One Potato, Two Potato...
...and oh so many more
Potato Soup
On Saturday the 8th, I went over to Joe's so we could break down five pallets we'd plucked from the side of the road as a free source of distressed wood.
I'd never broken down a pallet before, but I figured it was probably a five-minute job—or maybe 10 minutes to be safe, since I'm a newb and out of shape at the moment.
Imagine our surprise when it took us literal hours to painstakingly pry out crooked rusty nail, after crooked rusty nail, after crooked rusty nail.
My muscles—or the empty cavities where muscles used to be (before three years' of apartment living made me weak and wimpy)—were super thrilled to find out that manual labor was on the docket, after such a long spell of doing basically nothing physical.
Meanwhile, Athennia had been at home whipping up some loaded potato soup; so, after we finished ripping up the wood, Joe and Paula came over for dinner.
Paula's not the best at letting us take our turn to host though: Even though she just treated us all to dinner at Carrabbas a few days prior, she insisted that she had dessert taken care of... and then she showed up with pound cake, pumpkin muffins, lemon meringue pie, and chocolate-covered pretzels!
Mrs. Potatohead
On Sunday the 9th, Ruth treated us to a five-minute fashion photo shoot in the stairwell while wearing her Sunday best...
Later that afternoon, Athennia was out running some errands and saw that Lou's trailer had finally been demolished...
But of course it's still sad for her, now that it finally has.
That evening, we made burrito bowls for dinner—with corn from Jill and Terry's farm, and maybe the last of the tomatoes from our garden? (I honestly forget now.)
And then? The fashion show was officially over!
By the time evening rolled around, Ruth was back to her usual shower cap and her jammy-jams...
Baked Potato
On Monday the 10th, Ruth needed her live-in gigolo to help with the trash:
Then a little while later, some stoner-y-looking guy showed up to park his jalopy in the street behind our apartment.
Interestingly enough, when I entered high school back in the late 1990s, my dream car was the Lamborghini Diablo.
But I'd had no idea until now that, a decade earlier in the late 1980s, Honda had stuck some tires on a three-dimensional trapezoid and marketed it as the Dia-Blow: a beige shitbrick with an exhaust leak and pentagram wheels right from the factory, so that you could drive around like an obnoxious little doomgoblin and cause misery and agitation everywhere you went.
So, here we are...
Meat and Potatoes
Then on Wednesday the 12th, Joe and I completed our second build...
Nothing terribly complex, since we're limited in what we can accomplish for the time being, without any tools for higher-level woodworking.
Hopefully sometime sooner rather than later though, we'll have acquired some of those and we'll be swimming in inventory.
So, I sat down on Thursday and planned out an SQL schema for an inventory-management database so that I can start coding an application that will let us sketch out projects, track what parts and supplies we'll need in order to build them, and manage our inventory going forward.
The inventory-management aspect alone is a tad... involved, as you can see...
Small Potatoes
Later that night when Kitten and I were in bed, she was already asleep and I was playing chess on my phone, when we heard our downstairs neighbor Keith come home and start banging and slamming things around in his bedroom from 11:00 to 11:30.
We hadn't seen or heard any sign of Rosie for several weeks (ever since the two of them received that court date notice when they got sued by the landlord last month); so, we didn't know if she was just down in the Dominican Republic again for a bit, or if they had split, or if he was drunk, or packing up to move out, or what.
Until the following morning...
The moment the clock struck 9:00 A.M., I heard the telltale stomping of a certain little three-year-old imp downstairs...
Back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth.
...The entire length of the apartment.
...With each step reverberating up through the floor like they were down there hammering nails into their walls as a newfound pastime.
DUHN-DUNH-DUHN-Duhn-Duhn-duhn-dunh-dunh...
...dunh-dunh-duhn-Duhn-Dunh-DUHN-DUNH-DUNH...
...DUHN-DUNH-DUHN-Duhn-Duhn-duhn-dunh-dunh...
...dunh-dunh-duhn-Duhn-Dunh-DUHN-DUNH-DUNH...
It was literally hours of nonstop running and stomping—even after I finally stomped back for 20 seconds in a less-than-neighborly hint, hint message that probably registered on the Richter scale.
Potayto, Potahto
I went over to Joe's to do some work that afternoon; but then Paula called to let him know she had just been hit by a woman blowing a stop sign at the four-way stop around the corner.
