In Sickness and in Health

Well, after an exciting first half of September, Kevin and Riley and I have all spent the second half of the month sick with colds.

I was the first to realize I was sick, since I was 99% sure even as we were out geocaching in the woods on Tuesday the 12^th. But Riley was the first to actually come down with full symptoms two days later.

Halfway through work on Friday afternoon, though, I had a full blown cold as well.

And in other news, Kevin and I decided we're sick and tired of waiting for everyone to do nothing to move our house project along, so on Friday he gave Brody (the only one trying to move things along) the go ahead to dip into the $2,500 deposit we gave Clayton Homes back in June and fill out a build permit request to submit to the township.

Our realtor also found out (after Kevin's repeated hounding) that the current owner of our land might have some sort of certificate that would allow us to forgo (or at least diminish?) whatever stormwater management mandates we might otherwise be on the hook for.

But we don't know for sure yet, so we may just have to hope for the best and see what response we get from the township at this point.

Saturday morning I made us all bacon and eggs for breakfast. Then I asked Kevin if he minded if I laid back down for a nap, and he let me sleep the rest of the morning and afternoon.

We didn't really have a dinner plan, so we ordered pizza from Bambino's and then spent the evening relaxing and watching a bunch of episodes of Grimm (about a detective who can see mythological creatures hiding among humans, and hunts the bad ones while protecting the good ones.)

Riley and I were sick enough by Sunday that we decided to stay home from Ron's birthday party so as not to give whatever we have to Kevin's parents or Kelly, Steve, and the girls.

Kevin made chicken tacos for dinner instead (which Riley and I unfortunately couldn't taste, but it was some of the most tender chicken I've ever had.) Then despite being sick, Riley said she was bored out of her mind and wanted to do something, so she ended up sweeping out the kitchen and bathroom and vacuuming the entire apartment for us :)

Kevin and I spent most of the afternoon and evening watching Grimm. Seven episodes of it to be precise, which put us into the second season.

I decided to call out of work on Monday. The day was largely a repeat of Sunday (except that with Riley being in virtual school, she couldn't really justify missing a day as easily as I could.)

But when I finally decided to wake up, Kevin and I watched six more episodes of Grimm. And then he made another batch of chicken tacos again for dinner.

On Tuesday the 19^th I called out of work again.

Kevin received some geocaching stuff in the mail that he ordered the week before.

The keys on the left are tradeables we can leave behind as souvenirs, or "swag", at the various caches we find, especially when we decide to keep something for ourselves in exchange.

The ones on the right are "trackables": a hedgehog for Kevin, a kitten for me, and (as he put it) "Riley playing the guitar".

We thought it was funny that a shipment of items whose sole purpose is to be tracked every time they move, had virtually no tracking information the entire time it was in the custody of the post office:

Tuesday evening Kevin made chicken penne alfredo with broccoli for dinner, and we watched three episodes of Grimm but called it an early night so I could try to go into work in the morning.

Wednesday morning Kevin sent me this video and said,

It's 8:22 in the morning and Ditz is having a meltdown in the parking lot. I wasn't even recording yet for the really bad parts, but her vocals and her pageantry were downright demonic.

I thought about telling her to shut the @#$% up, but I decided just to let it play out... I've watched enough Grimm by now to know a Hexenbiest when I see one!

I was at work almost two hours Wednesday morning before my boss got in and took one look at me (and one... listen at me?) and told me I was crazy for coming in.

He insisted that I should have stayed home and put my health first, and he assured me I'm in no danger of the company being mad at me for doing so.

So I worked half a day before deciding to leave early to go home and rest.

Not knowing that would end up being the case, Kevin had already decided to spend the afternoon at his parents' house harvesting tomatoes and going for a walk with his mom.

But when he got home later, he said he had a sore throat and a weird taste in the back of his mouth, and he was pretty sure he was finally sick too after holding out for five days :(

Around dinnertime my mom called and asked if Riley wanted to come with her to Chic-fil-A to get dinner (in exchange for helping her by going in and carry everything to the car, which would be prohibitively difficult for my mom to do on her own.)

I had no appetite at all, and Kevin was tired of cooking from scratch and manually washing all the dishes afterwards for the past few nights. So he decided to just heat up a tray of French fries for himself.

When Riley called from Chic-fil-A to see if we wanted anything, I said no but Kevin asked her to get him an eight count of nuggets so he could get some protein.

What we hadn't realized was that my mom was buying food for Taylor, Ahlina, and CJ as well and taking everything back to her house for everyone there to eat first. She ended up ordering a giant tray of 30 nuggets in addition to Kevin's eight count, and then somehow the staff at the restaurant had a mix up and ended up giving Riley TWO of both.

So, two trays. Two boxes. And 76 total nuggets instead of 38.

