A Welcome Gentrification
An inverse-gentrification following the exodus of the degenerates.
Riley drew some cats on the whiteboard on our fridge the other day; and I came along some time later and made a minor alteration.
See if you can spot it...
On Monday the 18th, I could somehow just tell it was going to be a magical day. For starters, it was beautiful outside...
And also? Hopalong was leaving—and taking his 1992 fashion sense with him...
Not even the arrival of... let's call her Safety Serena... could darken my day...
No wonder Hopalong got out of dodge in such a hurry ;)
And then?
THEN?
You'll never guess what happened next!
Oh my God; were these degenerates finally moving out?!?!?!?!?!?
First, Serena gave her underlings a quick safety lesson...
Meanwhile, Kitten and the molerat were missing all the fun: Athennia had taken off work to take Riley for a dentist appointment—mandated by her virtual charter school (because that makes total sense).
—the
But eventually they arrived home too—looking downright déclassé with their thorough lack of fashion sense.
Kitten brought in the mail; so I checked to see if there was anything good...
I wondered what Riley's fridge-cats thought of this; so I went to check...
Wow.
That was at 3:15 P.M. And they wouldn't touch the mattress again for more than an hour. Here's the update at 4:27 P.M...
The move was an all-day fun-fest that continued well into the evening...
This was just after 8:00 P.M...
Athennia made us French toast and bacon for dinner (with pancakes for the molerat, who insisted on being a non-conformist)...
And, after dinner? We enjoyed what was quite possibly the quietest, most serene evening anyone in the world has ever known.
No club music.
No tribal chanting or voodoo priestesses.
No bowling.
No hooligans showing up to ring the downstairs doorbell excessively or bang on the windows.
Nothing.
The Ghana-rrhea had been cured at last.
It's not like their unpleasantness is a derivative of their ethnicity: It's simply a derivative of their staunch determination to conduct themselves like complete sacks of crap for more than a year straight.
The next morning was equally beautiful.
No more of the banging and commotion of half a dozen people (or more?) putting on their head-condoms and their tablecloths to go out into society at 5:00 in the morning.
No squabbling in primitive grunted syllables as 11 of them fought over who was getting in the shower next.
Nothing at all.
...Well, except for the pile of trash they left next to the dumpster for our maintenance guys to get stuck dealing with...
Whoops. Too bad they're on camera dumping it there in violation of the terms of their lease. I guarantee that'll be a fine of a few hundred bucks.
We settled on Burger King for dinner... but I couldn't resist knocking on Jeff and Lillian's door on our way out.
We all had a good laugh—and it was nice, for a change, to be the ones creating the ruckus in the stairwell instead of being the ones subject to the ruckus in the stairwell.
Getting in the car to head around the corner to Burger King, we confirmed that the troglodytes really had vacated: The blinds were open and the apartment was as empty as the space between their ears...
And then we were at the home of the Whopper...
One of our coupons had bestowed upon us a free beverage with our meal; and so I said I'd split it with Riley and settle for Coke since I know she likes that.
But I had wanted left Coke; and before I knew it, Athennia was dispensing right Coke into our cup...
The rest of the night was indeed ruined. Nothing even remotely worth reporting on.
Movin' on!
Wednesday morning, I heard the apartment complex's maintenance guys doing a walkthrough downstairs with the woman from the front office...
And while I'm sure we'll never know specifically what she was commenting on, I still heard her comment loud and clear...
How do people LIVE like this?! GOD!
Alright; so, what am I charging them?
Also, the difference between renovation noise and troglodytic assclown noise is that renovation noise can't be helped: unlike maximum tenancy that could've been respected, or loud mouths that could've just been closed at the appropriate hour, or doors and drawers that could just as easily have been shut softly, power tools are loud by nature, and remodeling work tends to hit the floors and the walls and reverberate through them accordingly.
So, while I may find it unpleasant, I won't have to deal with the anger component of this technically doesn't need to be happening and shouldn't be happening, but neither the landlord nor the police are willing to step in and do their job.
I can just put on some headphones, shrug, and let it roll off.
Brody also called me on Wednesday, to tell me that our USDA loan officer Kirstyn is now quibbling with him over the price of the house... because his numbers are $5,000 lower than hers are.
Yes, really.
Lower.
The problem is Kirstyn.
It's always been Kirstyn.
I whipped up a batch of tacos for dinner that evening; and then Athennia helped Taylor with some of her manufacturing homework.
On Thursday, Taylor made an emergency vet appointment for one of her cats—and had a little taste of adulthood when the clinic told her they wouldn't accept any animal that didn't show up in a carrier.
