Kevin worked with Joe again on Wednesday and Thursday and sent me these pictures of a bee on the shed door :)

Then on Friday Riley officially started her spring break from school!

She and I have had a trip planned to Connecticut since back in the fall. So on Sunday (since Taylor has off Sundays and Mondays) Riley and I drove up to Danbury to visit!

Taylor and Ahlina still have their apartment, but they also spend a lot of time at Ahlina's mom's since her apartment is closer to their work. So the first order of business was to pay the Cyrus tax:

Then we had lunch at a Batman themed restaurant called Three Brothers:

Then I helped Taylor apply (and get approved) for her first credit card, and we filed her taxes and went grocery shopping.

Before we knew it we were hungry for dinner, so we went to Elmer's diner:

Taylor got a piece of tiramisu the size of a cinder block!

And then just like that, the whole day had gone and it was after midnight somehow... with me and Riley having a three hour drive home ahead of us!

So we said our teary goodbyes until the next time we get to see each other :(

And then Riley and I got home around 4:20 Monday morning!

Naturally that was the day that Morrisville decided (having fixed all the other pressing issues in this town) that everyone needs to have matching trash cans like a bunch of Catholic school kids in identical uniforms.

The big hollow trash cans made lovely thunking noises as the garbagemen slammed each one down on the asphalt and then rolled them all to the curb at everyone's driveways.

And finally, it's the end of the month. So enjoy these purr-fect cat pictures!

When the weather gets warm, you might want to spend the day outside on your catio!

Do some sunbathing, and maybe even take a swim in that pool next to your food dish!

Then watch some TV, and take a bath if you feel like it:

Or go visit a friend, only to find that she's tired and just wants to sleep:

And sleep...

...and sleep...

...and sleep...

Until she wakes up and remembers she hasn't filed her taxes yet!

(But you've had yours filed for two months now, so you keep sleeping.)

Then you call up your other friend who's a real manly-man even though he really likes pink:

He comes for a sleepover:

And remember: It doesn't matter if the humans make their bed, as long as they make yours:

On Tuesday the 17^th, three cops showed up at the apartment complex.

Granted, I didn't exactly have a front-row seat...

...but, from what I could gather, they showed up to chase "Aindoo Nuffins" off the property.

If you've ever caught even 30 seconds of an episode of Cops, you know the type:

• loitering under a tree on private property at 10:30 A.M. on a Tuesday, because he's got nowhere else in the world he has to be
• pacing back and forth while sipping a Pepsi the entire time the cops are grilling him, because what better way to show 'em you ain't even da least bit fazed by dey presence 'coz you Aindoo Nuffins!

In our bass-ackwards little town of Morrisville, loitering is serious enough to warrant three officers responding, but petty enough to let the guy walk free after a stern talking-to.

Ugh.

At the very least, let's hope Aindoo Nuffins at least learned the lesson that he's better off if he aindoo it somewhere else from now on.

On Wednesday the 18^th, it was an absolutely gorgeous day and there was no reason in the world not to get some work done; so I reached out to Joe...

...who announced that he was sick and wanted to step away from the woodworking for awhile...

...but then he clarified that he wasn't so sick that he was completely out of commission; and, he'd more than happy to "meet me in the middle" and pop over with one of his trucks so we could snag the 14 pallets Athennia had spotted by the side of the road a few blocks from the apartment :)

So...

We managed to fit 11, leaving behind the three dumpiest ones that wouldn't have yielded much usable lumber anyway.

But, the thing with this particular truck is...

...it basically only has a driver's seat and a steering wheel in it right now.

So, I got to ride on the floor—hunched into the fetal position and not wearing a seatbelt as we tore down the highway at 70 back to Joe's place.

Probably almost as much fun as stealing from GIANT :)

Once we got back to Joe's, he decided he'd at least be up for drilling a few pilot holes to brace the table legs and finish our latest build...

I don't think we ever took pictures of the bathroom table we'd built for Paula either; so here's that. And at the end of the night, Joe offered to treat me to a very late dinner at the Golden Eagle in Bristol...

Saturday the 21^st, my mom invited us to a cookout at my parents' house.

As usual, Hannah pulled a Mowgli from The Jungle Book and went to live amongst her toys...

Then she came back with tales of her exploits...

