Eggheads (Sans Dovetails)

ASL: Alive and... Well, You Decide

We'd like to kick off this month with some very important news:

But, of course, that's inevitably going to lead to...

Okay; so... ever since I first moved in with Athennia, there's been an older woman who lives over in the center of our building somewhere.

I typically only see her from like 50 yards away, if I happen to glance out the front window while she's taking trash to the dumpster or checking her mail on the far side of the parking lot; and, from that distance, she vaguely resembles my Aunt Sue... albeit in the same capacity that pretty much any older woman on the thinner side and sporting white-gray hair would resemble my Aunt Sue from a distance of 150+ feet away.

It's really no different than seeing Jesus in your toast, or calling out a constellation in the night sky: If you squint hard enough and compress the resolution, you can pretty much see whatever you'd like to pretend you're seeing.

But, yeah. Anyway, Aunt Sue Lady has been a staple around here since my earliest days as a Morrisvillain: Even as large swaths of our original cast of characters have found themselves written out of the show—like Superstar, and the Egyptian, and all the mongrels that used to live downstairs—ASL has stuck around in the background, representing the Old Guard and minding her business otherwise.

I honestly can't recall whether she's ever made the blog before; but that's largely because she keeps to herself and doesn't do jackass things... with the lone exception being the people who show up at 7:30 in the morning sometimes to give her a ride somewhere—and who proceed to announce their arrival by honking the car horn, rather than more sensibly sending ASL a "Hey, we're downstairs" text.

Then again, what else should I expect: The car has yellow plates and a laundry list of collision damage and cosmetic defects that all scream "Trenton trash"...

And Greasy Gustavo behind the wheel looks like a 400-pound Jersey mafioso who just sneezed in his hand and used it to re-slick his hair back, while Methyl Ethel sits in the passenger's seat and picks at her scabs.

So anyway, in the last few days of March there was a pickup truck that kept showing up over by the main door to ASL's part of the building, and two guys kept filling up the bed with load after load of crap and hauling it over to the dumpsters...

First it was small things: lamps and kitchen chairs and such—like maybe someone was just changing up the decor a bit. But then it graduated to a sofa... a big-screen TV... a mattress... et cetera.

Athennia went full morbid and surmised that ASL must have died; but I tried to be more optimistic and posited that she could just be moving in with family or going into a nursing home: Somewhere where she's not all by herself and doesn't have to negotiate a full flight of stairs every time she comes and goes.

At any rate, I hadn't seen her in weeks before the guys in the truck showed up; nor did I see her in the days that followed. So, I'd just sort of started operating on the assumption that something had happened to her, and she'd moved on in one way or another.

So, imagine my surprise on the morning of 02 April when I glanced out our bedroom window and saw ASL alive and well!

But yeah; so, it turns out that it must've been someone else's apartment getting cleaned out instead. Every main door here provides access to four apartments; so, in addition to ASL, that particular door goes to Drew's Crew's apartment... and Magic Mike's sister and her 7'2" question-mark-shaped dad Lurch... and a fourth apartment whose mystery tenant keeps an even lower profile than I do, to the point that I'm not even sure who he or she is.

Drew's work truck and work van both sound like he ripped the cats out of them; so he rarely comes or goes without me being aware of it; but, now that I think about it, I haven't seen Magic Mike's sister, or Lurch, or Mad Meth in more than a month now. So, who knows?

...And, on that note...

Pre-ster Dinner

On Saturday 04 April, we headed over to my parents' house for Easter dinner a day early. They made green bean casserole and potatoes, and my dad grilled up a bunch of London broil...

And there was also corn, and crescent rolls...

...which came in a tube sealed so well that neither Kelly nor I could open it—even when I bashed it against the kitchen counter while imagining that I was sitting in Greasy Gustavo's back seat and clobbering him in the back of the head with it for honking his horn in an apartment-complex parking lot at 7:30 on a weekday morning.

The Hunt

After dinner, Steve and I went outside and hid a bunch of eggs for the girls; and then it was hunting time!

The only one I remembered hiding for sure was the one I'd stuck under the electric meter—because I put one there every year, and I get really proud of myself for finding such a great hiding spot... and then Riley always walks right past it, which just inflates my ego even more.

