Familial Festivities and Friendly Favors

Saturday the 24^th, we had a family Father's Day dinner at my parents' house (with a bit of latency due to scheduling conflicts a week prior).

Liv opted for pretzel rods, goldfish, and a few slices of American "cheese"; but, for the rest of us, Kelly prepared an amazing slow-cooker beef roast with potatoes, carrots, and onions...

We had a lovely visit—and, for some reason, I got great pictures of the ladies, but none of us dads...

Hannah made same face I make when my mom brings out one of her crumb cakes...

Sunday afternoon, we headed over to Pete and Alissa's for my cousin Liam's 7^th birthday. We caught this cool cloudscape on our way over; and then, 30 seconds after we walked in, Liam challenged me to a game of chess...

...And just so you know, I know some things about some things!

...he assured me—insisting that I should be scared.

Then I checkmated him in six moves.

Luckily, he didn't take the loss to heart: I'm pretty sure he still had a kickass birthday, and we had fun visiting with my extended family...

Monday, Riley went to her friend Kassie's for a few hours, and I finally managed to amass the sheer mountain of paperwork required for submitting a mortgage application to the USDA.

Tuesday evening, we finally had to do the laundry we'd been putting off doing since the Thursday before. The weather was slated to be terrible, and Athennia wasn't thrilled about going down the street to the laundromat by herself as late in the evening as it had become. (There are bullet holes in the windows, and they crank the music to discourage homeless people from coming in to crash for a few hours; so... yeah.)

I brought along a nice fat book on software engineering, and Athennia watched one of her shows on her phone, and we sat there for a couple hours doing our best to drown out the deafening rappy, clubby, poopular modern music that makes one question just why one's still residing on this planet.

Also worth mentioning is the reason we got such a late start on the laundry in the first place: We've been judicious but otherwise perfectly candid regarding the goings-on of Taylor and her girlfriend in Athennia's mother Lou's household over the past year; so, I think it's every bit as important to share positive news when it comes as well...

That being said, Athennia had a long phone conversation with her mother earlier in the evening; and we found out that Lou and the girls have been doing well and working towards getting even better!

Taylor passed 11^th grade with flying colors and has been doing art commissions for some spare cash in her free time.

Ahlina still loves her job at PetSmart and was recently given another promotion (her second, I believe), and is paying Lou exponentially more in rent than we ever would have guessed.

Their friend CJ recently started working at Wawa and loves it, and has been working to get herself back on her feet.

And, all three girls have been working to help Lou get the house cleaned up.

Everything seems to be going well for them, with the exception of Athennia's heavy-handed Uncle Kevin—who, I take it, is so incensed that things have taken this long to start improving, that he's resorted to stopping by twice a week to scream and harass everyone (his sister and his great niece and her friends alike).

Assuming that the unhinged derangement of an immature interloper doesn't torpedo the clear progress being made, the girls really seem to be growing up and buckling down—which is all we ever asked of them and wanted for them in the first place!

Here's hoping cooler heads prevail, and the odiferous effluvium shows himself promptly into the fan without leaving any further casualties along the way.

Thursday was a day of errands and favors: Riley had plans to sleep over at her friend Kassie's; so, Athennia and I decided we'd take the opportunity to knock out a chore that we'd otherwise have been stuck doing on Saturday.

In the meantime, I made plans to meet her at my parents' house after she finished work, since that would save us time as opposed to having her come all the way back to the apartment...

My mom had asked a couple weeks prior if I would accompany her to the cemetery to visit her parents' graves—and, since they're buried down in Rockledge (almost all the way to Cheltenham) and cemeteries tend to be isolated places in any event, my mom and her mom had always promised each other they'd never go alone.

So, we took a drive down to Rockledge together; and then I transplanted a handful of plants my friend Richard gave me back in May (that I'd had my mom watering ever since, because I'd been too lazy to pop them into my garden until now).

My parents treated to cheese steaks for dinner, and then Athennia and I were on our way down to the outer limits of Philadelphia to my friend Fotini's apartment: She recently started rotations at a hospital in Los Angeles—a cross-country move for which she was given about 11 seconds to prepare—and she was hoping we could break into her apartment to gather some forgotten clothes and her missing passport, then ship them to her at our earliest convenience.

For anyone who doesn't know, Fotini is actually my ex-fiancée from way back in... ohhhh, let me do the math...

...2010?

Yeah. So, we've remained good friends over the years—

—but I still kinda felt like I was violating one of Newton's laws as my new wife and I rifled through my ex-fiancée's personal belongings. It very much felt like an absurd bit from a Seinfeld episode or something.

We managed to find the passport within two hours though—and shipped her three boxes' full of stuff—for which she compensated us with a handsome donation to the Operation: Apartment Exodus Domus Acquirus fund :)

And finally, Friday brought the month to a close...

Riley was still at Kassie's until late in the evening; so, Athennia and I had fried chicken for dinner and finished the last two episodes of Breaking Bad.

Then, of course, we tried to make sense of the deluge of cat pics we'd amassed over the past four weeks...

But, we failed. So, in lieu of any actual curation work, here's the entire collection :)