Meanwhile, Liv helped Steve complete an ages-five-and-up jigsaw puzzle...

And then there was meat!

And more meat!

It's always a good day when there are gratuitous amounts of meat to be had...

Half of us even went on an after-dinner hunt around my parents' neighborhood to see if there was any more meat to be found.

It turned out that there was!

...but gutting a deer in front of the kids might've traumatized them; so we decided to take a page out of the Morrisville cops' playbook and let her live to see another day.

And finally, just before dinner on Sunday the 22^nd, I started tasting the definitive flavor of "Yep, you're getting sick" in the back of my throat.

For the first time ever, neither Olivia nor Hannah had been sick the day before; so, it's looking like I probably caught Joe's cold on Wednesday.

Heading into the second week of March, Kevin and I were each dealing with "work issues."

For Kevin's part, he was growing increasingly frustrated that he and Joe rarely seem to work more than one day a week on their woodworking venture... and that had seemed to further decrease to zero days a week over recent weeks.

He was starting to wonder if maybe Joe had lost interest and just didn't want to admit it because he felt bad about how much money Kevin had spent buying an entire shop worth of tools!

For my part, we'd had an HVAC crew working up on the roof at work the day before, and late in the afternoon when I came off a break and went to head back into the clean room (which is a highly controlled environment with multiple HEPA filters) there was a very strong odor that smelled like burning chemicals or a gas leak, or something.

My immediate boss (who I actually really like) had already left for the day, so I went looking for the owner of the company or her husband since their cars were still in the parking lot.

Instead I found their teenaged son "Junior" (who is employed there, but I wouldn't go so far as to say he "works" there). Junior told me that he had driven his dad's car in that day, and his mom was in the middle of a virtual meeting in her office.

Okay, that's all well and good, but there are some really bad fumes in the clean room, to the point that I got a headache from them the moment I opened the door. So I really think we need to tell someone and figure out what's going on!

Junior panicked but he agreed.

And then he marched to his mom's office, stormed inside, and regurgitated a slightly altered version of reality to her:

But, the owner of the company brushed us off, telling us that we were more than welcome to just clock out and go home if we felt like it, but she was in the middle of a meeting and was staying.

So I took it upon myself to go outside and flag down one of the guys who had been working on the roof. I escorted him inside and led him to the smell, at which point he assured me it was just residual fumes from some welding that his crew had just completed, and they should get filtered out and be gone within the hour.

Eventually the fumes did dissipate and I was able to go back to work. But then a couple hours later, my friend Melinda came to me and said she had to tell me what had just happened:

Apparently when the owner of the company finally wrapped up her meeting and came out of her office, she found her son to ask him again what had happened. And he again regurgitated to her what hadn't quite happened (falsely conveying that I had remained in the clean room and tried to work through the fumes despite not knowing what they might be).

At which point the owner of the company, who is the same woman who personally headhunted me on LinkedIn three years ago, shrugged and said, "Well, you can't fix stupid." Right in front of her son and my coworker Melinda.

Needless to say, I was fuming the rest of the day and evening about it. But when I went into work the next day and my immediate boss (the good one) arrived, he was like, "Oh, I have to tell you about the bullshit that happened yesterday afternoon."

And then he proceeded to explain, without knowing my role in the story at all, how the owner of the company had called him yesterday afternoon in a panic to tell him that she smelled a chemical leak and to ask him whether or not she should evacuate her own building!!!

So I got to tell him the rest of the story, including her "can't fix stupid" comment, and he was so incensed on my behalf that he went and confirmed its veracity with Melinda...

I probably shouldn't elaborate too much on what all happened next, but suffice it to say that I found out I'm hardly the first one at the company who's had a similar experience. And the owner is actually under investigation by her own H.R. department for similar things she has said to and about other people!

Aaaaand Kevin and I have since polished up my resume, and I am actively keeping my eyes peeled for a jump to greener pastures, should an opportunity present itself.

As we approached Tuesday evening, Kevin texted me to let me know that Joe had had federal jury duty down in the city that day and walked away $9 richer. And apparently he wanted to use that whopping paycheck to take all of us out to dinner!

Paula already had other plans, so it was just Joe, Kevin, me, and Riley. We met at Metro Diner in Langhorne and then we invited Joe to come back to the apartment and hang out afterwards.