Steve also put that yellow and pink one by the downspout, figuring that it might blend in with all those osprey and walrus eggs that look like basketballs and soccer balls.

Little did he know that Kelly would just blatantly blurt it out anyway...

Meanwhile, Olivia ran circles around both Hannah and Riley: I'm pretty sure she'd found all her eggs and half of Riley's before Riley had even moseyed far enough out to find her first one...

Come on, people! We're losing daylight here!

What, you think this freakishly weird Chernobyl sun's just gonna stay up here all evening?!

I think not—not when the Scorpio moon's flowing harmoniously with Mercury in Pisces! I'd say you have about half an hour until the sun clocks out for the evening, jumps in its Taurus, and drives home.

SO, LET'S GO!

Riley finally got her head in the game...

...and shotgunned her way through all her eggs, once she realized there really aren't that many places I can hide eggs for her where Hannah won't see them...

...and then she backtracked to grab that elusive egg off the electric meter.

Then it was time to calculate the payday.

I suggested that we take the opportunity to teach the girls about the "oh so civilized" concept of taxation by skimming 40% of their candy right off the top...

Luckily, Kelly had brought some extra cupcakes from some recent orders she'd fulfilled; so we didn't have to steal—erm, I mean tax—any of the girls' candy after all ;)

More Eggs

On Sunday 05 April—actual Easter—Athennia announced that the Easter bunny had come!

Some for Riley... Some for Taylor...

...And—no doubt thanks to the Sun squaring Jupiter and picking Venus up for a date in its Taurus—the stars aligned in such a way that even I'm still enough of a kid to get an Easter basket of my very own.

You can see my celebratory reaction in the reflection of Riley's golden elephant egg...

I got enough candy to last me about a week. Riley got 10 times that much, and it should take her through about 11:30 Tuesday morning ;)

... along with a veritable Noah's ark of tiny critters...

Other Stuff

On Wednesday 08 April, I had lunch with my mom at Friendly's; and on our way back to the apartment, we saw............. whatever this is supposed to be...

So, um... wow. Let's count it up...

1. He bought a Chevy.
2. He paid the government extra money for a "customized" permission slip to use his own property.
3. Having received the DMV's permission to customize said permission slip, and being thus granted to choose more or less any word he wanted, he went with "JEEP" for reasons I'm yet to comprehend. (Does the labeling of one shitty car brand with another shitty car brand constitute some kind of irony in a way I've failed to see; or...?)
4. And finally, the light is green and he is still parked.

Saturday 11 April, we had dinner at my parents' again. Nothing much else to report on there, except that I got this great picture of Hannah...

And then on Sunday, Charles in Charger took to the alley out back to do what he does best: sit in his Charger and export his noise!

Sans Dovetails

On Monday 13 April—after a full two-week hiatus from woodworking (in response to Joe's request for a break)—I reached out to him about getting back into it, and he finally admitted that he doesn't have the passion for it to justify putting the time into it.

So, unfortunately the woodworking is effectively on hold for now—largely because I don't have anywhere else lined up where I can work for the time being... and also because I dove head-first into writing and coding again a couple weeks back when we had that freak heat wave and I wasn't much relishing the idea of toiling away outside anyway.

It's a shame though, because I had been enjoying working together and building up our skills (even if only in the limited capacity of the few things Joe and I actually built together). But, woodworking is definitely still something on my bucket list; and someday in the future—probably when the Moon passes through the house of Capricorn, and Venus gets rid of the crabs she picked up from the Sun—the stars will be right for me to pick it up again.

Then again, perhaps I can just fire up all my power tools over in the alley: Every other assclown around here makes all the noise they want at any hour of the day or night and gets away with it!

...Though it does seem that Charles in Charger blew so much smoke up the whole neighborhood's ass on Sunday, that the people who live over there above the alley must have finally complained to their landlord about his relentless noise.

I noticed this morning that the pickup that normally parks over there had trucked off to the curb in front of the guard rail for the first time ever, and I've seen absolutely no sign of either Charger (the guy has a blue one and a gray one) since Sunday.

Thus, my working theory is that they've likely been banned from parking in the alley (which the Bucks County parcel map shows as private property owned half by our complex and half by the one next door).