Playing with Fire

Having spent the entirety of the week leading up to the first day of August installing, configuring, and messing around with various learning management systems for a potential business idea I had, I finally hit the limits of my patience and torched all the virtual machines I'd spun up for testing purposes over the course of the week.

Seymour Returns

Mid-afternoon when I went to refill my coffee though, I'm pretty sure Seymour Butts spotted my phone while I was clandestinely filming him...

Super Mario World

Kitten and I have been partaking in some video games ever since I had to rebuild my HTPC; so, later that night, we fired up Super Mario World from... I forget... 1991, I think?

It took me about 18 seconds for my decades of muscle memory to come back to me, and I was flying through levels like they were nothing.

But Kitten had a bit of a tougher time...

Revolution in Philly!

And then... there was revolution in Philly!

Or, I guess more accurately, Philly was in Revolution!

Overcompensating?

The night wouldn't have been complete without our neighbor "Drew's Crew" coming home first at 10:00 P.M. and then again at 12:30 A.M. in a rented Ferrari that he felt the need to rev repeatedly as he rolled into the lot and took his sweet time parking.

I, for one, was so impressed I almost fainted: To be able to rent a car like that?! This dude must have... like... probably $500 at least.

Jersey? Sure.

On Saturday the 2^nd, Nina and Taaro showed up at the asscrack of dawn around 7:30 to pick Riley up and head to the beach (Island Beach State Park, to be precise).

Kitten and I both pleaded with Riley to remember to apply sunscreen vigorously and regularly; but the typical teenagehood came out in full force, and we could tell by her attitude that the "okay" she gave us roughly translated to "I am absolutely not going to do that at all."

Ducksworth Eats TastyKakes

Kitten and I headed over to my parents' that afternoon. My dad grilled chicken and my mom made roasted potatoes and served corn on the cob.

And my parents like to keep industrial quantities of TastyKake products on hand for some reason; so after dinner, my mom wheeled out the dessert trolley.

Liv and Hannah were busy having a Donald Duck quack-off...

...and then Hannah provided some non-Euclidean answers to the question of how many cupcakes she thought she could eat...

Kitten and I harvested a ton of tomatoes from our garden, along with some oregano and basil so we could whip ourselves up a homemade pizza later in the week.

Timeout

We figured we had at least a couple hours before the Molerat would be home from the shore; so, when we got home later, we decided to fire up Turtles in Time (1992?) and save the world from The Shredder.

But we had just finished taking down the Rat King when Riley ended up texting us five minutes or so into the game...

Apparently Taaro's cousin kept pushing Nina off her feet while they were all in the ocean, and eventually Nina came down wrong on her leg and was hurt to the point that walking and driving were difficult. And so, they were on their way home a couple hours earlier than they had planned.

Riley was lobster red from... you guessed it... having only applied sunscreen once in the morning, and then neglecting to reapply it again at any point throughout the day.

Road Trip

Sunday the 3^rd, Joe asked if I felt like taking a drive over to Long Beach Island to help him grab some stuff from his shore house.

There are almost as many Jersey drivers in New Jersey as there are in Pennsylvania... but Jersey also has New York drivers too (who are somehow even dumber and less self-aware than the Jerseyans).

But aside from all those yellow and orange license plates, it was a beautiful day and we had a really nice drive.

I got some pics on the way home...

Pan-Handling

I knew that Kitten was planning to have dinner ready for us when we got back; but she surprised me by cranking up the AC in the living room, lighting some candles to combat Odin's litter box, and putting on some background music.

She served roasted chicken, potatoes, and broccoli for dinner...

Then Odin was ready to hold the evening meeting...

But Joe hadn't attended the last 787 meetings; so he had a lot of meeting minutes to review to get up to speed before we could begin.

Altimatum

Then, sure enough, it was Monday again. Midway through the afternoon, I heard commotion out our back window—and I finally got to see who owns this junk-heap of an Altima that's been parked on the curb for probably two weeks now with a flat tire...

I guess this lady's taking a page out of Seymour Butts's book and mooching of someone who's actually paying rent in one of the units here.