He and Kevin and I ended up having a very productive philosophical talk about life and the future for several hours at the kitchen table until we finally reluctantly had to kick him out so we could go to bed.

It turns out that he's still fully on board with the woodworking venture, and we all agreed that we want to see each other flourish over the course of the rest of the year :)

So on Wednesday, Kevin and Joe worked on their latest build together (a rustic looking coffee table).

And then to reciprocate Joe's treat from the night before, I invited him and Paula back to the apartment for chicken, broccoli, and potatoes for dinner.

Joe was playing a gig on Thursday, but he and Kevin worked again on Friday, and Kevin sent me this picture from the Home Depot parking lot when they stopped in to buy some polyurethane:

Then just a few minutes later, he sent a follow-up picture:

Three coats of polyurethane later, their table top was looking pretty good!

Meanwhile, Riley had Kassie and their mutual friend Jaden over Friday night.

Kassie was spending the night, but Jaden is a boy, so we took him home around 9:30. But the three of them walked to McDonalds and Rita's together and then came back to the apartment and played video games.

Saturday evening we had our usual takeout from Taormina's at Catherine and Ron's. Surprisingly Kassie's mom agreed to let Kassie come along with us! So she got to see what a normal loving family looks like :)

Kassie slept over again Saturday night, and she and Riley had Jaden over again on Sunday.

He seems like a very sweet boy. He kept insisting that his parents would embarrass him whenever we eventually met them, and sure enough, Kevin and I walked him downstairs that evening when his mom arrived to pick him up.

Here's how that went:

So, uh, yeah.

Jaden said he'd be embarrassed, and I imagine he was pretty embarrassed.

Before we get into March proper, let the record show that our lovely neighbors "the Jamaicans" had six cars parked here on the last day of February (after we'd already sent out the newsletter).

As a friendly reminder, the terms of our leases specify a maximum of two cars. (But then, these are the same troglodytes who had eight parked here overnight during our last blizzard, such that others of us in the building weren't even able to park in our own parking lot.)

So, here we are. Let's count 'em:

1. the huge white human-trafficking cargo van, front-left
2. the silver Toyota immediately to the right of the van
3. the gold BMW that's backed in another four spaces up
4. the blue SUV at bottom-right
5. the blue sedan five spaces up, between Ruth's white SUV and the black pick-up
6. and finally, the blue-gray SUV way up past the black pick-up, by the tree

Meanwhile in greater Morrisville—to the extent that such a name even makes sense—we got a reminder of why Riley doesn't attend Morris-vile High School.

On 02 March, Athennia happened to see a story in her news feed about a fight two-on-one beatdown that had occurred between three girls at the school the Wednesday before. (6ABC even had a video of it—in which they'd helpfully highlighted all the most egregious parts... albeit by bleeping and blurring them out.)

But when Athennia showed Riley and asked if she'd heard about it from Kassie or anyone else still enrolled at that zoo, Riley was like,

So, here ya go—raw and uncut, compliments of the Molerat! YouTube slapped an age restriction on this one, due to it having more violence and profanity than any three Quentin Tarantino films put together; so, you'll have to be logged in to watch it... but, good God, what animals!

Now Then, Someone Said Steak?

Sadly, the massive snow accumulations from last month have all but disappeared amidst our recent heat wave.

In fact, the only snow left around the apartment complex is the pile in front of the space where we'd been parked for the last blizzard...

...and that's because I'm just about the only one here (except for maybe our neighbor Jeff) who has retained enough of a conscience to...

1. shovel out the entire parking space, instead of just driving away and leaving the mess for someone else; and
2. move the snow into the grass as I do so, instead of chucking it out into the middle of the parking lot.

On Monday evening, Athennia flirted with the idea of making steak for dinner; but then she made sausage, peppers, and rotini instead...

But, she made steak two evenings later—with broccoli, mashed potatoes, and caramelized onions on top of a Parmesan crust...

...and that was quite a meal, as you can see.

But, unfortunately, that was about it for the "noteworthy blog stuff" until we got to the weekend.

A Quantum Birthday

Mom's a septwoagenarian this year (which means she turned 72).

So, on Saturday the 7^th, we went to my parents' house for roast beef with Kelly's family and Uncle Roy and Aunt Sue.

