday the 8^th, Athennia made chicken, potatoes, and green beans in gravy for dinner. Then she and Taylor worked on manufacturing classwork for a few hours.

Later in the evening, Athennia and I watched the final episode of Vikings—which had by then been annoying me for its last few seasons, as the writers just had the characters doing increasingly bone-headed things that I found increasingly difficult to care about. <shrug>

Mom Turns Sixty-Ten

Saturday evening, the four of us joined my parents; Kelly, Steve, and the girls; and my Uncle Roy and Aunt Sue at T.J. Smith's in Warrington to celebrate my mom's 70^th birthday...

Athennia and I split a huge plate of nachos as an appetizer; and she ordered a pomegranate margarita, while I let our waiter decide whether to bring me a pumpkin-spiced somethingorother or a cherry fireball...

But, no sooner had we killed off the nachos, when our half-pound burgers arrived: I got a sriracha burger with avocado, pico, and pepperjack cheese...

Athennia and Riley got classic bacon cheeseburgers. And Riley mistakenly assumed that no one would be watching when she plucked the tomato off of hers ;)

I honestly have no idea what anybody else ordered—although my mom did comment on how good Uncle Roy's "chicken and shrimp" dish looked.

She asked him what was in it, and he gave her a classic Uncle Roy response...

Chicken... Shrimp... and everything you see here.

Midway through our meal, the staff remembered that the flowers on our table were a surprise gift from my mom's sister's family out in Indiana :)

Since Kelly and her family only live five minutes away from my parents, they had all had dinner together a few nights prior on my mom's actual birthday; and so, my mom invited just Athennia, the kids, and me to come back to the house for birthday cake after dinner.

We gave her our card, along with half of her gift...

We had also ordered her a copy of the first book in Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear series; but, the USPS (Unbelievably Slow-Pokey Service) did what they do best...

Let's get this thing from Illinois to York, PA in one night... and then just let it languish there in the back of a mail truck for a good week-and-a-half for no apparent reason.

Then we had cake together and visited for a bit before we decided we should probably head home to feed our starving cats.

Chatsnapped

Just as we were getting up to leave though, Taylor burst into tears and announced that she had been abruptly logged out of her Snapchat account and was unable to get back in.

Initial diagnosis?

"Somebody HACKED my account! I can't believe this is happening to me!"

Actual reality?

So, Taylor went from zero to full meltdown in about three seconds flat as the rest of sat there in shock...

Apparently, she was using Snapchat as auxiliary photo-storage space since her phone is full; and so, she had potentially just lost literally thousands of photos of friends, family, former pets, and other memories that she's unlikely ever to be able to access again—which, I grant, is a hell of a blow (especially to someone like Taylor, who places so much importance on things from the past).

There's no denying how much that sucks.

But...

While Athennia and I disagree on the logistics of how to try to break Taylor out of this... pattern that she's in, we agree that she has a problematic approach to framing reality through a lens where she doesn't really seem to have a sense of agency in her decisions or responsibility for the resulting consequences; but rather, "life" is sort of just a conveyor-belt ride through a series of misfortunes that just kind of spontaneously happen to her at the most inopportune possible moment.

So, after Taylor spent the entire half-hour drive home blubbering in circles about the lost photos, I was totally blindsided when we got inside our apartment and Athennia decided to use that exact moment in time to take the opportunity to offer Taylor an enormous bite of a reality sandwich...

She told Taylor that enough is enough and basically called her out on having engineered her entire life to be a house of cards... and then complaining when her life operates like a house of cards... and then framing every misfortune as some external universal force that strikes without any warning or action on Taylor's part.

For example...

Whew.

Eventually Athennia drove Taylor home to Lou's... and spent another two hours there blasting Lou for her childish antics as well—since being subject to Lou's behavior is quite possibly the one thing in Taylor's life right now that isn't 100% her own fault.

(And, it is nothing short of a damn shame that an almost 70-year-old needs to be told not to scream Taylor's name at 3:00 in the morning on a school night because Lou's simply too lazy to get out of her chair to go to the bathroom or get herself a glass of water to drink. But, that's the reality in that household—and neither Lou nor Taylor can survive on their own right now—so they're trapped in this weird anti-symbiosis where they're both the parasite and they're both the host at the same time.)

Then when Athennia finally got back home, she and I needed a new show to watch (having finished Vikings); so we settled on the first two episodes of Reacher.

