All Is Fair in Love and War
A peaceful week devolves into conflict.
This week started out peacefully enough, before steadily trending towards armageddon.
Sunday morning, Athennia made us pancakes for breakfast. Then she and I spent most of the afternoon watching a bunch of Spartacus episodes. And later in the evening, we played some Balderdash with Riley and had an unplanned "noise fight" with the neighbors.
Early Monday afternoon, I called Athennia at work to suggest that she preemptively call the landlord and give them a heads up about our trouble with the neighbors: In responding to their never-ending bullshit, I had just cranked my speakers louder than I ever have in my life... and, sensing that things were finally about to come to a boil, I wanted us to be the ones to hit first and hit hard (especially since the only time we create excessive noise is in response to their excessive noise)!
The woman in the leasing office was tremendously sympathetic to our plight and asked us to log any offenses going forward, as she was going to call the savages downstairs and tell them there had been numerous noise complaints against them.
So, you're going to ask a computer guy to collect data, eh? Don't mind if I do!
I spent a couple minutes repurposing an old cell phone into a security camera and situated it in our front window; and so, just that quickly, I had the same view of the parking lot that the landlord's cameras have.
And, the nice thing about having dual monitors is that I can sacrifice one of them and still get things done just the same ;)
So, I spent the day (and the rest of the week) logging every infraction I identified... and I identified quite a few!
Interestingly enough, while Athennia and I were primarily incensed by the constant noise, the woman in the leasing office seemed far more alarmed when Athennia mentioned how there seemed to be people coming and going at all hours of the day and night (not so much in a "they might be drug dealers" sense, but rather in a "they almost certainly have some illicit extra tenants living down there" sense).
But, the camera never lies. So, we would certainly see; wouldn't we?
After a few hours of surveillance, I'd amassed quite the cast of characters!
First, we've got "Hopalong," who drives a smashed-up Toyota Venza (with Massachusetts plates... despite the fact that he had already been here for a couple months when I moved in the weekend after Thanksgiving).
If you really want to, you can assume the sun is in his eyes and he doesn't look this dopey all the time. But, at any rate, he was rocking his camouflage Adidas shirt today; and so, since he was feeling extra spry and confident that he was invisible from the waist up, he decided to try his luck with multitasking! (With his IQ, he had about seven points to allocate to walking, and another six or seven for texting. And, he managed to pull it off... this time, at least.)
As far as noise goes, I don't think Hopalong is a culprit: He's constantly going out to hang out in his car for inordinate amounts of time; and I think he might hate the constant cacophony as much as we do! But, he strikes me as a total shadeball nonetheless, and I hate having to smell his cigarette smoke when it seeps up through our bedroom floor—and he definitely isn't on the lease—so I'm outing him anyway ;)
Next up, we've got "Baby Mama"...
There isn't much to say about her, except that Hopalong might be the father... which would serve to explain his presence here. (Also, as much as we've grown to detest these people, we actually have no issue whatsoever with the baby—whom we very rarely hear at all. And actually, we have a great deal of sympathy for him/her, upon seeing the severe bow-leggedness that has resulted from spending so much time on the mother's hip.)
Then we have "Sourpuss"...
Let's be honest here: If you had to go outside dressed in a tablecloth and wearing a shower cap on your head, you'd probably be miffed too.
I'm 99% sure this is the same kid as above; but, I know that Sourpuss and Baby Mama are two different people, because I've seen them both at the same time before.
Next up, we have the ever-charming "Shovelwhomps"...
She seems... just... delightful; doesn't she?
And we can't forget about "Decaf Unleaded"—who seems to be a hybrid of a Sunoco attendant and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz...
But, when you have to knock on the window every time you show up? You know you ain't on the lease... so, maybe you can knock those ruby slippers together a few times and go back to wherever you came from!
Finally, we close out the roster with perhaps the only person who actually does officially live here. For the record, I originally gave her the family-blog-friendly nickname "Blue" since she drives a blue Nissan SUV. But, Athennia outdid me with "Bitchface" (and, well, I'd just be baldly lying if said I didn't like that one so much better than "Blue").