Hannah was in charge of Fun and Mayhem^TM, and she really nailed it...

And then, after everybody ate all their veggies, we had cake!

Hannah requested that her sliver of cake remain upright on the plate—which meant it was time for a quick science lesson...

Ah, yes... Nothing livens up a party quite like quantum mechanics!

Then there was more Fun and Mayhem...

Pumpin' the Brakes

In other "news," I realized back in early February that my primary storage drive on my PC was down to a measly 55GB of free space (on a 2TB solid-state drive)... which is a pretty critical issue that I'd been putting off addressing for too long.

After doing some digging to find the culprits who were taking up so much space, I discovered that it was mostly all the long-form videos I regularly rip from YouTube about things like homesteading, and woodworking, and other stuff I'm interested in.

So, last month I embarked on a quest to feed my entire video library into ffmpeg (basically the Swiss army knife of media processing) and have it shrink the quality down at imperceptible levels where my videos would still be perfectly watchable but their file sizes would shrink significantly.

This process takes a lot of time and CPU power—and generates insane amounts of heat, which meant that my computer kept overheating and shutting itself off!

So...

Midway through last month, I coded a quick and dirty shell script to get a better handle on things: ffmpeg doesn't have any kind of "pause" functionality built into it; so, instead, I just had my script keep a few timers going, and I'd periodically tell the operating system to temporarily stop ffmpeg's execution so that the CPU could take a breather and let some of the excess heat dissipate.

Everything that happens on a Linux machine (or any OS, really) exists as a process and gets assigned an ID number that can be used to reference it over the course of its life.

That even includes the lowly sleep command (which just halts a process's execution for a given number of seconds—something my script was doing in various ways). As every instance of sleep that spawns is in fact a process in and of itself, each of those short-lived instances was getting assigned a unique ID number.

So, on Sunday the 8^th, when I noticed how high the process-ID counter had become, I took this screenshot...

I've seen process IDs into the six-figures plenty of times on servers I've managed over the years (that rarely ever turn off and can run for years without even a reboot)... but I don't recall having ever personally seen PIDs in the 600,000s before.

So I thought it was kind of crazy. Soon it'll be as high as the number of cars the Jamaicans have parked in our lot!

On Monday, February 16^th, we headed over to my parents' house for dinner. I got this picture of Liv making funny faces for Aunt Athennia...

Wednesday the 18^th, my mom and I had lunch together at the Metro Diner in Langhorne.

It was a lovely pre-spring day, and Pennsylvania's state flower had sprung up all up and down the highway!

Everyone drove very carefully so as not to trample them...

Thursday the 19^th, Joe and I continued work on Paula's bathroom table.

We did a glue-up of the legs and the framing, got everything perfectly square, waited for everything to dry, and then took it back outside to notch out the corners of the shelves so they can sit on the framing...

Then, Saturday the 21^st, we were back at my parents' for dinner: pork tenderloin, corn, and mashed potatoes.

The Blizzard

Sunday the 22^nd, we got 21 inches of snow over the course of about 24 hours!

Athennia made beef stew for dinner, and here's a quasi-timelapse of the snow accumulation as seen through our front and back security cameras...

Funny thing about how our neighbor Rob's truck is in the first parking space in all these pictures: Another neighbor, Tits McGee, had parked us in the day before while she was lugging her groceries and laundry hamper inside just as we were trying to leave for my parents' house. And, when we honked our horn, she came out and gave us this bitchy sourpuss face as though we had inconvenienced her...

Fast forward to this evening: Our other neighbors The Jamaicans had a total of eight cars parked in the lot—making it impossible for anybody else to find a space within 100 feet. We had watched Rob come home and sit there idling in our parking lot for nearly 15 minutes waiting for one of the many non-tenant vehicles to leave, before he finally relented and parked over in Building 4's lot.

So, when we happened to see Tits McGee get in her car and vacate the first parking space half an hour later, you know Athennia scrambled to put on her coat and run downstairs to tell Rob to come out and steal her spot!

Morrisville had gone completely thugless by about 8:00 Sunday evening, and I was looking forward to enjoying the silence!

My heart broke for that poor stray cat though :(

The window washer did not keep up with the snow, but the plow guy did...