Then again, two years in with these cats—which, you may recall, were plucked from the woods as kittens—and Taylor has also never had them even once to a veterinarian to see what kind of diseases or parasites they may or may not be carrying.
That's enough of a no for me, personally: I don't need our carrier coming back full of fleas or ear mites or some shit. And, with Lucky being FIV-positive and having a heightened risk of getting seriously sick even from something trivial?
Yeah, no.
Incidentally, we had just received a new carrier (for Odin) from Amazon about 10 minutes before Taylor reached out; so I suggested to Athennia that, since we already have two and didn't desperately need this one right at that exact moment, she could offer to have Taylor buy it off of us so she would have one going forward. And we could just order ourselves another one.
But, it was so... easy. So... logical.
Lou and Taylor swung by a short time later and I met them at our front door to give them the carrier—a bit perplexed as to how it was that Lou could get out of her chair and into her car and they could magically work together to get a cat to the veterinarian, but they can't seem to find a way to do the same thing and get to a grocery store.
Then again, who am I to judge: We caved and ordered Domino's for dinner with Riley later that evening.
And then Athennia and I finished the Season Two finale of Reacher.
A Reverse-Gentrification On Hold?
Angel called me on Friday with not so great news—although he had actually talked to Kirstyn on the phone!
Anyway, Angel had talked to the seller's realtor—who told him he doesn't think they're going to be signing anymore paperwork pushing settlement out 90 days at a time with no end in sight.
—probably someone
Yeah, so... Kirstyn explained to Angel that the USDA is receiving a minute percentage of their usual funding this year, and so they'll only be able to finance a fraction of the people they normally would.
—probably also someone
Yeah, so again... see, no matter how many times our builder Brody has reached out to Kirstyn and asked, "Hey, can you just give me a full list of everything—and I mean EVERYTHING—you need from me in the way of details for the house and the development work on the land?", she keeps doling out requests to him one or two at a time. And what's even worse is that many of them require input from an engineer, meaning that there's constantly a day or two of lost time.
Long story short? We've actually been working on this since 1956... but we're still not officially in the queue for even a chance at receiving a few pennies from the USDA's trickle of funding.
So, when Angel tells me that Mr. Whiny Pee-Pants is throwing a tantrum about pushing settlement again—which he has done every other time as well, even though his client (ahem, the actual land-owner) seems to be far more patient—I'm inclined to feel for him at this point.
I basically told Angel...
You know, we still love the property. We'd love to have it. But at this point, it's like the entire universe is telling us we're not going to get it.
And, up until a few days ago, I really, truly thought there was actually going to be a light at the end of the USDA tunnel; but, I no longer feel that way with any confidence whatsoever. I mean, Kirstyn has just been a completely incompetent sack of horseshit from day one... and even if, by some unlikely miracle, we got squeezed in and got funding, the USDA's demands are so far above and beyond a conventional lender's demands, that it would probably take an extra six months for them to conduct all their bullshit environmental studies and stuff...
So, honestly? If this guy's ready to walk and put the property back on the market, that is A-okay with me. But HE would be the one backing out of the contract at that point, and so I would fully expect to get our $2,000 deposit back...
'Cause, that was a "good faith" deposit; you know? No good faith? No deposit. That's my take on it.
It'll be a shame to lose the Kutztown property; but, let's face it: 99% of the work Brody has done on the house plans can be transferred to any property anywhere... So, maybe we end up waiting half a year or a year, and we plop a house down somewhere else that ends up being even better—perhaps even more than an acre, or perhaps significantly closer to our families than Kutztown is?
Who knows?
At least we're finally rid of the degenerates downstairs; and so, biding our time here will be far more tolerable than it would've been otherwise.
Friday evening, Athennia made chicken, broccoli, potatoes, and macaroni and cheese for dinner and then helped Taylor with some homework.
Somehow the movie Beetlejuice came up during dinner, and I said I had only ever seen parts of it on TV when I was probably seven or eight. So, after we took Taylor home, Athennia and I watched Beetlejuice. And I thought it was lame—because I think just about every movie I see is lame.
Then we spent a couple hours Saturday afternoon filling out an application for a conventional mortgage as a last-ditch effort to keep the Kutztown property. I'm not anticipating having any luck receiving the amount we're requesting: I think conventional rates are way too high right now for a lender to like what I'm expecting our front-end DTI to look like under a conventional mortgage.
But, only one way to find out. <shrug>
We made a sausage, tomato, and basil pizza for dinner and then started watching a show called Orphan Black that I've had on my bucket list since probably 2015.
And, with no downstairs neighbors? We actually cranked the volume loud enough to turn the closed captions off!
#winning
And in lieu of anything more interesting to round out this post, here are a few sky pics I captured over the past few days—absent any context whatsoever...
