Meat in the Middle
Setting the table... then building one from scratch.
On Tuesday the 17th, three cops showed up at the apartment complex.
Granted, I didn't exactly have a front-row seat...
...but, from what I could gather, they showed up to chase "Aindoo Nuffins" off the property.
If you've ever caught even 30 seconds of an episode of Cops, you know the type:
- loitering under a tree on private property at 10:30 A.M. on a Tuesday, because he's got nowhere else in the world he has to be
- pacing back and forth while sipping a Pepsi the entire time the cops are grilling him, because what better way to show 'em you ain't even da least bit fazed by dey presence 'coz you Aindoo Nuffins!
In our bass-ackwards little town of Morrisville, loitering is serious enough to warrant three officers responding, but petty enough to let the guy walk free after a stern talking-to.
Ugh.
At the very least, let's hope Aindoo Nuffins at least learned the lesson that he's better off if he aindoo it somewhere else from now on.
On Wednesday the 18th, it was an absolutely gorgeous day and there was no reason in the world not to get some work done; so I reached out to Joe...
...who announced that he was sick and wanted to step away from the woodworking for awhile...
...but then he clarified that he wasn't so sick that he was completely out of commission; and, he'd more than happy to "meet me in the middle" and pop over with one of his trucks so we could snag the 14 pallets Athennia had spotted by the side of the road a few blocks from the apartment :)
So...
We managed to fit 11, leaving behind the three dumpiest ones that wouldn't have yielded much usable lumber anyway.
But, the thing with this particular truck is...
...it basically only has a driver's seat and a steering wheel in it right now.
So, I got to ride on the floor—hunched into the fetal position and not wearing a seatbelt as we tore down the highway at 70 back to Joe's place.
Probably almost as much fun as stealing from GIANT :)
Once we got back to Joe's, he decided he'd at least be up for drilling a few pilot holes to brace the table legs and finish our latest build...
I don't think we ever took pictures of the bathroom table we'd built for Paula either; so here's that. And at the end of the night, Joe offered to treat me to a very late dinner at the Golden Eagle in Bristol...
Saturday the 21st, my mom invited us to a cookout at my parents' house.
As usual, Hannah pulled a Mowgli from The Jungle Book and went to live amongst her toys...
Then she came back with tales of her exploits...
Meanwhile, Liv helped Steve complete an ages-five-and-up jigsaw puzzle...
And then there was meat!
And more meat!
It's always a good day when there are gratuitous amounts of meat to be had...
Half of us even went on an after-dinner hunt around my parents' neighborhood to see if there was any more meat to be found.
It turned out that there was!
...but gutting a deer in front of the kids might've traumatized them; so we decided to take a page out of the Morrisville cops' playbook and let her live to see another day.
She aindoo nuffins!
And finally, just before dinner on Sunday the 22nd, I started tasting the definitive flavor of "Yep, you're getting sick" in the back of my throat.
For the first time ever, neither Olivia nor Hannah had been sick the day before; so, it's looking like I probably caught Joe's cold on Wednesday.