Then at 3:04 A.M. on Monday the 23^rd, PECO saw fit to cut our power.

Our security cams don't work so well without electricity. This was all they could see...

Jarred awake by the sudden absence of all the white noise from the fans in our bedroom, I got up and ventured out to the living room...

Just as I suspected! The entire rest of the world still had power: It was literally just our building.

These two shots are actually three hours apart, at 3:00 A.M. and 6:00 A.M., even though they look virtually identical...

I also snapped this cool shot completely by accident...

Then I stopped to pee before I went back to bed... and that's notable only because I'm thankful that PECO is not in charge of the sewer system—a reality with which I wholly credit the fact that the toilet still worked when I flushed it!

By 10:00 A.M., it looked like the bulk of the snow had already fallen...

Jeff and Keith were already outside cleaning off their cars...

So, we decided to venture out as well...

Jeff brought Turbo out, too!

But then The Jamaicans showed up... and I remembered from last time that they'd likely all be asking if they could borrow our shovel.

And, you know what?

...When you have EIGHT !@#$%^& cars parked here, even though your lease specifies a maximum of TWO?

That's a hard no from me.

So, Athennia and I wrapped things up and ducked back inside to leave them to their fate.

And, um... they pretty much behaved exactly as you'd expect uncivilized swine to behave—bottlenecking the entire parking lot by parking their cars all willy-nilly wherever they pleased...

Then we happened to catch these nutsacks from the building next door...

Hours later, Hoodrat finally bit the bullet and came down to shovel herself out...

...though, naturally, she just pushed all her snow in front of the cars parked on either side of hers, rather than moving it to the grass like most of the rest of us had.

Oh, and look who else finally deigned to show up?

He's hard to see in that second pic—even in his neon yellow vest—but PECO sent a technician out to trudge back into the corner of our neighbor's yard and stand there to think about his crappy behavior.

Good.

I hope he's learned something about how and where to install power lines for better uptime.

By sundown, it was almost like nothing had ever happened...

...You know, except for the fact that we STILL had no electricity.

We ordered a couple pizzas from Bambino's for dinner, and then called my parents to see if there was room at the inn—since our apartment was down to like 50 degrees and only dropping.

Naturally, we were about halfway packed to head out, when all the lights and fans flickered back to life.

Back to Normal

Thursday the 26^th I worked with Joe again.

We stained Paula's bathroom table what should have been a lovely shade of maple; but I forgot that pine has a tendency to make most things come out looking like it's made of Doritos. So, we're going to have to see what we can do with that.

Then we cut a mitered trim for our coffee table from two weeks ago, to make it a lot more heavy-duty-looking.

I didn't get pictures of that; but I did get one of my new six-port battery charger...

Three of our batteries were so cold from working outside all day that they didn't even want to start charging right away!

Paula cooked us up some penne with hot Italian sausage and homemade meatballs for dinner. It was awesome!

And then on Friday the 27^th, Joe and I worked again for a few hours—just long enough to slap two coats of [darker] stain onto the coffee table top...

Then he had a band rehearsal to go to out in Conshohocken... which, incidentally, would take him right past where Athennia was still at work.

(She worked three 13-hour shifts this week to make up for calling out Monday and Tuesday!)

So, we jumped on the turnpike and headed west!

Athennia's workplace is a top secret facility; but I figured, if Joe and I managed to sneak into an air-traffic-controller tower at an airport back in 2012, I should probably be okay laying low in the passenger's seat of Athennia's car for an hour and a half until she finished work.

And I was.

We decided to grab dinner at China Wok before we headed home...

...and because Athennia gets lunch there occasionally enough that the entire staff knows her, the owner gave us $40 worth of food for free on our way out, after the customer who had ordered it never bothered to show up to get it!

Meanwhile, Riley went to sleep over at Kassie's Friday night.

And yesterday was largely uneventful. Mostly just laundry and chores around the apartment.

Still got a few cat pics for you though, even if Penny has dominated them this month... to the point that Lucky doesn't even make an appearance!

Enjoy :)

Saturday the 7^th, we headed over to my parents' house for takeout.

Liv asked me to set up the marbles, and I was happy to oblige!

Then we had dinner from Taormina's.

Gametime!

Then Sunday the 8^th was... gasp... the Super Bowl!

