Burgers, Kings, Mustaches, and Warnings

Real quick before we get into things, I didn't get to share this last month since Athennia hogged the entire back half of September, but back on the 28^th, I snapped this picture...

Why is this significant?

Because the GIANT guy tried:

He knew he couldn't fit in that spot—or in any other spot in this entire parking lot. But, instead of just parking his crap in the middle of the road like a schmuck, he made an honest attempt to get out of everybody's way... which is more than anyone else around here has the decency to do.

And, I thought that merited recognition. So, there it is.

And now, on to October!

On Sunday the 1^st, Athennia took Riley to Spirit Halloween at the Oxford Valley Mall; and when they came home, they surprised me with cheesecake smoothies from Wawa.

Then we pretty much just binge-watched a bunch of Grimm episodes the rest of the day...

On Tuesday, our realtor Angel was finally able to snag a copy of the blueprints for the septic system the current owner of our future property had installed back in 2018...

We basically wasted all of September trying to get a copy of this (among other documents) from the township; but, they seem to have somehow lost all their records relating to this property.

Fortunately, the seller was able to provide this—which is at least something...

It was still too little too late for us to be remotely ready for settlement on Wednesday though; so, we signed paperwork Tuesday night pushing the closing date out to 06 November to give us some breathing room.

We're still waiting for the township to rake us over the coals, after all.

Late Wednesday afternoon, I prepped a bunch of ingredients for a sausage, tomato, and onion pizza—and wiped down and pre-floured the kitchen table so Athennia could roll out the dough when she got home (because she's much better at it than I am).

But, much to my surprise, she walked in the door with a big bag of Qdoba—and some Mickey-D's sponge nuggets for Riley—and reasoned that she had left work much later than she had anticipated, and so she thought we would appreciate eating earlier than 7:30 P.M. :)

Then we all watched three episodes of Grimm and some YouTube videos together before bed.

Thursday morning promptly squatted to take a steaming dump on our otherwise great week thus far...

I woke up to an email from the USDA that essentially read as follows (though I may be paraphrasing just a bit):

As you know, the Rural Development program is a government-funded program. And, as you also know, the government has a piss-poor track record at managing their finances, which is why the national deficit is in the tens of trillions (and well over $100 trillion when considering unfunded liabilities) and the country is headed for yet another shutdown.

Given that we currently have no funding available, we advise you to either stop looking for property immediately or try to find a seller who is willing to schedule settlement for 75 days out at minimum—which is the absolute earliest we expect to have funding again... although this is the government; so, nothing is guaranteed.

When Congress eventually remembers that they can simply ask the Federal Reserve to fire up the money-printers and inflate the currency by arbitrarily creating a few trillion crisp new dollars that they can magically spend into existence with carefree exuberance due to their proximity to said inflation as per the Cantillon effect, we'll shoot you an update so you can foot the bill.

Sincerely, your f(r)iends at the USDA Rug-Pull Program

So, long story short, we'll have to go back to the seller yet again and request another extension on the settlement date at some point—and hope to God that he'll continue to be as patient as he has been so far.

(Given that he's been trying to unload the property for six years now and we're basically offering his full asking price, we'd like to think he will be. But, that's of course his prerogative.)

We're not going to do that until we've heard back from the township regarding our request for a building permit though—so that we can come from a position of strength with the permit literally in our hands and say...

Look, dude; we're dead serious about wanting this property, and we're personally ready to go the moment the USDA gets funding again. So, if you're cool to just keep up with mowing the grass for another couple months, we're cool waiting it out with you. Deal?

Time will tell.

In the meantime, we made our pizza for Thursday night's dinner instead; and Athennia stopped and bought some ice cream for dessert on her way home; and we watched a couple Grimm episodes and some YouTube with Riley.

Neither of us had any ideas for dinner or much felt like cooking Friday evening; so, we caved and decided to cash in on some Burger King coupons we'd received in the mail at the end of September.

Ordinarily, we would've just gone through the drive-thru; but, the coupons all had the ol' "one per customer per visit; cannot be combined with any other offer" rigmarole... which you can usually just bypass entirely by walking in and flipping the script to make the clerk look like the asshole instead of you...

Are you seriously gonna make us place three separate orders? Or can we just use all three of these coupons?

But, just our luck, we got stuck with high-school Hayden—who, it would seem, has 103% in her AP Civics class and believes that rules are rules.

She promptly cut us off at the pass—to which we simply shrugged and said, "Guess we're placing three separate orders then."

Things became even more delightfully awkward when we discovered that the chip in Athennia's debit card was failing, to the degree that the only way she could get the card-reader to approve her card was to...

1. try to use Tap two or three times until it asked her to insert the chip instead
2. try to use the chip reader three times until it asked her to swipe
3. swipe her card like it was 1991 a good five or six times until the reader finally relented and approved the card out of sheer exhaustion

Then, of course, we got to jump through these same hoops two more times, for my order and then for Riley's.

We did find out that our local Burger King apparently employs Mike Tyson: See, on the coupons we got, the picture of the Whopper shows it as being a good four or five inches tall—which is admittedly way too much burger for the average human jaw to comfortably accommodate.

But, when we brought our food home and opened our burgers up, they were more like an inch and a half thick at best.

So, the only explanation I can think of is that our local BK helpfully hired Mike Tyson to hang out at the end of the sandwich line and punch every burger down to the thickness of a beer coaster so that customers will be able to eat them without any jaw strain whatsoever.

Quite thoughtful of them, really!

After dinner, Athennia and Riley went over to Lou's to visit Taylor for about an hour since her 19^th birthday is coming up next week.

Then we watched some Grimm and some YouTube for the rest of the evening.