But after the girls finished eating and my mom left to bring Riley home, they forgot to grab Kevin's nuggets on their way out, so despite thinking he might have 16 coming his way, he ended up not getting any at all.

He supplemented his French fries with a bowl of Reese's peanut butter puffs (because how else would you make a dinner of French fries even worse?) and then we watched five episodes of Grimm before bed since I knew by then I was not going into work in the morning.

In fact, I didn't even have a morning. I just slept straight through Thursday till about noon, and I felt substantially better for it when I finally decided to get up.

We all took it easy all day, and I popped out to Giant to grab fried chicken and some mac and cheese for a quick dinner. Coming out of the store, I captured this picture of the sun with a rainbow around it.

(Or a sunbow?)

Then after dinner we watched some Grimm and got to bed early so I could go to work in the morning.

Friday I went into work, and stayed for a full day!

Sometime mid afternoon Kevin sent me this picture of our maintenance guys Leon and Rafael finally fixing the door lock on the neighboring building that has been broken for probably a year now so that anyone in the know could just come right in by pulling on the knob hard enough:

We caved and ordered pizza from Bambino's for dinner again. Then Kevin and I retired to the bedroom for yet another Grimm marathon.

At one point shortly after we gave the cats their dinner, Kevin said to me,

Hold on, I missed whatever just happened. I'm trying to figure out what Michael Phelps is trying to accomplish over here.

An episode or two later, he wanted to go make himself some more tea to try to keep his cough under control, so he asked if I would pause it:

Him: Do you mind if I go make another mug real quick?
Me: (sarcastically) YES!
Him: Well, TOUGH NOOGIES! <starts pushing past me>
Me: I'd love a kiss. But I know you can't.
Him: <looks around, spots his tape measure on his desk, picks it up, kisses the main housing, then unrolls the tape 4-5 feet and taps the top of my head with the end like he's knighting me>

Friday night into Saturday morning was not a great night of sleep for either of us. We were constantly waking each other with our respective coughs until Kevin finally decided to just get up 5:30am.

He let me sleep until well into late morning again, but it turned out he had been too sick and tired to concentrate on much of anything. So he had fired up Minecraft for the first time in forever and played all morning.

When I did finally get up and he showed me what he had built, he said,

You can tell what I wish I was doing right now...

Meanwhile Riley wanted to know if her friend Kassie could come over and spend the night. So I had to remind her that not only were we all sick at the moment, but we're also in the middle of a slow motion move, which is why our living room looks like this at the moment:

The girls were able to change their plans so Riley could spend the night at Kassie's instead, but Riley had run out of clothes and needed me to go do laundry first for that to happen.

Luckily I was starting to feel like I was over the hump and on the way to getting better by this point anyway, so I got our clothes together to head to the laundromat.

When I heading down to the car, I found this in front of our downstairs neighbor's door:

I sent it to Kevin as soon as I got in the car. His first response was:

So, first off, why is their welcome mat backwards. They're essentially welcoming themselves out of the house every time they leave, like "Welcome to the vestibular utopia that is the stairwell."

Then, of course, I have to wonder how many people are living in your two-bedroom apartment to justify having TWO !@#$%^& microwaves.

(We've been seeing several new faces coming and going frequently and have our suspicions. And of course we reported them to the landlord for having too many tenants back in February.)

But I suggested that it was just as likely they might be shipping the microwaves down to family in Africa much like our upstairs neighbor Ruth ships a bunch of random crap down a few times a year.

So by the time I drove the three blocks down to the laundromat, Kevin shot me back this response:

Kassie and her Mom came to pick Riley up around 4:00. And when dinnertime rolled around, I surprised Kevin and offered to treat to Qdoba since it was just the two of us.

We drove to the Neshaminy store, ordered our meals to go, and came back home for a tasty dinner and another evening of binge watching Grimm.

We made it into the fourth season by the end of the night, despite never even realizing we had made it into the third season at some point.

Sunday started off as a lazy day. Kevin woke up a few hours earlier than me and had breakfast by himself. And I didn't have much of an appetite.

We watched a few afternoon episodes of Grimm, and in one of them the characters had ordered Chinese food in one scene, which I casually mentioned to Kevin that I could really go for right then.

Four or five hours later as it was nearing dinnertime, Riley called to ask if she could stay at Kassie's another night (since they each had off Monday for Yom Kippur.)

That meant it was suddenly just me and Kevin for dinner again. And as soon as I hung up with Riley, he just kind of looked at me and said, "Soooo...?"

What, you want Chinese for dinner? I correctly deduced.

We decided to change the cat litter and get the trash together since we were heading out anyway, and in doing so we realized we needed to stock up on more litter while we were out.

