Joe, Sea, and the Pussycats

The afternoon of Thursday the 20^th, I snapped this picture—which is a pretty accurate metaphor for the overall family mood after Lou's passing on Tuesday evening (and our not being told about it until 24 hours later for some reason)...

Earlier in the week, Athennia and I had made tentative plans with Joe and Paula to do dinner Friday evening; but then Paula got sick and Athennia had done enough crying for two days straight that she didn't feel like going out in public. Plus, she's been spending a lot of time on the phone with her sister and the girls; so she encouraged me to just go out with Joe somewhere and enjoy the evening.

We dined at Gianni's in Richboro, which is always top-notch in my experience.

Meanwhile, my parents recently got new phones... and my mom has this weird supernatural phenomenon where she writes down all her passwords in a notebook right next to her computer, and then Big Tech conspires against her to change all those passwords to something else every time she gets a new device.

So then I basically have to help her hack back into her own life by saying and doing all the same things an actual attacker would say and do if he were a complete stranger trying to steal her identity.

So that's what she and I spent a couple hours doing on Saturday the 22^nd.

Little old Baskin' Robbins here was just hanging out on the railing for the steps into the pool all afternoon...

Then Kelly, Steve, and the girls came and we ordered takeout from Taormina's.

I noticed that Hannah had some butterfly tattoos; so I told her how much Aunt Athennia likes butterflies and asked if we could send her some pictures. The resulting photo shoot went pretty much exactly how I expected it would...

Also, check out Olivia's stylin' new glasses...

In other "news," my daily-driver keyboard of 15 years is sadly on its way out, and Logitech stopped manufacturing it more than a decade ago—which meant I'd had to do some research to find something comparable.

Athennia had wanted to go to Office Depot last weekend to grab some things for her new office at work; and I had decided to tag along on the off chance that they might still have physical computer keyboards on display in our 2026 world where it seems like every schmuck just thinks he can do everything on his iPhone, with two thumbs and a screen the size of an index card.

Anyway, Office Depot had a really nice Logitech demo on display for $85, but it was out of stock. Athennia pulled up their website on her phone—which, I concede, was rather handy since I hadn't lugged my desktop PC out to the store with us—and the keyboard was out of stock on the website as well.

Then we popped over to Amazon, where they were asking $330 for the damn thing!

But I'd paid $150 for my previous keyboard back in 2011, and a third-party seller had this new one listed on Amazon for $115; so I decided to bite the bullet even though I'd gone in thinking I'd probably be able to score something decent for closer to $50-60.

And, while I was over at my parents' house, the new keyboard got delivered to the apartment; so I had Athennia run downstairs and grab it before it got porch-pirated.

Behold!

It even has that "new keyboard smell."

No regrets!

Saturday evening, Riley also returned home from Florida.

No egrets—except for this one...

This may be a picture of a gulf rather than a sea; but I'm dealing with a sea of my own right now: I have more than 700 tabs open in Firefox, and I am absolutely drowning in information-overload. So I will probably be spending the first half of September wading through it all and filing it away in my personal knowledge base... like I should've done one item at a time as I read each one over the past 18 months.

In other news, we've had an endless stream of cards, flowers, and well wishes coming in from friends and family since Lou's passing.

We enjoyed a lovely fruit bouquet from Paula and Joe...

And then Athennia received flowers from the president and CEO at her new job...

And then even her old job sent flowers earlier this week—which was completely unexpected!

On Thursday the 27^th, the sky was getting menacingly dark as a thunderstorm rolled in.

So, guess who decided to show up?

It's Super Smash Brother! Remember him? He's the guy who, back in like May, used to park closer and closer to our door even though he goes into the door all the way across the lot. Then one day he got rear-ended; and ever since then, he normally parks out on the main road in shame.

I'd sure hate to be driving around with a trunk that doesn't close when there's a storm rolling in... but then again, that black car in the background of this picture has been sitting there with a busted back window for more than two months now as well.

So, who knows? Maybe the people around here simply prefer their car interiors a little on the soggy side. 🤷‍♂️

Meanwhile, I saved all the baby pumpkins I'd encountered when I ripped the plants out of the garden the week before, and I suggested that my mom let Liv and Hannah paint them some day when she was watching both of them.

So, that finally happened on Friday the 28^th...

Paula and Joe had us over for dinner Friday night: Cheese ravioli, Paula's excellent homemade meatballs, salad, and a loaf of Italian bread. Then we had brought sticky buns from Fritz's bakery for dessert, and they had already had an iced chocolate-chip pound cake.

We were supposed to meet Joe's friends Frank and Alicia; but it was nearly 10:00 P.M. by the time Frank arrived, and I don't even know how far out Alicia still was... and Athennia had been up since 6:00 that morning, plus we had three hungry cats at home counting their ribs as they convinced themselves they would surely starve to death ;)

On Saturday, Riley went out with Taaro to some family function at his grandfather's house an hour and a half away.

