1 Party, 2 Parents, 3 Parcels, 4 Weeks in Putz-town

1 Party

This past Saturday was Athennia's best friend Emily's (belated) birthday party.

It was pretty much the same cast of characters from last year; and, we spent the afternoon and evening playing cornhole, getting drunk, and of course gossiping about the absolute shitshow that is the company Athennia left behind (coming up on a year ago already, at the end of October).

Here's my family hiding from the camera as usual—contrasted with the birthday girl, happily posing despite the suboptimal angle and even worse lighting...

Orlando grilled up a bunch of burgers, hotdogs, and salmon all evening long; and then, late into the evening, we had cake: one was tres leches, and I think the other one was some kind of almond.

I was on the wrong side of the cake to get a decent shot; so, this is the best I can do...

If I try to flip this around, it's just going to look weird and your brain won't accept it as valid.

See?

After the sun went down, Athennia and Luna sat around cloaked in heavy blankets like it was mid-January instead of mid-August...

2 Parents

On Sunday, we all headed over to my parents' house: They returned home from vacation the day before, and we hadn't seen them in a week; so, we decided to do dinner together...

We brought fried chicken (with some unexpected complimentary corn bread from a special at Giant), and my parents picked up some tomatoes, corn on the cob, and cinnamon bread from a local farm.

I guess they didn't know they could've just gone into our garden for the tomatoes, since the tomato plants have choked out everything else this year—and, despite having been to my parents' house three times in the last two weeks to drop off carloads of moving boxes, we hadn't actually been there in the daylight to be able to harvest anything.

But...

...We managed to find a few the bugs hadn't chomped through yet :)

3 Parcels

So, now we had a metric ton of tomatoes to use up before they went bad. (And, most of them had been lying on the ground when we grabbed them; so, we knew their shelf-lives would be drastically reduced...)

This called for some crowd-sourcing: My parents had of course just bought tomatoes earlier that day; so, they only took a few. But, I made some calls to my sister and to my Aunt Sue and Uncle Roy to see if we could dump some on them.

Yes and yes.

Kelly and Steve were over at his mom's for a family party; so, I left a bag full of tomatoes with my mom to take to them the next day. Then Athennia, Riley, and I stopped at my aunt and uncle's in Richboro on our way home so we could make a tomato delivery.

When we finally pulled into our parking lot later, I asked Athennia whether we should offer some to our (good) downstairs neighbors Jeff and Lillian...

We really don't know them well at all; but, as I've mentioned numerous times here on the blog, they're basically the only people here whom I can tolerate: They're polite, and respectful, and quiet, and actually have triple-digit IQs like normal people (all super-rare qualities 'round these parts). Plus, Athennia has said that Jeff has helped her out a few times over the years—getting heavy things up the stairs and such, before I came into the picture. And I appreciate that!

Why not offer them some tomatoes? We were still drowning in them!

As we approached the front door to our building, Athennia saw Lillian through their front window and they waved to each other. So, I knocked on their door.

Jeff's eyes popped out of his head when I told him he could take half of them if he wanted. He grabbed a grocery bag and started loading up, saying that he felt like a kid on Halloween—at which point I lamented the missed opportunity to make that a stipulation of the deal...

Jeff's apparently a huge health nut and a gym rat; so, he promised he'd go through the tomatoes in a matter of days, and I promised I'd almost certainly have more for him at some point.

Just before we got into bed that night, Athennia logged into K12 and discovered that Riley was apparently not enrolled in school (with it now being late-August, and the school year beginning in about 11 seconds)...

But, Athennia called first thing Monday morning and confirmed that—just like with Taylor—Riley was enrolled just fine all along, and K12 is just running their business on Windows 3.1 or something.

4 Weeks in Putz-Town

Seems as though we've been trying to navigate this whole property and house acquisition process for a couple millenia now...

First, it was all Brody's work getting Clayton Homes to work with the USDA's draw schedule.

Then, it was the never-ending journey through literally hundreds of Zillow listings (and, luckily, just a handful of actual trips to visit maybe a dozen of them in person).

Now that we've settled on the Kutztown property, it feels like we're all still dragging our feet in some way or another (as the clock continues to tick downward on our deadline from the USDA to commit and close on something by mid-November).

Kutztown?! More like Putz-town; amirite???

But, to his credit, Brody's dad Ed called me on Tuesday morning, all healed up from "the 'VID" (as he called it)—so, I guess he wore six masks and got all 14 boosters over the weekend ;)

Ed was feelin' spry and ready to head out to Kutztown within the hour—which was fine, except that I wanted to be there too, and it would take me two hours.