Here's a highly-satisfying little preview...

Porch Pirates??? In THESE Seas?!?!

Sunday the 10^th, I snapped this picture of the sky around 10:30 A.M...

Then absolutely nothing interesting happened all day, until later on when we caved and ordered dinner from Domino's.

Even though it wasn't one of Taylor's nights to come for homework help, she asked if she could come over just to get out of the trailer on account of the stress of the Snapchat fiasco the night before.

And after that, Athennia and I watched Reacher pummel a bunch of mongrel-class citizens of all shapes and sizes. Fun was had by all... except probably the mongrel-class citizens who bled out after the fist of karma finally found them.

Then on Monday evening, Athennia picked up spinach- and artichoke-stuffed chicken breasts at GIANT and made some penne on the side.

...Aaaaand then we watched Reacher pummel a bunch more mongrel-class citizens of all shapes and sizes. Once again, fun was had by... most.

Odin woke me up Tuesday morning by walking across my face and pillow with his poop-paws, as usual—but, when I scooped him up to launch him back down onto the floor like I always do, he decided to dig in and get his revenge...

Then Athennia texted me around noon to ask if I could go down and grab the Amazon packages (plural) she had just noticed had been delivered sometime earlier.

No prob.

Got halfway down the stairs and saw one (singular) box on the stairs—meaning that Jeff or Lillian must've brought it inside for us as they were coming or going.

I carried it upstairs and left it inside our door for Athennia to open when she got home... and thought nothing of it the rest of the day: The box was on the larger and weightier side; so I figured, whatever it was that Athennia had ordered, the guys in the warehouse had probably just packed multiple orders into the same box.

Fast-forward a few hours, and Athennia arrived home and confusedly asked whether this was the only package... and then she pulled up the photographic proof of delivery that the driver had sent—which clearly showed a second package, in the form of one of those thin cardboard-esque mailing envelopes.

Worse still, that package contained a pair of one-terabyte memory cards Athennia had ordered for the kids' phones, to prevent lessen the likelihood of a repeat incident like Taylor's Snapchat snafu.

But ANYWAY...

We realized that our shiny new memory cards had been swiped from the front porch—either by a one-eyed, parrot-toting thug with an eye-patch and a peg-leg... or perhaps just by the wind.

So, Kitten and I went outside and took a gander around the premises; but, no luck. On our way back in, I said I was going to knock on Jeff and Lillian's door to see if they had any pertinent details about reported sightings of pirate ships recently.

Jeff—who, incidentally, works for Amazon—said he was the one who brought the box inside, but he hadn't seen an additional package. And, when we suggested possible thievery, Lillian immediately pointed to the mongrels in Apartment 13...

Battle Scars

I asked Lillian what led her to that conclusion; and she just shrugged and said, "I mean, they have like 15 people in there!"

Then Jeff chimed in and said the neighbors' endless parade of guests have resorted to ringing his and Lillian's doorbell when the people downstairs don't answer the door quickly enough.

And also? Two of them have asked him for his wifi password!!!

What a bunch of scumbags!

This kicked off an hour-long conversation where we swapped war stories—first about our dealings with the neighbors, and then moving into a riveting game of "Who Has the More Derelict Apartment?"

It was two Christmases ago that Lillian told us about the mice infestation they'd been dealing with (which we never had, since we have a cat army). Jeff invited us inside and proudly showed us the half-dozen patch jobs around their living room, where he'd drilled into the drywall, deposited industrial-sized quantities of rat poison into the wall, and sealed everything back up so he can repaint at some point.

Then they asked us if our heat works (yes, poorly—though that's fine by me) and said that they have zero heat whatsoever and have to run two space heaters around the clock because the landlord won't fix the problem.

Then we had a contest to see who had fewer operational windows that actually open and close without falling out of the wall. Imagine our victorious grins when we won—having one in five versus their two in five.

By that point, we were practically giddy and insisted they come upstairs to see the structural cracks running through the load-bearing walls in our kitchen and living room.

And, finally circling back to our lost and/or stolen package, Lillian insisted that we should call the front office and demand that they look at the security-camera footage around the time when Amazon claimed to have delivered our packages.

And Jeff, being an Amazon worker himself, said give it a day to see if the package turns up; and then just complain to Amazon and ask for a replacement if it doesn't.

Wednesday the 13^th, I was treated to a road crew outside our back window. We all know how quiet and fast-working those guys tend to be...

