Mother's Day and Our Anniversary

Blowing Smoke

So... we had a notice squeezed in our door yesterday afternoon that maintenance would be coming out to every apartment between the 8^th and the 14^th to test everyone's smoke alarms and check the kitchens and bathrooms for leaks.

Great.

None of our smoke alarms have batteries in them—largely due to the fact that I ripped them all out and threw them away 30 seconds after maintenance came out around this time last year.

And also, I can neither confirm nor deny that our kitchen faucet and the one in the shower drip constantly... nor that the toilet slowly runs around the clock.

Anyway, the imminent visit was enough to finally motivate me to take the two minutes and install an unused security camera outside our front door: something I've been putting off doing since we bought our cameras back in February—which is rather ironic, since a big reason for buying them in the first place was so we could point one back at our crappy neighbor Ruth (who, as you may recall, set one up last August after I banged on her door one night and blasted her for parking like such an imbecilic twat all the time).

Funnily enough, Ruth and her latest boytoy don't seem to be fans of being caught on camera every time they come and go: I wish I'd been recording and managed to capture their caught-redhanded-with-their-hands-in-the-cookie-jar expressions the first time they each came up the stairs to find themselves staring down the barrel of a security cam!

My plan was to deny all knowledge of the problem and insist that we simply hadn't noticed anything wrong, with three of us running the water around the clock; but it ended up not mattering anyway, because maintenance came out just before 3:00 P.M. the first day of the spread and did Jeff and Lillian's apartment and Keith and Rosie's, but then decided to call it a day without coming upstairs to do ours or Ruth's.

And then they never came back; so I guess we just got forgotten about entirely. And that's A-okay with me!

Later Thursday evening, we went for a walk—because the sky looked like this...

...until we got about a mile out, and then suddenly things looked more like this...

But, everything blew over without issue and we got drenched exclusively by sweat instead of by Trenton-smog-laced acid rain.

The Enemy of My Enemy...

After dinner on Friday the 9^th, I was working at my desk and heard excessive shrieking out our back window; so I finally got up to take a peek and saw three problem kids who've been getting progressively bolder in recent weeks.

Quick back-story refresher: You may recall that back in the fall I penned an anonymous letter to our landlord demanding that "Fuggy" (our resident make-believe handicapped driver) and her three grown-adult kids be subject to the same Two Cars per Unit in the Parking Lot limit to which the rest of us are; and so, two of the kids have to park their cars out on the street.

So anyway, I looked out the window and saw two of the three aforementioned "problem kids" sitting on top of Fuggy's son's car like it was just parked out there for their amusement!

I went into Riley's room where she and Athennia were playing videogames, and I was like, "Get a load of these two chucklefucks out here just chillin' on Fuggy's son's car without a car in the world."

The son wasn't home; but the one daughter came out, and she and Athennia walked out back and caught the third problem kid—a girl with a dog—seemingly acting as a lookout, while the two boys who'd been on the car had suddenly vanished.

Fuggy's daughter was super appreciative of the heads up and even made mention of the fact that two of her siblings have to park back there "because that's just the way it is." (Clearly they have no idea that I'm the one who orchestrated that.)

But sure enough, no sooner had she and Athennia come back inside, when the problem kids popped up yet again.

So? Athennia tried her hand at battlin' some thugs!

The little shitstains tried to play tough with her—complete with purposely  hanging out right at the edge of our private property (though seemingly failing to realize that they were at that point on someone else's private property)...

...but eventually the knowledge that they were on camera finally wore them down and they decided to fuck off to the clear other side of the next apartment complex over.

We still hear them shrieking somewhere out in the ether several times a week, but they haven't wanted to come anywhere near our complex ever since.

Mother's Day

Saturday Taaro came over for a date with Riley, and then we got to venture into North Philly after dark to take him home that evening.

That's always so much fun.

Then Sunday was Mother's Day...

We headed over to my parents' house for takeout with the family—and of course gave my mom her card and present...

The Death March

While we were over there in one of the nicer parts of Bucks County, we took the liberty of going for a walk on sidewalks that aren't crumbling, in neighborhoods where the houses actually have a bit of a yard...

I'm sure this guard rail is a lot quieter than ours is though...

At some point this woman came out of some random front door and started pushing a stroller up the street. She was behind us for nearly four blocks before she called out an "excuse me"...

Then she asked what the fastest way was to the Getty station—which I was unable to place, off the top of my head, but I assumed was somewhere out on Street Road.

I approached her to try to make sense of the map she had up on her phone, but it wasn't much help; so I just directed her to the fastest way out of the neighborhood and onto Street Road.

This picture doesn't really do her justice...

...but she looked like an inner-city hooker and smelled like a perfume factory had exploded.

Definitely out of place in this neighborhood.

Shortly thereafter we got to the "bunny trail" that leads to McDonald Elementary School and decided to take that as a more scenic route around the neighborhood...

Riley was by now complaining about the distance, and the speed, and just how difficult it was overall for a skinny 15-year-old to keep up with two out-of-shape middle-agers.

Amidst all her complaints, I counted seven broken ankles, four broken legs, three incidents of scoliosis, one headache, and a general hankering for an ice cream cone from Burger King.

A little while later we saw a parasailer—who's pretty hard to make out in these photos...