Call me crazy; but, in a weird way, I'm kind of hoping she doesn't get towed for a few months... because a mostly-abandoned vehicle is way quieter than having a different assclown show up every night at 11:00 with his rap music blasting the entire time he has to back up and pull forward 27 times because he can't parallel park.

Cactus in the Rye

Monday evening, I got an email from our overpriced Arizona lawyer, asking me, Kelly, and our aunts to sign an "affidavit of succession to real property."

And this is real property—not that imitation soy crap that's full of preservatives and high-fructose corn syrup—so that meant we all needed to ink our autographs in front of a notary. What fun.

Kassie invited Riley to sleep over and go to Hurricane Harbor the next morning—which Riley was on the fence about, since her skin was the color of a Drew's Crew Ferrari. But eventually Kassie wore her down and Riley finally capitulated.

Category-5 Fun

Riley said she had a blast at Hurricane Harbor.

Since we weren't expecting her home until late Tuesday evening, Kitten and I grabbed a quick dinner at Wawa. As we were waiting for the deli to finish making our sandwiches, I saw two little kids come in and bee-line for the soda fountain. It was hard to tell from ~25 feet away, but I was pretty sure the one kid's shirt had the map from the original Zelda game on it.

But then, the kids filled up their cups and started heading back for the doors to leave without paying!

But then, I saw that they had only filled their cups with ice—and our sandwiches were ready just as they got back outside—so I followed them back to their parents' minivan...

...Aaaand then I basically just walked away.

Siren Song

A few hours later, Riley texted to ask us to come pick her up from Kassie's. As we were walking out the door, we heard sirens coming from everywhere...

...and, as we got on our way, Kitten chuckled, "How much do you want to bet someone let a dryer go too long at the laundromat?"

Sure enough, we got two blocks down the road and confirmed her suspicions. Here's a picture that's so terrible I may as well have not even taken it...

But check out that tree out front, thinking it's the cover of Argyle Park's 1995 album Misguided or something...

Pretty badass!

Langhorne Tax[idermy] and Gate-keeping

I'd already had a lunch date scheduled with my mom for Wednesday afternoon—and I knew I'd be heading right through the center of Langhorne, which is where Kelly works—so I spelunked for a reputable-looking place where we could meet up and pay a voyeur to watch us sign our autographs on a copy of a copy of a copy of the scanned Word document the Arizona lawyer had emailed us.

Langhorne Tax & Bookkeeping looked promising: right out on Maple Avenue, in a building old enough that it's probably where the Last Supper took place. You don't stay in business that long without being either really good or really crooked, or really good at being crooked.

Great either way. I'm not picky.

I figured I'd call 'em up to see whether we'd need to make an appointment before showing up. But I was not expecting the curveball they threw me when I stepped into the batter's box...

I may as well have asked them if they could taxidermy a zebra head.

Allow me to present Exhibit A, with dank memes for added effect...

I briefly considered waiting an hour or so and then calling back as someone else, to troll them by just going up the list of services one at a time...

Dealings with the Notariousized Russian Mafia

But I'm far too lazy for that.

So, instead, I thought to myself, There's gotta be some place in Penndel that's just an eerily nondescript building that looks like a storehouse where the Russian mafia would stash stolen DVD players down by the docks. What if Kelly and I went there instead, and just showed up and walked in unannounced?

So that's precisely what we did.

I told her to meet me across the street, next to this SUV that was MacGyver'ed together with zip ties and duct tape...

Then we did some recon from the shadows...

Yep: If I were part of the Russian mafia and I were stealing DVD players, this is definitely where I would keep them.

Once Kelly and I had gathered enough intel, we made our move.

We knew this would be all about confidence, so we walked right in like we owned the place; and when we found ourselves face to face with two low-level grunts, I requested an introduction with their boss.

Kelly and I signed our respective pages, and a very nice woman—who was probably not Russian at all, but maybe Polish or Bulgarian or of some other ethnicity that my geography-ignorant American ass can't even comprehend—stamped her little seal of approval and recorded our names and the date in her little log book.

But anyway, Kelly and I knew we weren't out of harm's way just yet: Word had surely reached Fat Nicky by now that we'd been asking about him; so there was no telling who might be watching us—much less tailing us as we left the building and went on our way.

