Don't Even Sink about It!
But pretty much everyone sought about it...
In Dependence...
This first half of the month has certainly been... eventfully uneventful.
Or uneventfully eventful? I'm not sure.
The molerat went over to her friend Kassie's on the evening of Wednesday the 3rd, which left Kitten and me free to grab some Qdoba for dinner and then stop by my parents to visit for a bit (since it wasn't like we'd be going there for a party the very next day or anything).
Also, I tried not to gawk; but we were in the presence of a true genius on the way home that evening...
In-Dependence Day
Then Thursday was "Independence Day"—which, for some reason, we still celebrate as a nation even though we've lost 99.9% of the independence for which our ancestors fought so hard.
My parents hosted a party for my mom's side of the family—who all showed up except for my cousin Dave's family because they had pulled a Fievel and were headed west at the time.
My aunt even brought along some COVID (obviously unbeknownst to her until a few days later); but, Kitten and I still count ourselves among the filthy unvaxxed masses... and, somewhat interestingly, I think we're also possibly the only ones in the family not to have contracted the 'rona yet.
Anyway, we came over an hour early so we could harvest our garlic—and grab the last of our bolting spinach to toss into the salad Athennia had made.
Between the two of us, we only took one picture the entire day, and it wasn't even of any of our loved ones. It was of this kickass pepper we've got growin'...
Riley asked if she could stay over again at Kassie's Thursday night into Friday... and then again Friday night into Saturday.
Then she went with Kassie's family to the St. Mike's fair Saturday evening and got dropped back home afterward.
Don't Even SINK about It!
Meanwhile, it was sometime over those few days that Athennia decided to try her hand at fixing the drain plug in our bathroom sink—which had separated itself several months ago from the rest of the... up and down mechanism.
If I had to describe the situation as a software engineer, I might say...
But, the drain plug had other plans; and when Kitten went to fix it, the dry-rotted plastic plug part snapped and fell down into the P-trap under our sink.
Then, on Sunday the 7th our vacuum cleaner unexpectedly took a dump: It was never all that great at keeping up with triple-strength cat hair to begin with, but the thing finally overheated enough to irreparably melt the belt until it fused itself to the motor housing and started smelling like a tire fire.
So, we spent about 45 minutes doing product research to determine what was the Lamborghini of vacuums in 2024... and then we spent about about 45 seconds doing pricing research and ordered ourselves a... Toyota Camry of vacuums instead.
Even with Amazon Prime, the new vacuum wouldn't arrive until the next day at the earliest... but we still had a pile of cat hair and stray litter in the middle of our living room for the time being; so we took a drive over to my parents' house to borrow their vacuum, along with a wire hanger we needed to perform surgery on the sink.
A Coat-Hanger Contortion
The drain was still pregnant with an unwanted drain-plug, after all... and desperate times call for desperate measures.
But, we MacGyver'ed our newfound hanger into a makeshift hook, snaked it down into the bowels of our bathroom sink, and made quite an unexpected discovery.
Who knew it was twins?!
I couldn't make this stuff up if I wanted to: Not only did we extricate our drain-plug; we found the previous tenants' plug as well!
We Are Aware of an Outage
On Monday the 8th, Kitten sent me this picture of her car's thermometer as she left work...
So I sent back an "Oh yes, Kitten; I know!"
See, PECO (our electric company) decided that the best way to be a "reliable" electric company was to kill the power—and that the time to do that was on the hottest day of the year so far...
Now, I consider myself more well-versed than most when it comes to logic; but I was at a loss for how to quite make sense of...
- Why not have trimmed these trees back when they were still just wee saplings... or at least before they became the theme song to Monk? ("It's a jungle out there...")
- Or, perhaps these wires could've been strung up in front of people's houses, where periodic access with a bucket truck is considerably easier?
- Better yet? Why even bother rigging power lines up on giant toothpicks made of termite food at all? You could just bury them underground where they belong, and wrap them in a dozen feet of rubber, concrete, and lead to ensure that they'll outlive us all.
while(false){ peco.beReliable(); }
You Sunk My Rat-tleship
Tuesday night we got Domino's for dinner, which is only worth mentioning because Kitten snapped this picture when she realized that it looked like the molerat and I were playing Battleship...
Special Delivery
Thursday the 11th, Athennia and her colleagues were midway through lunch when they heard a loud BANG from somewhere in the back of the building.
It turned out that the delivery truck that day must've been driven by a PECO employee, because the quality of service was too reliable for words...
Brain Freeze
On Saturday the 13th, we went over to my parents' house for dinner.
Here's a picture of Hannah holding court...
On our way home later that evening, we stopped at Dairy Queen in Richboro to grab dessert.
There was a three-family field trip with a full-on kindergarten class of snot-nosed kids heading for the entrance as we parked; so we dove out of the car and basically stormed the front doors like they were the last helicopter out of Vietnam.
But then we got to the counter and remembered we hadn't been to DQ in some time and had absolutely no idea what we wanted. But we didn't want to look like total jerks in front of the family reunion we'd just blatantly bypassed; and so, when I spotted a list of Blizzard concoctions on a giant menu just in front of us, I suggested we just each pick something off of that.
Crisis averted!
Aside from having to endure the one kid who felt like he had to stand so close to me that he was basically humping my leg the entire time we waited for our order, we were in and out of there like it was nothing.
We got back in the car, where I took custody of my Blizzard before handing the drink carrier off to Athennia so she could differentiate between her peanut-butter Blizzard and Riley's "Ultimate Cookie" Blizzard.
And then we were on our way.
It wasn't until about 45 minutes later—after we'd made it home and Athennia had tucked her Blizzard into the freezer to recongeal for a bit—that she finally had her first spoonful... and immediately wondered why it was so sickeningly sweet.
Also...
So, yeah...
Not much we could do about it at that point, but that was a thing that happened.
<shrug>
College Howgebra?
Meanwhile, my cousin JD had reached out for some help with a math class he was taking over the summer.
(He's making a career out of teaching history; so, he's definitely gonna need college algebra on pretty much a daily basis for the rest of his life.)
But I had raved to JD at the 4th of July party about how I just spent six months helping Taylor with algebra and I was at the top of my game...
So I headed over to his apartment Sunday morning and spent a couple hours tutoring him reteaching myself how to do this crap after a 15-year hiatus so that I could then attempt to kinda-maybe-sorta teach it to him.
It's a good semester or two beyond that—involving concepts I've rarely touched on in my professional life since college—and I had to de-rust a lot more than I had imagined.
But I guess it went okay...
Hopefully JD was able to take something useful from it.
And that brings us to today...
I've been sitting here wondering when's PECO coming to save the day by killing the electricity.
He could just go around and trim all the trees by himself: No bucket truck needed, and I'm guessing even fences wouldn't be much of an issue for him.
He'd probably be too reliable for their liking, to be honest.