...And finally a killer sunset...

The Deuce

The following week was pretty slow and uneventful, until Sunday the 18^th when Athennia and I celebrated our two-year anniversary.

We dragged the Molerat along to dinner with us but decided to break our Las Margaritas tradition and dine at Friendly's instead...

Apparently the second-anniversary theme is "cotton"—which I'd had no idea—and so Kitten got me an ornament with a literal cotton plant inside of it...

...and also a kickass NES cartridge with 1988-era sprites of Mario and Princess Peach.

Meanwhile, I got Kitten a dozen paper roses made from pages of Pride and Prejudice, which is one of her favorite books...

Wireless Notworking 101

Monday morning our internet crapped out for about 20 minutes—which has been happening maybe once a week for a month or so now.

I texted Athennia at work to let her know—mostly because I knew Riley would get marked absent if the connection didn't come back in time for her to log in to class, and I wanted Athennia to have a heads up as to why in the event that she happened to get a notification about that.

Unbeknownst to me, she was having a slow day at work and decided to call Comcast and complain! So I was kind of surprised a short time later—long after our connection had been restored—when she called to let me know that a technician would be coming out sometime between noon and 2:00 P.M. to inspect everything.

The guy got here pretty close to noon—and I watched him through our security camera as he wolfed down a McDonald's cheeseburger in his van before getting out to ring our [perpetually broken] doorbell.

I let him in and brought him upstairs, and then I explained our issue to him...

Then he threw me for a loop...

I really thought we were about to get into a debate over the difference between a LAN and a WAN—or between network access and internet access—but, with that, he recalled that he had seen a Comcast truck working on a utility pole just next door to McDonald's on his way over.

So, he called that guy to see what was up, and the guy said he'd just finished replacing a faulty amplifier on that pole, and we shouldn't have any more problems.

Athennia later reminded me that that would've been the very same pole that got hit at like 50 miles per hour and took our power out at 3:00 or 4:00-something in the morning a month or two back.

And so, everything ultimately made sense except for the fact that a professional network technician seemingly had zero understanding of basic network terminology.

At any rate, we have not experienced any outages since.

Tow Company, There's a Crowd

Tuesday the 20^th I was headed out to lunch with my mom; but something fell out of our door when I opened it to leave.

It was a long-overdue note finally promising some enforcement of the parking rules around here—which is phenomenal—but it also appears to have been authored by someone with the IQ of a canteloupe, which is... well, less awesome.

And, you know me: We're gonna have to mercilessly pick this apart.

Ready? Go!

So... wow! Where to start?

• The way this is written, "being parked" actually points back to the leasing office; so, it's claiming that you'll be towed if the leasing office doesn't have your vehicle information while the leasing office itself is parked on the property. Seems unfair? But okay.
• English punctuation actually includes an apostrophe; so, they could've just written "your vehicle's information."
• My brain can't even compute what "...to not be towing" means here.
• The number '2' should have been spelled out. And up-to-date should be hyphenated since it's a compound adjective. No exceptions.
• '24' is more than 10 and can be written as digits, but '24hrs' is just trashy: This is not a text message to your BFF. Spell that shit out.
• Hopefully whoever wrote this will get better soon. Or perhaps, get better now. 'IMMEDIATLEY', one might even say (though I wouldn't).

Apples + Bees - Apples = Bees

My mom and I went for a walk before lunch, and I decided to show her the gardens at Bucks County Community College...

Then when I realized all the teenagers had gone home for the summer, we took a quick walk through the campus as well...

Then we had lunch at Applebee's in Newtown, where they were running a special for graduates to get a discounted gift card or something.

There was no statute of limitations mentioned on exactly how recently one had to have graduated; so I have to assume that our waitress just thought I looked too dumb to be a graduate at all.

Oh well.

The End of an Era

When I got back to the apartment, there was something different about the parking lot. See if you can spot it...

I cannot describe the sheer sense of glee that washed over me in that moment, as I realized that the dreadful "Fuggy" and her entitled family were moving out after probably two full decades here.

If you thought gentrification wasn't a spectator sport, you were mistaken! I spent a good half hour watching the cameras to make sure everything went smoothly...

Here's one last piece of videographic evidence to add to my stockpile proving that ol' Fuggy was a perfectly able-bodied fraud all along, who was simply using the residual handicapped license plate from her husband who died back in 2013 so she could have her own personal parking space just outside her door...

And here's some long-overdue closure as the whole repugnant tribe leaves for the last time...

Ah. The end of an era.

Is it me, or does the sky just look a little brighter now?

The Beginning of an Era

Our maintenance guy Ralph came by in the rain the next day and unceremoniously plucked the handicapped sign out of the mud, marking the beginning of a new era in which all the tenants have free access to all the parking spaces.

It's up for grabs! Whoever gets it first!

Actually, Jeff got home first and backed into the spot next to the no-longer-handicapped spot; so I opened the window and asked why he didn't pretend to be handicapped for the day.

Only then did he notice the missing sign...

And in other news, my friend Joe gave me a call last night to let me know he'd received my letter and has been meaning to get back to me for the last week or so.

He's a good dude and I've missed him these past five years; so it'll be awesome to reconnect and have him meet my family one of these days :)