With everyone else slated to be glued to their televisions all night, Kitten and the Molerat and I figured it was the perfect night to go out and have my belated birthday dinner.

I opted for Cancun.

That's a hell of a drive though, and we were losing daylight...

The sucky thing about going to Cancun is that Middletown Township went and shat out a good-for-nothing median right here, so that you have to pretend you're a... New Jerseyan? ...A New Jerseyian? A New Jerseyite?

Whatever. I don't know the official demonym.

At any rate, you have to drive past this perfectly good point of entry and go another block or two up the road and then turn around somewhere and backtrack like you're some New Jersey twat that can't turn left.

This is how it should have been designed—had Middletown managed to find and afford someone with a triple-digit IQ...

Instead, they spent their entire budget on that big dumb M on the corner of Lincoln Highway and Oxford Valley Road.

And so, you get this instead...

We still managed to get to the restaurant just before sunset the following evening!

And we enjoyed a Super Bowl of our own while we waited for dinner to arrive...

The Molerat ordered some kind of radioactive sizzle-plate that sounded like it had come straight out of Chernobyl...

Kitten got nachos and I got a burrito (and a pina colada the size of my head)...

Pallet Time

Joe and I had a work day on Tuesday the 10^th. We poached two pallets from behind the dumpsters here at the apartment, and another two from a neighbor of his.

Free wood!

Joe and Paula had an old mattress sitting out for the trash; but unfortunately it was only visible to non-garbagemen: The refuse collectors were indeed refusing it.

So, later that afternoon, Joe and I rented a U-Haul trailer and delivered the mattress to Philly dump ourselves. That's what that 3% city wage tax buys you, folks: You can take your own trash to the dump, any time you like!

The garbage-ass garbagemen sure as f--k aren't gonna do it for you!

Joe and I had dinner with Paula and their friend Bunny at Warminster West, and then we shotgunned three episodes of Letterkenny.

We worked again on Wednesday the 11^th—this time cutting legs and cross-braces and gluing up some shelf panels for a small bathroom table Paula asked us to build...

And Joe finally broke out the dowel jig I got him for Christmas...

Then Paula treated us to cheese steaks from Don Giovanni's for dinner, and then Joe and I watched a couple more episodes of Letterkenny.

Valentimes

Thursday and Friday were uneventful; but then it was Valentimes Day.

Fortunately, in adulthood you get buy-one-get-one offers from Qdoba on Valentine's Day...

...and even when you get there to find that it must be some Middle Eastern holiday and you have to wade through a sea of Indians just to order and pay for your dinner, you still get a kickass meal.

Also, Indians really seem to love white cars, for some reason...

After dinner, we exchanged gifts:

I gave the Molerat a stuffed Yoshi.

Kitten baked me a loaf of banana bread...

I gave Kitten two candles and a bottle of honeysuckle soap...

And the Molerat gave me...

Oh well.

As promised in last month's newsletter, we need to kick off February by going back in time a bit to the final hours of January—whereupon we celebrated my birthday a few days early!

Berfday #1

Saturday the 31^st, we braved Global Warming Climate Change^TM and ventured across the tundra to my parents' house for dinner...

My parents' front yard has turned into a glacier...

What does Hannah think about this?

Anyway, since we didn't drown in the rising tide or get crushed under an avalanche, it was time to start the party!

Liv and Hannah were happy to play with their coolest cousin; and Hannah found out the hard way what happens when you steal Pop's seat...

We ordered dinner from Roman Delight—and I could've sworn I ate some pizza; but, as you can see, we all just split a plate of fries...

Then it was time for presents!

Liv was very excited to give me my birthday card...

...because...

...she had signed her name and Hannah's all by herself!

The girls also hand-made their gifts to me—whereas most three- and five-year-olds probably would've just given me some dumb impersonal gift card or a check ;)

The first canvas looked like an evidence photo from a crime scene of one of the victims of a serial killer I just made up called 'The Tracer'—except it's actually tres, as in the Spanish word for the number three...

The second one was the result of a precognitive vision of something that hadn't even come to pass yet but would happen very soon—just like the scenes Isaac Mendez from Heroes used to paint while he was high on heroin...

And finally, there was a painting of Liv and me celebrating the fact that Hann—I mean, um, The Tracer—hadn't killed us yet...