Saturday was a washout. By the time Athennia got home from the laundromat (with a pit stop at the bank to procure herself a new debit card), we didn't feel like grocery-shopping or cooking; so, we gaslit ourselves into thinking that Burger King couldn't possibly have been that terrible the night before.

...And we caved and did it all over again.

This time we decided to use a single coupon for a "family bundle" that came with six burgers and three orders of fries; so, we just went through the drive-thru instead of going inside to call a townhall meeting and debate Hayden.

But the crew working that night just hardcore sucked; and, after each customer placed an order at the speaker and pulled around to the window to pay, the staff had every car pull up and out of the drive-thru so that their metrics would look like they were serving people in under 15 seconds all evening long... even though we had to wait almost 10 minutes for a pretty basic order (and nowhere near anything you could call a dinner rush).

To make matters worse, Tyson must be vying for Employee of the Month or something... because he had really put all his muscle into making our burgers as paper-thin as they could possibly be.

Later in the evening, Riley baked chocolate-chip muffins for dessert and we blew through the end of Season 5 of Grimm to leave just the final season remaining.

Athennia had a few errands to run on Sunday and sent me this gem while she was out and about...

We had plans to have dinner at my parents' house around 5:30, but I wanted to get in at least a short hike somewhere beforehand.

We settled on Tyler State Park and hoped the sky would cooperate; and on the way there, we got stuck behind this guy who looks like he shelled out his hard-won cash for some professionally-made bumper stickers...

I wanted to let him know you can achieve the same thing for free with a dot-matrix printer and some masking tape, but we sadly didn't get the chance.

When we parked at Tyler, we got a real treat: a rare sighting of the new Ford Mustache...

Have any of you driven one of these yet? The Mustache is a lot like the Mustang... just quieter and more sophisticated.

We were half expecting Mr. Peanut to pop out of the woods, using his monogrammed satin pocket square to clean a bit of tree sap off his monocle before he lit up a cigar.

It was by then after 4:00 already.

Dinner was at 5:30.

My parents' house was ~20 minutes away.

So, that left us, oh... a good 18 seconds or so of hiking time?

But, little did we know that things were about to take a turn for the worse...

Nothing quite seals one's fate like the realization that the ice-thickness monitoring to which he was entrusting his personal safety actually exists only in the confines of his imagination.

One moment, you think you're safe and happy in a scenic park; the next, you realize you're basically a sitting duck in the DMZ between North and South Korea.

We knew it was unlikely we'd make it out alive: The only sensible course of action seemed to be to press onward and enjoy our final moments.

Shortly thereafter, we found something else that's apparently also not monitored in this area...

Despite the six dozen No ATVs or Vehicular Traffic signs posted per linear foot all throughout the park, these tracks look remarkably like... well, one or both of those.

Weird.

Must be one of those cases of rules for thee but not for me. Where do you stand on this matter, Hayden?

I'll bet the park ranger drives a tricked-out Ford Mustache with homemade bumper stickers on it and goes blazing through here every night—at sundown, after all of us mere mortals have been kicked out (because nature is dangerous in the dark).

Ultimately, neither the ice, nor the Koreans, nor the illicit vehicular traffic proved fatal; and so, we were able to continue our hike.

The Neshaminy Creek looked more like Neshaminy Pond. And here's an excessive amount of pictures to defend that assertion...

We eventually arrived at what the other side of the creek-pond forebodingly calls the Danger Dam... though, the dam inexplicably poses no danger whatsoever to hikers on this side—as evidenced by this side's sheer lack of signage even bothering to mention its existence, let alone trumping it up into some kind of vengeful entity that comes alive at night to feed on the blood of children and small animals...

See those geese just chilling on the edge of the dam as though there's only half an inch of water flowing over it? They totally wouldn't stand a chance if they had entered the water from the other side: The dam would've eaten them and their hopes and dreams without hesitation.

(That's what dams do, you know.)

And the ice thickness here... The ice thickness!

No one even knows what that might be, because no one's even monitoring it!

Tyler State Park: A recipe for disaster.

And a dam shame.

Athennia got some fantastic artsy shots—and I caught her in the act...

Then it was time to head back so we could get to my parents' on time.

...Except, I turned around to find Athennia and the molerat ambling along at a snail's pace and giggling like schoolgirls.

Shortly thereafter, two roads diverged in a not-yet-yellow wood...

We made the split-second decision to go left back to the parking lot.

No poem required.

Somehow we actually did make it to my parents' house in time for dinner—even stopping to pick up dessert on the way!

Hannah was particularly surprised...

"What the—where the heck did you guys come from?!"

My dad grilled barbecue chicken for dinner, and my mom made mashed potatoes and wax beans.

We brought two shrinkflated faux-gallons of ice cream (not knowing that my parents had already stocked up) and a peach cobbler that Athennia baked.

After dinner, Athennia and I harvested a bunch of tomatoes, and some volunteer mustard greens that sprouted from the plants I let go to seed two years ago.

Then we planted two dozen garlic cloves just before the sun went down...

When we got home later, I knocked on our neighbors Jeff and Lillian's door to give them our excess tomatoes; and, when Jeff answered, I offered him some mustard greens too.

I told him they're like lettuce infused with wasabi horseradish, and we each tore off a leaf and popped them into our mouths.

Two seconds later, our eyes were watering and our heads felt like they were about to explode. And I asked Jeff...

So? You want a whole bag?!

He accepted it trepidatiously, and I saved the other bag for Athennia to take to Taylor to feed her bearded dragon.

Then we watched a couple episodes of Grimm and some YouTube videos before getting to bed for another Monday already.