Athennia and I headed over to my parents' and we all got takeout from Roman Delight. Then on our way home later on, we decided we hadn't eaten enough calories from just our cheese steaks and fries; so we stopped and grabbed dessert at Rita's around the corner from the apartment.

On Sunday, Athennia went down to the parking lot and loaded up her trunk with the three trash bags of dirty cat litter we had just changed—which she was going to drop off at the dumpsters on her way out to the grocery store.

But I noticed on our security camera that she was just sitting in her car and not moving; so after five minutes or so, I decided to call her and make sure everything was okay.

It most definitely was petty, but I was 100% on board with it.

I did go downstairs to help her lug the cat litter across the parking lot though, because that stuff gets very heavy, very quickly.

On our way back, we ran into Jeff and Lillian (and Turbo) and spent a few minutes catching up. I told Jeff that I actually had a "shit-ton" of tomatoes to give him from our garden.

(I think I had only given him like 15 cherry tomatoes so far this summer, because we got a late start planting and we haven't been going to my parents' house quite as frequently.)

I had really been leaning toward giving Keith some as well—because, without Rosie, he's really a pretty quiet and considerate neighbor, and I appreciate that.

But...

He's also had a new car for nearly six weeks now (which I've since noticed has Lyft stickers on it; so I guess he's another bio-robot contributing mindless labor to make someone else rich in the gig economy)...

...and, despite not driving his white Mercedes SUV a single time for more than five weeks now, he insists on leaving it parked in one of the most precious and sought-after spaces in our parking lot—as this month's security footage will attest...

That actually really pisses me off. So he got NO tomatoes, and instead I just gave more to Jeff—who parks his car far away and leaves the closer spaces for everybody else :)

And then we ordered pizza from Bambino's for dinner 😄

That brings us to yesterday—the end of the month.

Athennia got a call from Gwen in the leasing office, telling her that Leon was on his way over to replace the wax seal on our toilet because apparently it's been leaking water down into Keith's bathroom.

I made sure to remind Leon that the thing also runs constantly—because, even though we don't pay for water here, there's still a problem with the seal in the tank that makes it a pain in the ass to flush sometimes.

Leon was a little gruff, as he always is. And he had to go get an angle grinder to cut through the bolts holding the toilet to the floor!

Maybe it's just me; but I don't know that I'd be setting my glasses down on the toilet in a stranger's house. 🤔

He did end up fixing both our problem and Keith's; so, as he was leaving, I decided to bag up the last of our tomatoes for him.

And that brings us to this month's cat pics!

We had a bit of a SNAFU this month when Riley realized she could tune Odin's cone like a satellite dish...

We told Odin that we knew he'd probably watch Cinemax After Dark every night; but we'd appreciate it if he waited until after Riley went to bed, because she's too young to be watching smut.

He seemed off-put but agreeable...

But then Riley figured out how to use the cone not only as a receiver, but as a transmitter as well. And then she started broadcasting...

She repeated the broadcast every hour on the hour...

Soon the entire apartment was filled with cats.

Phase 2 of her plan had been to pack them in her suitcase and take them all on vacation with her to Florida; but fortunately, she's a girl—which means that, for a week's vacation, she needed to pack 27 outfits, 43 pairs of shoes, and enough toiletries to last seven Neptunian years—which meant there wasn't even enough room left for Lucky, let alone all the cats of the world...

Lucky was pretty miffed; but he resolved to sit there unmoving until Riley returned...

Odin, on the other hand, jumped ship immediately in search of greener pastures...

Lucky held out for about 11 minutes, before asking Athennia, "She'll be gone an entire week, you said? That is quite a long time. I suppose you can pet me in the interim."

Odin reached a similar conclusion...

"Congratulations: You've been promoted to Head Petter!"

"Psst! Hey! Did you hear me? You're Head Petter now, I said..."

"You + Pet + Head = Go."

Odin threatened to transmit another broadcast over the waves and call all the cats of the world into our bedroom.

Athennia thought he was bluffing.

He wasn't...

Luckily, Joe stopped by and hypnotized him into reversing the broadcast and telling all the cats of the world to go back to their true homes...

And, when Riley got home from vacation, Lucky staged an intervention and tried to get both Odin and Riley to agree that they would never use Odin's cone to broadcast ever again...

Surprisingly, Riley agreed.

She invited Odin into her room to take a nap on her comfy bed; but the whole thing was just a ruse until they were out of Lucky's sight!

Imagine Odin's surprise when Riley woke him up a short time later and insisted that he sit in the sun to recharge his cone, because they would need all the juice they could get to broadcast another call for cats later...

Neither of them anticipated that the sun's rays would actually disable the cone's transmission abilities permanently.

So, in the end, Lucky got his wish...