But of course, Bitchface is thus far yet to appear without her little red-dreaded "Sidekick"...
So, let's see. That brings the official count to... seven adults and a baby in a 900ft2 two-bedroom apartment? Methinks that has to be in violation of their lease... and the fire marshal would probably be interested in this little clown car of a fire hazard.
Just for shits and giggles, here's the trash taking out the trash. A bit redundant, if you ask me...
...Aaaaanyway, getting back to our lives, we had dinner at Qdoba on Monday evening, followed by ice cream cones from Burger King for dessert.
Tuesday evening, Athennia and I finished the season finale of Spartacus: Vengeance (not the final season, but the last one I own at the moment), and we started watching The Tudors.
I've never shared that fascination people seem to have about royalty past or present—much less Henry VIII in particular—though I'm nothing if not an iconoclast; so, I have thus far enjoyed the portrayal of the politicking between the Church and the Crown...
It sure is interesting at any rate how Martin Luther criticized the concept of "indulgences" way back in the early 16th century; and yet, we can look at our present reality to find Bill Gates flying around on his private jet to lecture the peons about their excessive carbon footprint.
Weird how history always seem to rhyme (and tyrants always seem to tyrannize). But, we have our modern-day Luthers working to cancel out the Gateses, and the Schwabs, and all the other nebulous cretins whom history always eventually sees for who they really are.
Count on it :)
Don't know whether I'm happy or sad to report that the highlight of Wednesday was when I finally got sick of the spam calls my phone keeps getting for Athennia's ex, John—who, as I believe I mentioned a month or so back, is currently losing—or has maybe already lost—his house (because he's a shit at managing his finances, and he apparently hasn't paid his property taxes in about a century now).
The slew of debt collectors looking for him were easy enough to dismiss: They're liable to have to pay you damages under the FDCPA if they continually harass you; so, it literally just takes a single "!@#$ off!" to send them packing for good.
Yet, I've been fielding a few unwanted calls from bottom-feeding realtors interested in nabbing John's house on the cheap, and I don't really have a way of repelling them en masse. But, since everyone who is legitimately trying to reach me proxies through my "main" number that I give out to people, while everyone spamming me is using the number tied to the physical SIM card in my phone, I came up with a rather decent solution...
I set my secondary number's voicemail greeting to three minutes' worth of me tapping on my desk (because it wouldn't let me just record three minutes of absolute silence). But, after being distorted during transmission, the tapping sounds more like someone frantically plunging a clogged toilet—which just conveys my intended message even better!
"Get flushed, buddy! I don't want to talk to you!"
"Time is money," as they say; so, I expect that the number of people who will prove willing to sit through three minutes of plunging just to leave me a voicemail about some crappy house should drop to just about zero ;)
And that brings us to yesterday—Thursday...
Riley and I had both been craving chicken tenders for the past 48 hours or so; so, I ordered Bambino's for lunch and surprised her with tenders and onion rings (which she and I like, but Athennia doesn't).
Then Riley went over to her friend Kassie's house after school; and, around 3:30—a good hour and a half before I was expecting Athennia home—I heard someone coming through the front door.
My first thought was that Hopalong had come upstairs to try to break in, and I rushed out to the living room ready to bat someone's teeth all over the floor!
But it was Athennia, with her eyes full of tears; and she proceeded to tell me about what a horrible day she had (regarding, in a nutshell, some purely needless but absolutely intense family drama from her mom, her sister, and Taylor).
Since Riley was at Kassie's for the evening, I suggested we go out for Chinese food, and then I decided to give her an early Valentine's Day present. (She protested because her gift for me hadn't arrived yet, but I insisted that this was just the "decoy" gift anyway.)
Apologies for the tightness of these shots: I didn't get these pics until a few days later, and there are other gifts in the immediate vicinity that I had to crop out until we blog about them. No spoilers!
Athennia was still pretty upset well into the evening; but we wound down the night by watching a few episodes of The Tudors... because, even when your loved ones' behavior makes you feel like you have the worst family in the world, you can always look to Thomas Boleyn and feel a bit better about yourself.