Then it was Athennia's and Riley's turn...

First up was a license to fart, which was very thoughtful and well received!

And then...

...an appropriate T-shirt!

They also gave me two Reacher novels—since I enjoyed the first one I read last year—as well as the complete series of Letterkenny, since I still haven't seen the second half...

Then, as Liv's painting had foretold, we ate cake...

And, I later hung my new artwork on the wall above my desk...

...albeit changing the story a bit so that Liv and I have actually jointly been The Tracer the whole time, and we celebrate with a cake every time we kill someone and leave our infamous trio of bloody handprints behind as a signature at each crime scene.

Berfday #2

But first, after we left my parents' house Saturday night, we stopped by Joe and Paula's to exchange gifts with Joe since his birthday is three days before mine.

Liv's clairvoyance had failed to show her that Joe and Paula would offer us doughnuts when we got there!

Anyway, we'd brought Joe a whole bag of goodies ostensibly from Victoria's Secret...

First up was a wall tapestry of the Great Wall of China that 21 Chinese Kitchen had included in our order when we dined there on Christmas night...

...as well as a book of pennies from my change jar (to mock a bone-headed mutual acquaintance of ours who seriously believes that the discontinued penny is going to enjoy a perceived rarity and command an accordant price point at some point in our lifetimes).

Then we gave Joe a candle...

...so he can sniff bofa deez nuts anytime he wants.

...As well as a make birthdays great again card—and also the first six seasons of Letterkenny (which may or may not have come straight off of my media rack, given that I recently upgraded to the complete series)...

Better to re-gift my old DVDs to a new loving home than donate them to a thrift store that will just sell them at a profit to some arbitrageur who will turn around and list them on Facebook Marketplace to do the very same ;)

That just leaves more cash in our pocket to buy Joe something else in addition... like a killer woodworking T-shirt to match mine!

In return, Joe and Paula gave me a lovely birthday card and a very generous gift card to Boscov's.

Meanwhile, Riley took the opportunity to play with Stevie and lounge around under a blanket like a former elementary-school librarian who's enjoying her retirement as an old cat lady...

Back to the Future

So, that's what happened in the final hours of January.

Now onward to February!

On Sunday the 1^st, I recorded this video of some schmuck stuck in the snow at the bottom of the street behind our apartment...

Then Monday was my 41^st birthday; but we didn't really do anything special since we'd covered that over the weekend ;)

On Tuesday the 3^rd, Riley used her artistic abilities to call Athennia out on not having updated the family calendar a full three days into the new month...

Hiring a Pro!

I still had this Boscov's gift card burning a hole in my pocket; so on Wednesday the 4^th, I enlisted the help of a professional.

I call her "Mom"... and she's a lifelong Boscov's shopper with literal decades of experience!

We were about 20 minutes late in getting to the store as they opened, which meant that five other cars were already there.

But it was still nice being there on a Wednesday morning instead of something like a Saturday afternoon :)

I made her walk the entire store with me so I could see what all was on offer before I committed to anything.

In the end, I made out like a bandit—scoring a new shirt, a new wallet, and a duffel bag for myself; as well as two candles, a honeycomb soap dispenser, a stuffed Yoshi, and two cards to give Athennia and Riley for Valentine's Day.

Also, we made a pit stop at Home Depot and picked up a six-port charger for my Ryobi batteries, using the money my parents had given me for my birthday...

And for dinner that evening, Athennia surprised me by bringing home Qdoba (and McDonald's sponge nuggets for Riley)!

Dashbored

Thursday the 5^th, I reached out to Joe since we hadn't been in touch since we'd exchanged gifts the previous weekend.

He said Paula was making pepper and egg sandwiches; so we headed over there and ate like kings.

Then we hung out for a bit and I decided to accompany him on a DoorDash run.

What an adventure that was!

One of our stops was at CVS for a can of Pringles... which we had to deliver to the AutoZone literally right next door.

Then we stopped at the Panera in Feasterville, where they seem to have designed the parking lot to discourage pedestrian traffic of any kind.

You have to park behind a curb, then cross a little throughway that people are flying down to bypass all the fuckery out on Street Road; and in exchange for all that effort, you finally make it to the opposite shore only to be greeted by this...

