Greener Pastures? Nope.
Nothing like an exceptionally noisy week in L'il Trenton to remind us that we're probably not leaving L'il Trenton anytime soon.
Well, May is off to a phenomenal start so far...
Shortly after sunrise on the morning of the 1st, the myriad demons of L'il Trenton began showing up one by one to wish us a warm welcome back, now that we've resolved to likely spend another year here and focus on knocking out the last of our residual debt so we can comfortably take on a larger mortgage without assistance from the USDA's rural development program—which would have been an absolute godsend if not for the timeless I'm from the government and I'm here to help trope that derailed our plans entirely.
But anyway, here's our maintenance guy Leon kicking off the start of May at precisely 7:30 A.M. on the first of the month...
That ol' fridge just had to come out. It couldn't wait another day, another hour, another moment. Doesn't matter that the downstairs apartment is so trashed beyond recognition that nobody will be moving in for literal months at this point: That fridge just had to come out, right that second.
At 7:30 in the morning.
Everyone who's still asleep at that hour be damned.
Loud and obnoxious... the L'il Trenton way!
That evening Athennia decided to splurge and grab Domino's for us while she was out picking Taylor up on the way home from work.
As we finished dinner, we received... an emergency broadcast?
...An S.O.S. from a neighbor in distress?
We're still not sure. But it went something like this...
You may recall our neighbor "Mrs. Douglas" (whom I prefer to call Mrs. Fugless), who is perfectly able-bodied but uses her long-since-dead husband's handicapped placard to perpetually monopolize the lone handicapped space conveniently located just outside her front door...
...and who has like seven kids who are all driving now, who all have their own cars, despite the terms of the lease stating that the maximum is two vehicles per unit...
...and who also has about a dozen cats—which, I confess, doesn't bother me in the slightest on a base level... except for the fact that a family whose behavior is so atrocious by every other metric would not be expected to have any qualms about letting their cats out into the common hallway/stairwell they share with three other units.
And so, this cat—cute as he is—has been left to punch a decent-sized hole through the window-screen in the common stairwell... which is pretty crappy behavior even 'round these parts.
And we had lots of fun bringing Odin, Penny, and Lucky out one by one and trying to initiate a dialogue :)
After dinner, Taylor announced that she had an exam on Friday morning at 8:00—which would yield her a college-level certification in manufacturing if she passed it, but which also necessitated proctoring by an adult who would vouch for her completing it without using her phone and the internet to "cheat."
Why not just design the test in such a way—and with an appropriate time limit—that only those students who truly know the material will have a hope of earning a passing grade, even if they do make use of their phones and the internet?
It's not like these are recently-emergent technologies: They've both been ubiquitous for literal decades now. Why are you still stubbornly fighting an uphill battle against them?
Anyway, my first thought at the "adult supervision" bit was, Good thing your girlfriend is your learning coach and she's almost 22 now, which makes her technically an adult.
But then of course, I had to follow this with, Oh wait; Ahlina ran away to Connecticut almost six months ago after committing aggravated assault, 'cause that's what adults do.
So, naturally Athennia asked me if Taylor could sleep over at the apartment Thursday night into Friday so that I could proctor her exam.
And I told her flat-out,
Yeah; to be honest, I do mind—because I'm yet to see Taylor reach a point where she can go more than a few hours without having a total narcissistic meltdown, and the thought of her pulling one of those in our apartment while you're an hour away at work doesn't exactly thrill me.
But I realize I'm pretty much the only adult she has last-minute access to while your mom's in the hospital; so I'll do it for you in spite of my concern for how many ways this could potentially go wrong.
Thursday the 2nd was a nice quiet day.
For some reason the guardrail outside our bedroom window has mystical Pied Piper-esque abilities to lure every screaming, snot-nosed streetrat in five-mile radius to come hang out and do nothing but make noise for hours at a time.
For dinner that evening we ordered Chinese food and then Taylor slept over for her exam the next morning...
...which thankfully went off without a hitch.
I got set up at the kitchen table and used the time to do some editing on my novel Untouchable and continue reading through Humble Pi that I started last month.
And, when Taylor finished the exam, she said she felt confident in her performance.
Riley got invited to sleep over at Kassie's house but Athennia wasn't answering the phone; so she came and asked me for permission instead, which I was happy to okay.