We decided to play it safe and split up; and as Kelly was peeling out of the parking lot, she shouted, "Meet me back at Woods!"

So I went there. Only, Kelly was nowhere to be found!

I couldn't know for sure whether they had grabbed her, or whether she'd had to jump over to a Plan B I wasn't aware of.

Either way, things were getting real now. It was every man for himself!

The Russians would be after me as long as I had this document in my custody; so I had to get to the post office quickly.

Against my better judgment, I backtracked to Morrisville so that I'd at least be on my home turf in case I had to engage in a shootout...

...And as a last-ditch effort to ensure successful delivery, I disguised the notarized document as a birthday card to someone in Wisconsin...

But I used a weird Canadian zip code and a bogus address that doesn't exist—and then I put the Arizona lawyer as the return address, so that the document would eventually get to him after it bounced in Wisconsin.

For a moment, I thought that one of the Russians' assassins had caught up with me as I was exiting the post office: I was ready to grab some pine needles from a nearby bush and shoot them into his neck like in the movies—and then garrote him with one of my shoelaces and leave his body behind some shrubs—but it just turned out to be some old guy in a Prius.

Pledge, Pizzazz, and Parmesan

Thursday the 7^th, I spent a good portion of the afternoon straightening up the apartment for the company we were hosting the next evening.

Then for dinner we got around to making that pizza we'd been planning since the weekend...

I wish I could take credit for more than dicing the tomatoes and herbs—although at least I can say I'm not the one who failed to realize we were dangerously low on mozzarella and had to substitute with cheddar and parmesan.

Kitten got this thing so perfectly round though, it looks store-bought!

Joe-king Hazard

Friday the 8^th, we had Joe and Paula over for dinner.

Instead of making them park in the visitors' section all the way out by the dumpsters, I told Joe to just park in our lot like every other assclown here has his/her visitors do. He at least had the decency to park out of the way and leave the closer spaces for actual rent-paying tenants.

Sure enough though, the cops showed up about 20 minutes later!

Don't worry: They weren't there to enforce any actual laws being broken. It just seemed to be really important that they show up and 69 each other in the middle of our parking lot while completely blocking the main thoroughfare through the apartment complex.

They sat there yin-yanging for about five minutes, and then they left.

Our tax dollars at work!

I whipped up a mega batch of nachos for dinner—the only size I know how to do—and we all tried our hardest to kill them off.

We failed...

Plus, Joe and Paula had brought dessert; so we all had to find room in our stomachs to shovel down a bunch of pastries as well!

I'm pretty sure they just walked into Fritz's Bakery and asked for two of everything, because it was just boxes, and boxes, and boxes of stuff...

Then, for most of the remainder of the evening, we decided to play some games.

Kitten and I tend to opt for the NSFW edition of every game we buy; so I'd figured What Do You Meme? would be the safest bet, since we've never actually mixed the really raunchy cards into the rest of the deck. (All our other games are positively scandalous.)

But we were about three minutes in, when Kitten exclaimed, "Oh! We should play that REALLY offensive one that we played last time with Em and O! That was hilarious!"

I tried my best to veto the idea. But Joe and Paula insisted!

"Bring it out! It sounds fun! We can handle it!"

So, off we went.

Odin was particularly leery...

But I looked Kitten, Joe, and Paula in the eye; and, with a shrug, I said, "Just remember: You guys wanted this."

We actually had a blast though. The entire game was a riot :)

And we even got the Molerat to snap some pics when she came out for a drink...

Lemonade

Finally, we heard from Taylor earlier, and she said that she and Ahlina did end up buying the 2013 Infiniti they've been looking at.

So...

Their car payment is just shy of $370 a month for the next three years.

Ahlina's insurance premium is something in excess of $500 a month.

That sacks them with basically a $900/mo car bill, on top of their rent and all their other expenses. Oh, and the mileage on the car was too high for them to qualify for gap insurance... so, if anything at all happens to this car, they'll still be on the hook for paying off the full amount of their loan—while being back to shelling out $400+ each month for Uber rides to and from work every day.

We tried really hard to get them to consider something more practical. But sometimes 20-somethings just know better. <shrug>