I had also wanted to stop by Giant anyway. So we went to Giant, then up the road to PetSmart. Then as we left PetSmart, I called in dinner and we stopped so I could fill my tank on the way at BJs.

Kevin pointed out "Phil McCracken" at the gas station and commented that "maybe that guy should have a valve stem on his shorts, because they're looking a little low as well."

Then unbeknownst to me, he got a picture of me coming out of the Chinese place:

He teased me when I got back to the car,

What were you looking at, kitten? The pumpkins?

Because it's getting cold out?

Because Ned Stark was right, and winter is coming?

And soon it'll be nice and cold and gray again?

Then as drove away, Kevin asked what I thought it would be like to go to a dentist that was just called "Dentist."

He ran with that for a few minutes:

You'd pretty much have no choice but to be Russian at that point and speak without using articles.

Okay, I hef to go to Dentist now.

Son of bitch! I have cavity! How can this be vhen I always floss after meal?!

Now I am hef to go back and get filling. But if you want I can give ride to Tanning or Tattoo. Even walk down and get pumpkin if you want.

Winter comes!

With dinner in our hands, all we wanted was to get home and dig in. So naturally another round of rain rolled through and we hit every single red light.

I could feel Kevin slowly boiling over:

And now we get to be stuck behind Handicapped McGee.

And she's been braking for 27 seconds straight, which I know because I counted.

But then he realized something even worse:

Yet now that we're sitting at a red light, she's apparently NOT braking.

Then as soon as the light turned green and we started back up, she appeared to be braking the entire time again.

We realized that her brake lights were wired up wrong and inversely correlated to her brake pedal (which is super dangerous for her and everyone else alike!)

But we didn't have any way to get her attention and warn her by the time we got back to our street, so hopefully someone else tells her or she figures it out somehow.

When we got home, Kevin said he didn't feel like making two trips in the rain to carry up all the cat litter, cat food, groceries, and dinner we had brought back. So despite barely being able to breathe to begin with, he carried all 100 pounds of cat litter across the parking lot and up an entire flight up stairs (and threw himself into a two minute coughing fit as a result) while I managed to grab everything else.

Then we enjoyed our hard won dinner and watched half a dozen more episodes of Grimm.

We had a terrible night's sleep Sunday night into Monday, but since then we both seem to be on the mend (even if more slowly for me.)

Riley came home from Kassie's around 9:00 and watched a couple episodes of Grimm with us. Then it was off to bed so she could go back to school Tuesday morning.

Later that evening, I made chicken, potatoes, and broccoli in homemade gravy, and for dessert we had some upside down apple crumb cake that Kassie's mom had Riley bring home to us.

And finally on Wednesday evening just before we sat down for tacos, Brody reached out to Kevin and said that Clayton Homes's "permit guy" had submitted a build permit request to Richmond Township (Kutztown) and will "keep on them" about getting a response ASAP!

After dinner we watched some Grimm with Riley. And then as we wound down with some funny YouTube videos, we heard what sounded like cackling hyenas and other loud noises outside our window and Kevin informed me that "it's 9:45 on a school night and there are five thugs hanging out on the guardrail."

Oh boy.

So before he decided to grab his baseball bat and go down to play a round of Whack A Mole, I reminded him that the noise ordinance goes into effect at 10:00pm, and I told him I would call the police if they were still there at 10:30 when we were getting into bed.

When I returned from tucking Riley in around 10:20 or so, Kevin informed me that "it sounds like the hoodlums have finally @#$%ed off."

Thursday afternoon I got rear ended when traffic suddenly came to a stand still from 80 miles an hour, and a woman in a blue Toyota slammed into a guy from Jersey in a black Honda and pushed him into me.

So I got to spend an hour standing in the fast lane of the turnpike in rush hour and praying that someone else wasn't going to come along and plow into all of us while the state trooper took all our information!

But at least the cop cleared me to drive away at the end:

We didn't have a dinner plan (and neither of us felt like cooking) so we caved and ordered cheesesteaks from Bambino's. Then we watched a bunch of Grimm episodes and stayed up a bit late since I had already called out of work for the morning so I could deal with my insurance and everything.

Yesterday was largely uneventful by comparison. We just watched a bunch of Grimm throughout the afternoon and evening, and we made a sausage pizza for dinner.

Then this afternoon we went over to Kevin's parents to see Catherine, Ron, Kelly, Steve, and the girls for the first time in two weeks (and to give Ron his belated birthday present.)

Catherine treated to takeout from Taormina's, and Kevin and I brought cookies and ice cream for dessert :)

We also had a special guest:

And the garden is doing... okay... considering we haven't put any real effort into it all season:

The moon was beautiful on the drive home too. We tried to get a good picture, but that's not easy at 45 miles an hour:

And of course it's the end of the month, which means lots of pictures of the kitties :)