An Inconceivable Valentine's Day Weekend

This past Saturday morning, Athennia made me and Riley some pancakes for breakfast... and then she gave us our Valentine's Day gifts!

Riley got a gold-trimmed rose...

And I got a lovely card and a keychain...

Also, don't forget about that much-needed bookcase Athennia got me nearly a month ago now—which was an early Valentine's Day gift as well ;)

Saturday afternoon we headed over to my parents' house for an early Valentine's Day dinner.

I still had one more surprise for Athennia and Riley, thanks to Kelly generously offering to bake some freaking amazing custom desserts for them like she did for Athennia last year...

Actually, in Riley's case there was yet another surprise—because I had inadvertently shipped something to my parents' house that I had intended to put in her Valentine card the other night.

We visited a bit before dinner...

...and even got to squeeze in a bit of soccer with Liv—although the neighborhood deer seem to have made a pact to exclusively use my parents' yard as the community toilet; so, it was as much a riveting game of "The Floor Is Lava Raisinets" as it was "soccer."

Dinner was my mom's homemade lasagna—superb as always—with brownies for dessert. And before we headed home, I asked her to snap a few pictures of me and my valentines.

They look downright thrilled that I picked them; don't they?

And then my mom sent us on our way with cards from her :)

When we got back home, we watched a movie (which you should already have been able to guess) from the inconceivable title of this inconceivable post...

Sunday was, of course, the Super Bowl—which I've always felt just sounds like a giant toilet. (And if you're like us and you're not a football fan... well, you'd be pretty hard-pressed to find many differences between the game and a giant toilet.)

We decided to get out of the house and take Riley to the Neshaminy Mall instead.

One thing that's assuredly not worth noting, but I'll mention it anyway, is this van that's always parked directly across from the entrance into our apartment complex...

My brain always wants to emphasize the "Ron" instead of the "Fish," and I pronounce it like it's an aquatic species (e.g. catfish, whitefish) instead of a guy's name.

Ronfish.

And about 70% of the time, I announce it aloud as we go past. That's really the end of that story.

I'll tell you one place that seems to have been poxxed pretty hard: The Neshaminy Mall. I grew up six blocks from here, and it was always a happening place full of heart and soul.

Now it's like the elephant graveyard from The Lion King (although even that had a population of three after the hyenas showed up)...

Remember when the arcade was called Time-Out Zone and took up like three stores' worth of space? Now it's the size of a Tic-Tac container.

I'm not even kidding when I say I think there were more homeless people in the mall than there were customers. It was truly astonishing to see what this mall has become after I had been away for so long.

But we made the best of it.

We checked out a candle sale at Bath & Body Works but didn't find anything that we had to have. Then we ducked into Spencer's, where Riley decided to buy some Cheech and Chong incense.

(Man, she must have some cool and permissive parents: I would never have been allowed to have incense at her age, much less Cheech and Chong-branded incense!)

I saw a mug that made me chuckle; but, with a $15 MSRP, I decided that a picture was as good as the real thing...

Finally we returned to Barnes & Noble, where we had come in from.

I tried again, and again, and again, and again to get Riley to smile for a picture, but it was no use...

But just a few feet away, there was a center display with an uncannily timely warning...

You'd better start smiling in my pictures, Riley, or they're going to have to write a sequel to this... because there's going to be a new main character!

Also, isn't this the one where Thoreau moves to the woods because he needs to bury the body of someone who wouldn't smile in his photos? (And because he could no longer stomach the truth of his "F!@# me like the government" mug.)

Before we headed out though, there were two things I had spotted on the way in... and I'd told myself I would buy them on the way out if I still wanted them that badly.

And I did.

So I did.

I must say, nothing makes you feel like an intellectual quite like coming home from the book store with no books and a bag of stuffed animals. I remarked to Athennia that I probably have more now than I did as a kid.

(But, that's a lie.)

As we got back to the car, Athennia saw that she had an offer from Applebee's for 20 free boneless wings with an order of $40 or more. And, since we like Applebee's boneless wings—and $40 isn't very hard to hit when feeding three people in our post-inflationary world—we decided to take advantage of that deal.

En route to the 'Bee, we saw a Tesla. (<— Make sure your inner voice italicizes that and you do a whoopity-doo motion with your finger as you read it.)

SANINKA? That sounds like a new line of porta-potties or something. And, oddly enough, the car was just about as gross!

I thought a big part of driving a Tesla was so you could virtue-signal and feel self-righteous about "saving the planet" and such; but, this shit-heap is probably actively depleting the ozone layer as we speak!

Athennia had some choice words for him...

While I had my phone out, I used the opportunity to check on Riley and make sure she wasn't, like, shooting heroin back there or anything. (She's had that incense for more than an hour now; so, there's no telling what kind of rabbit hole she could've gone down by now.)

When we got to Applebee's, I felt like I should send Mr. Tesla a post card conceding that his is only the second ugliest car in the world...

We took our Applebee's home, ate way too much food, and watched Robin Hood: Men in Tights together.

And of course yesterday was actual Valentine's Day. It didn't seem like such a big deal, now that we've personally had a good four or five Valentine's Days over the past few days.

But, we finalized the report of our log of the downstairs neighbors' many, many offenses over the past week, and then we crafted a very polite and professional email to the landlord to go along with it (so that if there ends up being any cases of he said, she said, it will be readily apparent which party is the upstanding intellectuals and which is the ne'er-do-well street trash).

And then we headed to Qdoba for dinner. I instated a policy where we take the avocado for a ride-along anytime we go out for Mexican food...

We decided to try the Bensalem location (despite our disappointment last time), since our friend Larry should have been back from vacation and transferred there by now. But, when I asked the guys behind the counter, they sort of snickered and said Larry was supposed to show up last week; but nobody knows what happened to him.

That really ruined the meal for us—since we know that Larry flew down to North Carolina back in late January, and we're really not sure exactly how literally or figuratively to take the claim that "nobody knows what happened to him." (Here's hoping everything is fine, and his transfer was simply delayed for some innocuous reason. We'll certainly report an update when we have one!)

We had ice cream sundaes at home later and just hung out for the rest of the evening...

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!