Father's Day in the Motherland

What the Deuce?!

This past Saturday the 15^th, I woke up to an early-morning text from our builder Brody giving me some specs on a home model and a project I'd asked him to price out.

I called him back shortly after I woke up, and he said the showroom is notoriously dead on Mother's Day and Father's Day weekend; so, despite it being a precious Saturday, he actually had all the time in the world to talk, and we conversed for the better part of an hour.

Naturally, one of the topics that came up was how Athennia and I were planning to part ways with Angel in the coming days...

...to which Brody replied that an old high-school buddy of his named Lucas had stopped by the showroom the other day and was working as a realtor now...

...and so, as for the piece of land I'd asked Brody's opinion on a few days prior, he showed it to Lucas—who volunteered to call the listing agent and try to feel him out for how receptive the sellers would be to accept an offer 25% less than their asking price.

Brody commended Lucas's "go-getter" nature; so I said we'd definitely be open to working with him once we officially gave Angel the boot—even though we're in a holding pattern right now without much of a down payment since we decided to pay off some debt last month.

Then Brody and I moved on to discussing what he's read so far of my novel Untouchable, when his day took a sudden dark turn...

Him: Hey, so I actually gotta go: I'm being summoned to clean up the mess some customer left behind when they used the bathroom in one of our display homes.

Me: You mean, like, they saw one of the toilets that has saran wrap and blue painter's tape and a big sign over it that says 'Don't use this, you moron. Yes, this means you,' and they took that as their sign to take a dump in it?

Him: Yep. It actually happens way more often than you would think.

Me: Who even does that? Is it, like, asshole teenagers who think it's a funny prank or something? Or are people really that dumb?

Him: Honestly, I think people are just really that dumb.

Me: Wow.

Pregaming

While Brody went to spend the afternoon crawling under a display home to clean fecal matter out of a toilet with no water, Athennia and Riley and I headed over to my parents' for an early Father's Day dinner.

First we exchanged cards and gifts. Thanks to Liv, I am now the proud owner of a hand-painted markered wooden duck magnet and a painted rock...

Then it was time for Hannah and Liv to give Pop his gift...

Soon thereafter, we ordered takeout from Taormina's for dinner; and then it was time for dessert.

My mom baked a crumb cake, and Liv had a "possicle"...

After dinner, my wife and my daughter were—I don't even know—powwowing about something back in one of the guestrooms.

So, I went outside and played soccer with Liv instead :)

Father's Day

We got a late start to the day on Sunday; but the first order of business was for Athennia to go over to her mom's trailer to deal with all the school supplies Taylor had left behind that had to be sent back since the years was finished.

(For the record, this wasn't Taylor being entirely childish: It was a loosely-negotiated arrangement in which she was to leave all of her school supplies in a single location so that Athennia could box them up and use the shipping labels provided by the school to drop them off at a UPS store and have everything sent back.)

But...

Her printer was trashed and covered in dust and soda stains; her laptop was missing its charging cable; and the pile of other crap she had left for Athennia to deal with was missing more than half the textbooks and other supplies on the inventory list provided by the school.

And so, Athennia did the sensible thing: She texted Taylor and called her out for not keeping her end of the deal, and she told Taylor that she can find a weekend to make the trip down to Pennsylvania and deal with it.

As it got closer to dinnertime, Athennia said she was thinking about treating me and Riley to dinner at the Yardley Distillery (a stone's throw from our apartment, where the old Friendly's was that closed down about 10 minutes after Athennia and I started dating).

I would've been fine with Tex-Mex, but I wasn't sure Athennia or Riley would find anything they really liked on the limited menu; and so I suggested Applebee's instead...

The Motherland?

After dinner I requested that we stop at Tyler State Park for just a few minutes to see the creek and take in a bit of nature.

I didn't have time to whip my phone out and get a picture; but, as we pulled into the parking lot, I'd swear we saw Saddam Hussein walking through the parking lot with his wife and two daughters.

