Rain on Our Parade
Look at that white wall! April showers bring flash floods. We become... mallrats?
No One: You should open this post with a haiku: It'd be sophisticated and urbane.
Me: <shrug>
Gonna pour for four days straight.
Sky just keeps peein'.
Nobody'd better steal that, by the way... I haven't published it yet; but, there's no denying that it's poetic gold: Excuse me while I adopt "Robert Frosty" as my nom de plume and get rich as the new Wendy's spokesman who routinely sips a frosty while writing poetry in the park.
...So, anyway, we did our best to make the most of a soggy weekend. I'm personally addicted to Dark Hollow Park at the moment; but, needless to say, that wasn't in the cards. We also didn't get Frosties (Frostys?)—which, in hindsight, is also kind of a bummer.
Working at the Athpartment
We spent a couple hours cleaning at Athennia's apartment on Saturday afternoon: The kids had left behind a bunch of Scotch tape residue and other crap on the walls in their old bedroom (now Athennia's room, since the switch); so, I went through and performed surgical touch-ups to remove all the sticky black spots with WD-40, and then Athennia came along behind me with a bleach-soaked mop...
Since it was 50 degrees and pouring outside, shampooing the carpet had to wait for another day more conducive to opening the windows; so, we decided to throw in the towel and spend the rest of the day hanging out with Riley.
We headed back to my place for a quick lunch of some leftover pizza and chili (and Kraft mac and cheese for Riley). Athennia had tried and failed to get Riley to try a bite of chili earlier in the week; so, I conned her into trying it by promising to give her an early Christmas present in exchange... to which she readily agreed!
She tried a big bite—even with two kidney beans, which I'll freely admit that I wouldn't have touched at her age—and said she really liked it :)
And so, I kept up my end of the bargain as well... kind of.
BAHAHAHAHAHA!
Mallrats
For lack of any other ideas—we decided to check out the Willow Grove Mall to see whether malls have evolved at all since... oh, circa 1997 or so (which I imagine is the last time most people have stepped foot in a mall).
Oddly enough, the very first and very last things we saw provided the perfect subject matter for a series I've decided to call titled "No Privacy for the Obtuse."
Obtusity's forms are manifold, but these photos capture two of the more common...
The first depicts a degree of ostensive self-absorption rapidly approaching positive infinity: It's a relatively safe assumption that Abraham Lincoln neither knows nor cares that his parking spot ended four feet and seven inches ago. He's not part of the terrestrial society in which the rest of us dwell: He lives on Planet Abraham (population: awesome), and one can only hope that his evening at the theater ends with a real bang one of these nights :)
The second represents the uneducated impulsivity of whoever actually uses Bitcoin ATMs...
But, no. He wants Bitcoin because Fox and CNN told him it's untraceable and will turn him into a millionaire. So, his first step with this "private" and "untraceable" technology is to go to an ATM, slide in a credit card directly linked to his real-world identity via his SSN, and leave behind a crystal-clear paper trail for those 87,000 new IRS agents that may or may not being coming onboard (depending on whether you get your news from Fox or CNN).
That's stupid, Billy. Don't do that. If you want Bitcoin, go produce some goods or services for someone and have them pay you in Bitcoin just like it was cash: No KYC. No AML. No paper trail. Purely anonymous and impossible to prove.
It's mildly fascinating to consider the possibility that Abraham Lincoln and Billy Bitcoinz are the same dude: Like, he drove all the way from New York to exchange his fiat for bits at an ATM 100 miles away in the hopes of covering his tracks, because he's that smart and that dumb at the same time.
Athennia bought Riley some new Slipknot shirts and a KoRn shirt at Hot Topic; then, we spent about 6.3 seconds pondering how badly we wanted the gigantic avocado plushie at Squishables (not badly enough to spend $250 on it!); and, after walking all three stories of the mall, we ended up at Auntie Anne's to load up on overpriced empty carbs.
As we ate our pretzels at a table overlooking the third-floor railing, I told Riley about a time back in February that Athennia and I were having Chinese food there and one of her chopsticks rolled across the table and took an unexpected leap over the edge.
Luckily, we saved some room for dinner—since we had already planned on homemade tacos. And, after a late dinner—complete with obligatory ice cream for dessert—we decided to call it a night and took Riley home.
No Park-ing
When we woke up Sunday it was, to our complete lack of surprise, still raining. And, all we wanted to do after three full days of the same was go outside! So, we started thinking about how we could perhaps simulate outdoorsy stuff even though we couldn't actually be outdoors?
Athennia suggested that we could go check out the store at Shady Brook Farms—where I snagged a cool little hedgehog statue for the garden, and some seeds.
I said we might as well check out the Styer Orchards store while we were kinda-sorta in the area, too; but, we didn't see anything there that we had to have.
On the way home, I asked if she felt like popping into Tyler State Park just to see what the creek looked like after three straight days of rain.
We weren't disappointed!
Check out these before and after shots...
Turns out, we had arrived just in time—right as the park ranger arrived to toilet-paper the area with caution tape.
Honestly, whom are you expecting is showing up to traverse that bridge? You're wasting perfectly good caution tape that you're gonna wish you'd saved when someone paints the theater wall with Abraham Lincoln's brains later this evening!
Excuse me while I... cross the creek: I need to cordon off the area to make sure no one crosses the creek!
- Ranger Rocco
Naturally, we had to go check out Playwicki too: I've seen the creek come all the way up to Bridgetown Pike there!
But, we didn't feel like getting out of the car and trudging through a wet field to get down to the creek; and, what we could see from the car was pretty underwhelming...
Sunday Night
We were starving by the time we got back to my area; so, we went to the general to save some time.™
Athennia thought it was just tso-tso, but I liked that there were almost as many hot peppers as bites of chicken. (It was way too hot for her after her first ~5 bites; so, I ended up essentially killing this entire thing myself.)
The rest of the day was just meal-prep and relaxation... save for a wild hedgehog sighting!