With just three of us for dinner, we decided to take the easy way out yet again and just get Burger King. Then, probably around 6:30 or so, Athennia asked me if we could bring Taylor back upstairs for just "an hour worth of homework."
An "hour" later at 10:00 P.M. we finally took her home.
There were rumors on the drive home about a guy maybe turning left at some point...
And then when we finally got home to enjoy the last sliver of the day in each other's company, we watched some of Bill Burr's stand-up comedy.
Saturday morning Athennia had an early-morning appointment at Mr. Tire to have them look at the laundry list of "urgent issues" the dealership insisted last month that she should address immediately.
Surprising nobody at all, her actually honest mechanic Dave dismissed 75% of the list outright, identified a handful of things that would be beneficial to have serviced at her convenience over the coming months, and counted on one hand the things that she should actually worry about in the immediate future.
He and his guys ended up doing a little bit of work that morning but didn't even charge her anything for it, and they made a follow-up appointment to address some other stuff two weeks later.
Finding ourselves with a free morning, we decided to hit the Fairless Hills Garden Center and stock up on plants...
Who knew there'd be a celebrity there?!
We found a pepper that made us think of Steve, and some T-Rex statues that made us think of Emily; but without knowing how many tens of thousands of dollars we might end up racking up just for ourselves by the time we made it to the checkout line, we had to settle for pictures instead of souvenirs ;)
But, we stocked up on tomatoes, peppers, spinach, cucumbers, oregano, and rosemary.
Then Athennia had agreed to drive Taylor and her two cats to an appointment at the veterinarian down the street from Lou's trailer.
Then she had to pick Riley up at Kassie's.
Then we headed over to my parents' house to plant...
My dad made an awesome pot roast for dinner, but apparently nobody took any pictures of our family hangout for cherish for years and years.
So?
Movin' on.
Athennia and I watched some more Bill Burr later that night, and that was about it.
Sunday we had fried chicken and French fries for dinner and moved on to watching some of John Pinette's stand-up.
And Monday morning I spent an hour on the phone with Brody discussing a half acre of land I had found in Macungie and done a bunch of preliminary research on. But he confirmed my concerns that it was too close to the water table and we'd likely have a nightmare of a time getting a septic system approved inside of $35,000.
Always nice, losing substantial chunks of time with absolutely no pay-off whatsoever ;)
Athennia was running late in rush-hour traffic on her way home from work and surprised us with Domino's for dinner that evening.
Then I helped Taylor with algebra. Her class was factoring sums and differences of cubes now...
Basically, turning a3 + b3 into (a + b)(a2 - ab + b2)...
Over...
And over...
And over again with different values of a and b.
Like maybe,
\(64m^3 + 27n^3 = (4m + 3n)(16m^2 - 12mn + 9n^2)\)
...which would demonstrate our understanding of how to do these...
And then 19 to 34 identical problems with slightly different numbers, just for shits and giggles.
I found high school highly mockable when I had to endure it; and, 21 years later... not much has changed as far as my opinions go.
I don't recall whether we've made mention here yet that Athennia has been suffering increasingly intense gallbladder attacks for probably a l a month or two now.
But, shortly before bed Monday night she started feeling the initial pangs of what turned out to be a seven-hour attack...
And then she got up at 5:00 the next morning on virtually no sleep and went to work anyway!
She had already agreed to pick up Taylor's cats before work on Tuesday morning and take them to the vet again where they would stay all day and finally get neutered at some point (you know... now that they had spent two entire years scent-marking every surface of Lou's trailer, and Taylor was preparing to move with them up to Connecticut).
Meanwhile Leon came around to all the apartments to check everyone's smoke alarms—which meant I had to go around and put batteries in all of them the night before, and then go around and rip all the batteries back out as soon as he left.
Maybe it had finally occurred to him that he was never the protagonist of that story; but, for whatever reason, he was totally polite with me. And so I was polite back.
Weird how that works.
Angel got back to me that afternoon—a day late, as usual—about the half-acre Brody and I had already analyzed and decided to pass on.
Yeah; I talked to the seller's agent. It looks like you'd need a variance to build there because that's a small lot for that area; and you'd probably have some issues with plumbing a septic.
Finally, I made tacos for dinner Tuesday evening. It was supposed to be all four of us; but Taylor pulled out because the vet recommended that the cats not be left alone after their surgeries.
We've been using ground chicken instead of ground beef though; so Kitten skated through without a gallbladder attack :)