Then, when we actually got down to the creek, we found the entire vicinity flooded with Middle-Eastern invaders!

This picture doesn't even do justice to how many tens of trillions of people were here: This only really shows the River tribes, while the Forest and Mountain tribes remain largely hidden from sight.

I didn't know if this was some holy pilgrimage, or a mass migration back to the ancestral motherland, or what; but I was strongly considering bullhorning everyone and telling them to vacate the premises on account of the live 'Saddam' sighting in the area.

Then it occurred to me that I couldn't be sure they weren't all part of the impending coup as well!

So... better to just try to blend in then?

I figured the flesh-eating algae would thin the horde considerably before they got around to engaging us.

And sometime around that point, Athennia recalled that it was some Indian holiday or something...

...and, I guess if you can't make it overseas to take a quick dip in the Ganges and get back Stateside before work the next morning, the Neshaminy Creek is a close second when it comes to what's a ridiculously-filthy body of water I can go bathe in to cleanse my soul on my religious holiday?

We're decidedly less religious; so we chose to stay dry ;)

If we did have a religion though, it would probably be ice cream; and so we decided to have dessert at Friendly's...

...and, since the Friendly's in Morrisville no longer exists because it's the frou-frou Yardley Distillery now, we went a few miles further up the road to the Friendly's in Fairless Hills—which is, unbeknownst to us, Little Morrisville.

At least, that's what their signage said...

The rest of the week was relatively slow and uneventful, until Thursday evening when Athennia got home from work and told me that our refund check for the Kutztown property had finally cleared!

...which of course meant...

Nos Angeles!

I was actually conflicted about how to reach out to Angel:

On the one hand, texting instead of calling felt like a super-cowardly thing to do in this case; but on the other, I did want a "paper trail" of sorts to protect us from any repercussions down the road... and it's not like Angel had a great history of picking up the phone when I called him anyway.

So, I opted to text and figured I'd just answer the phone in the event that he called back with anything to say.

But things went pretty well...

...I daresay he had probably been expecting it for several weeks by that point, given how poorly he had handled the whole matter of getting our deposit back for us between March and this point, and the fact that we had missed out on at least three properties that got snagged before he'd even responded to my inquiries about them.

<shrug>

But, I spent half an hour on the phone that evening with Brody's friend Lucas, and we're officially working with him now—even though he knows we're more or less in a holding pattern for the time being while we save up a bigger down payment :)

Extra Innings

On Friday the 21^st, Athennia texted me around 4:00 P.M. that she was staying late at work because it was crunch time after a customer had pushed up a deadline.

She finally clocked out at 8:40 P.M... and sent me a screenshot of the timeclock showing her 13.83-hour workday and her 49.15 hours for the week.

Then yesterday, the drain stopper in our bathroom sink broke off due to old age when Athennia went to snake the drain; and so it's sitting all the way down in the P-trap for the time being until we think of a way to extricate it.

We went to Home Depot to grab some rubber grommets to try to fix the faucet in our shower, since the thread inside the knob that directs the water flow through the spigot or the showerhead has long been ground away to nothing (and maintenance has already had numerous opportunities to make matters worse over the years).

We couldn't find anything suitable though; so our solution is simply to leave the water routed to the showerhead indefinitely until whenever we get out of here.

While we were out, Athennia and I stopped at Lou's to drop off the two big boxes of hardware from Taylor's robotics course—now that we're not on the hook for dealing with sending it back to the school.

Then, later in the evening, we decided to pop around the corner and grab water ice from Rita's... where we were treated to a rare Fugless sighting in the wild!

Needless to say, ol' Fuggy was walking around just fine, slurping her water ice like she owned the Rita's parking lot too.

Finally, we went home and relaxed for the evening with an episode of The Handmaid's Tale, some "People of Wal-Mart" compilations, and a bit of stand-up comedy from Kyle Dunnigan.