I told him, at this point, if this was the only time he could do it, just go ahead and I'd settle for being present over the phone instead. Otherwise, tomorrow afternoon would be fine with me if that worked for him.

We made plans to meet on site tomorrow at 1:00 P.M., and things finally felt like they had a bit of forward momentum building up.

Riley went over to Lou's later in the afternoon to see her sister for a few hours; and Athennia's five-minute stop at Wal-Mart on the way home from work turned into more like an hour when she was accosted by no less than four NRG grunts who had gone rogue and left their little square at the front of the store and taken to wandering the store to hunt for unsuspecting shoppers.

When she finally got home I asked her, "Why don't you just checkmate those assholes on the spot, Kitten? If they're going to shamelessly solicit and harangue you—especially when they know full well they're not supposed to—it's okay to take the gloves off and just trounce them in front of everyone..."

But,

That's not who I am. That's hard for me to do,

...she said.

(I know, Kitten. I know.)

One of the things she procured at the store though was a bigger container of spackle so I could try my hand at tackling... er, spackling... this monstrosity...

This is the result of years and years of the landlord's "Bare Minimum" policy: Instead of ever actually fixing anything, they gloss over it with a thin sheen of paint and a can do, but don't feel like it attitude.

But, while Athennia got busy in the kitchen—making the rotini with sweet Italian sausage, onions, and peppers that she'd planned for dinner—I cracked open the spackle and went to town with an expired credit card I hadn't had a chance to shred yet...

Not bad for a first draft! And maybe I'll do a few touch-ups tomorrow...

...But, then again, maybe I won't—because here are some examples of things the landlord has considered finished to satisfaction over the years...

Whatever. Soon it won't be our problem anymore :)

Wednesday morning, my mom and I headed up to Kutztown together to meet Ed, giving ourselves plenty of extra time in case we ran into any traffic—or in case the Pennsylvania state flower (the orange highway cone) was in excessive bloom this month.

It turned out to be a headache-free trip and we got there with half an hour to spare...

And, just as I was telling my mom how the neighbors hadn't answered the door when Athennia and I knocked on it last month, a car pulled into their driveway; so, I bolted out of the car and sprinted over to introduce myself.

Our hopefully-soon-to-be neighbor's name is... Terry?

Or Terri?

Or Teri?

Or Pteri?

She was super friendly and told me a little about her boyfriend Rodney and the couple who live across the street. Her biggest complaint about them is that "they kind of keep to themselves," but I assured her we can live with that. (God, I wish our current neighbors would keep to themselves!)

As a bonus, Terry probably has an easy 20 years on Athennia and me... and I get the impression that our neighbors across the street are older than we are as well. So...

Then Ed arrived, two minutes early. He was also super friendly and personable, just like his son. I doubt his assessment of the lot even took 15 minutes, since it's such a textbook piece of property.

He only really noted a few things:

• The existing well is only 80 feet from the septic system instead of the standard recommended 100+ (which we already knew, because we had to acknowledge this in some of the paperwork we signed).
• Stormwater management requirements on a property this big would be "absolute bullshit" in his opinion, but could cost $20,000 nonetheless if the township demands it.
• The current electric service is only 100-amp, which we might want to upgrade. (I'm a computer guy who sometimes has a lot of servers running; so, yes.)
• OH, and... among all the deer poop littering the landscape, "This one looks like it might be bear."

My mom and I stopped for lunch at Arby's in Quakertown on the way back, where—despite the friendly customer service and top-notch quality of the food—our cashier Seth apparently thought I was just common-noun material...

After lunch, I stopped by my parents' house and harvested a bunch more tomatoes, some lettuce, some Vietnamese coriander, and some volunteer mustard greens that came up from last year.

Athennia and I made our rounds dropping off veggie deliveries all over Bucks County—much like DoorDash, although there was no dash component to it whatsoever, thanks to this not-so-aptly named "Veloster" full of little high-school tykes behind whom we got stuck...

LVJ-1431, their license plate said. Perhaps that's French...

Le veloster juvénile—and its top speed of 14.31 miles per hour.

Anyway, we finally broke free of them and stopped by Lou's to drop the mustard greens off for Taylor (since they're apparently a dietary staple of her bearded dragon Littlefoot).

Then, when we got home, we knocked on Jeff and Lillian's door to dump another few pounds of tomatoes on them (since Jeff was so appreciative a few days ago). They said they like cilantro too, so I gave them some of the coriander to try as well.

And, for dinner, we whipped up some tacos with garden-fresh veggies!

Maybe someday we'll have tacos with top-choice bear sirloin from a real-life grizzly that Lucky and I take down with a shovel and a ballpoint pen.

But, this time, it was just boring old ground beef. Still delicious though!