As usual, there were two guys doing actual labor, and 13 others just standing around talking (and holding shovels, in case the boss happened to drive by).

And, never mind that all the heavily-trafficked roads around here are going to shit: This particular parking-lot-alleyway-cut-through-whatchamacallit had been causing Cockbag and his merry men to bottom out for the past week or two; so of course they had to get someone out here right away to patch things up for Morrisville's upstanding denizens!

Here ya go: Exhibit A...

...aaaand B...

I think it's safe to say this guy lives his life a quarter mile inch at a time. And those are just two of many, many, MANY videos that I've amassed over the past year :/

Later that evening, Athennia made pesto chicken for dinner. It's delicious and reasonably nutritious; so it has become one of our staples in recent months...

Then Taylor wanted some help redoing the math assignment we had completed a few nights prior.

Redoing??? Why?! We got everything correct!

Yeah, but my teacher said we solved them using substitution, and we were supposed to use elimination.

Ah, right. So, given a system of equations like, say...

\(-2x + 6y = 6\)
\(-7x + 8y = -5\)

...we had manipulated one of the equations to isolate x or y so that we could plug its value into the other equation and then proceed to solve for the opposite variable... And that process is called substitution.

But now, the teacher wanted us to use an alternative method called elimination—in which we would manipulate both equations in such a way that we'd cause one of the variables to get... um... eliminated.

Thus...

\(-7(-2x + 6y = 6)\)
\(2(-7x + 8y = -5)\)

\(14x - 42y = -42\)
\(-14x + 16y = -10\)

So now if we add these together, the 14x and -14x cancel each other out:

\(-26y = -52\)
\(y = 2\)

Then we can pop this value of y back into either of the original equations to solve for x—which, I gotta say, sure feels like <cough> substitution <cough> to me... probably because it is!

\(-2x + 6(2) = 6\)
\(-2x + 12 = 6\)
\(-2x = -6\)
\(x = 3\)

What fun. We KO'ed every single problem, Reacher-style. And I'm not even 6'5"!

And that brings us to yesterday—the 14^th.

The woman in the front office returned Athennia's call about our missing package and told us that someone had found it blowing around the parking lot and actually brought it to the office!

We have no idea whom it could've been; but I can tell you whom it definitely wasn't...

Remember this knucklehead—who said he was going to "slap my bitch ass" back at the end of November?

I swear I could hear the gears grinding in his head—almost like saying "left foot, right foot" at the same time he was trying to do it was really taxing his brain.

Slow down, brain! My abacus ain't gots that many beads on it!

I suppose I can't fault him for dressing like he's 15, because that's how I dress too.

He's still driving his 60% of a BMW though. Apparently nobody's told him that 60% of a BMW is just a "BM"—and those aren't special: Most people take one or two every day and think nothing of it.

All right; enough with the poop jokes.

For all we know, Poop here is a perfectly ordinary guy who doesn't always park across two spots like a self-absorbed twat, and we just caught him on a bad night that one time...

And it's not his fault his BM is in such disrepair: After all that alimony every month, there's no money left for a buff-job and some Miralax at the body shop.

Plus, the guy clearly just learned how to walk sometime in the past few days; so perhaps we should cut him a break.

Away with you, BM-Double-Deuce. I've got other stuff to cover.

For dinner that night, we opted for Domino's yet again—and Athennia and I were treated to this delight on our way to go pick it up...

Classic Jersey driver!

In the right lane...

To make a left turn...

With no signal on, so it looks like he's going straight...

...Aaaand stopped dead at a green light, for good measure.

A few miles later, we encountered something else as well: It seems that some random Levittown resident got sucked into the sales pitch of a 4:00 A.M. infomercial...

So umm... yeah. This was an actual thing...

...and I honestly can't imagine any other way it could have gone.

<shrug>

Those flags are looking authentic though! Like, I would actually believe there's really a gas line buried there.

Hell, I'd probably call before I dug there—not because I have any respect for the fact that it's a law to which I never agreed to be bound, but because I'd find it useful to know whether or not my shovel was about to tap into something I'd find highly unpleasant that could kill me faster than a Reacher punch.

And finally, a special thanks to Jeff Bezos for our two complimentary SD cards that arrived on our doorstep today—bringing the count to four :)

And thanks to BM and his brotherhood of thugs for not stealing them ;)