So Joe and I jumped in one of his 37 cars and raced over there to see what was up.
And, oh boy... It sure seemed like something was up!
Meet Candace...
Or Kandiss.
Qhaendisse?
X'andi$.
All I know is that she seemed a little unclear on how the post-accident exchange of information works...
Now, young Kand'isse was very much being about as unforthcoming as she possibly could be.
But, to be fair, I did stay in the car the entire time; and I therefore was not privy to the actual verbatim exchange between her, Joe, and Paula.
So, I suppose there's some nonzero chance—no matter how slim—that Q'haen'das'se was the classy one, while Joe and Paula were in fact the ghetto thugs...
What a predicament!
Who was really at fault?
But...
All things that made me go hmm.
At any rate, it turns out that the police in our post-COVID world want to work from home along with everybody else; so they're not all that keen on coming out to the site of a minor fender-bender to write up a report anymore.
You have to come to them now.
So, the three of us gave Xkaen'd1$e a VIP escort to the police station, with me and Joe driving in front, and Paula shadowing from behind—almost like our classy little Trentonite was some celebrity rap-thug with her own entourage, heading out for a night of champagne and dancing!
It was a few miles to the club...
...but it was worth the trip, because I got a nice chuckle at the police premises accidentally saying the quiet part out loud:
Here's the facade of civility and public service that you're supposed to believe...
And here's the cold, hard truth of reality...
They would really prefer that you not come pester them.
Their job is not for you to bother them, but for them to bother you.
They're not here to protect you. They're not here to serve you.
Never were.
Never will be.
They're nothing more than a bunch of little Eichmanns who've sworn to enforce The LawTM, no matter how arbitrary, repugnant, or unjust.
Tater Tots
Meanwhile, Joe and I had still managed to get a little bit of work done, cleaning up our pallet wood a bit to see what we had to work with.
Four of the pallets were just ordinary pine; but one was something else—way sturdier and heavier.
This could make a nice "reclaimed wood" coffee table or two...
...you know, if we had the tools to work with it.
But, yeah... maybe it's time to procure ourselves some tools.
Now, for the record, we've already got a power strip and a blender...
...so we should be good to go with just those two.
Hot Potato
On Saturday, we took Riley to hang out with Taaro for the afternoon.
But that meant dropping Riley at Nina's house.
And that meant venturing into North Philly.
And that DEFINITELY meant coffee first.
The drive down Roosevelt Boulevard was as eventful as you'd imagine. Somehow it was like... we barely got above 20 miles per hour, yet almost died in half a dozen high-speed collisions, all at the same time.
Mix in 600 red lights, 700 speed cameras, 800 Jersey license plates, and 900 uneducated inner-city troglodytes; and you've pretty much got the whole picture.
From Nina's, Kitten and I headed to my parents' house; and we decided to try taking the back way instead of getting back on the boulevard.
What an improvement that was. We had to look at ads for a "free prek" and "get one line" and yadda, yadda, yadda...
Maybe if you only have a Pre-K education you shouldn't be allowed to drive, you preks. That would take about 90% of you off the roadways!
Potato Skin
Just a heads up: There's no left turn in front of Sushiman...
...There's no right turn either—or even going straight—because traffic simply does not move at that location, for hours at a time.
To add insult to injury, I had to sit there and wallow in my own embarrassment upon the realization that I'm 40 years old and I've never once had my dimples threaded, nor my eyebrows and eyelashes tinted...
But then, it wasn't like we'd lose any time stopping to check it out; so we decided to pop in there so I could see what this whole tinting business was all about.
!@#$ it, ladies; just do my whole face.
"Dark Cheeto" sounds like a cool color. Let's go with that one.
I sent Joe a picture afterwards...
That's MY color! Go have them change it!"
And, at that point, I lost interest in the entire thing and just paid them to tint all my facial hair back to the way it had been when I'd initially walked in.
Incidentally though, Liv recently drew this portrait of Athennia...
But I feel like this is clearly my bald spot, tinted eyelashes, and threaded dimples.
Anyway...
We ordered dinner from Taormina's with my mom and dad, and I took this kind of cool picture of the neighbor's tree with absolutely no context whatsoever...
Then later that night Kitten and I watched Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
And yesterday we did basically nothing noteworthy except order a pizza from Bambino's for dinner.
So, nothing noteworthy at all, you might say.