After Panera, we hit up the Wal-Mart near my parents' house so that some lazy schlub in Hatboro could have two frozen pizzas and a 24-pack of Pepsi that were crucial enough to pay a premium for, but not quite precious enough for him to just put on pants and drive to the store himself.

We did a couple more deliveries and eventually ended up north of Richboro before we finally called it quits—at which point I announced that I was craving some Chick-fil-A... and three more shirts in blue, green, and red to match the gray one I'd bought at Boscov's the previous day and was enjoying tremendously.

I suppose we could've just paid someone else to go grab all of that stuff and deliver it to us; but, since we were already in the car, we just drove to the Neshaminy Mall and did our own shopping... like two old fogeys from the 20^th century, when people used to do shit for themselves :)

MMA (without the Fighting)

And finally, there was an all-day MMA match outside the bedroom window all day today.

Usually "MMA" stands for "mixed martial arts"; but today it stood for "Morrisville Municipal Authority"—and, from what I could tell, they were fighting the street itself...

I'm not sure jackhammers are allowed in traditional MMA; but these guys were packing a jackhammer and an excavator, and they showed up at 8:30 A.M. to do what jack-asses (and excav-asses) do best:

As per federal regulations, they did maintain a strict ratio of eight guys standing around doing nothing for every one guy who was doing actual work.

Fun was had by all, except for some.

Namely, me.

On Thursday the 22^nd, I spotted Ralph and Leon on our parking-lot camera and watched as Ralph scrawled something on a sticker before proceeding to slap that bad boy right on the windshield of Teef's BMW!

My guess was that Teef was about to get a root canal.

He popped up from God knows where a short while later and stood there mystified for a good 10 minutes—trying to decipher whatever cryptic message the sticker was meant to convey...

But Teef wasn't having it!

He waited for the sun to set, and then he jumped in the car to make his escape—followed by his hetero housemate "Dreadlocks," who I presume was his ride back home again after they'd stashed the BMW at the Fortress of Solitude...

Or, perhaps, the Fortress of Ineptitude...

Or, more likely, just in an out-of-the-way corner of the GIANT parking lot a stone's throw from our apartment...

Who knows?

Guns 'N' Hoses

Friday the 23^rd, my friend Richard and I had Mexican for lunch at Cancun, and then we checked out the Oxford Valley Mall since it was blisteringly cold outside and the woods probably would've been soggy from all the recent snow-melt anyway.

Since he knows Joe and I are getting into woodworking, Richard gave me his nail-gun—which is pneumatic; so I'm not even sure we have a means of using it. (I don't believe Joe has an air compressor. But, at any rate, I just bought a brand new high-performance brad-nailer last month anyway.)

I told Richard that, since his nail gun has no paper trail leading to me, I'd keep it here at the apartment and use it to deal with the thugs on the guard rail when spring rolls around ;)

In-Denture-d Serpent

Later that afternoon, Teef returned!

So anyway... imagine running away the night before because your car has been tagged for towing; but you half-scrape off the neon orange sticker, and then you come back and park literally 15 feet away from your previous location—right where the tow truck will have been instructed to look for you...

But THEN... imagine that the tow truck—somehow, some way—inexplicably fails to find you!

Leon and Ralph were even out here right next to the !@#$%^& car to put up this little No Parking sawhorse...

(There's a water main access-cap-thingy that's been leaking and then freezing; so Ralph and Leon have been trying to block the spot with a single orange cone for the past couple weeks. But Hoodrat kept deciding she didn't feel like parking far away when she got home after 11:00 P.M. every night, and so she would just mow the cone down and park there anyway.)

Pizza and New York Shitty

Saturday the 24^th, Kitten, the Molerat, and I went to my parents' for a rare quiet dinner without our nieces commandeering every moment :)

We hadn't had pizza from Roman Delight in Southampton in quite a while; so that's what we settled on... and it was delicious.

On our way home later we stopped at Wawa for gas—where every pump was occupied except the one next to this Dome-Hippo van...

So, yeah... A real celebrity in our midst!

Then again, it was a New York plate. So, that made perfect sense.

Kitten sat there and blasted him with her horn until his ego finally came back down to Earth and he pulled his Big-Apple ass out of our way.

Later that night, she and I watched a comedy special by Rex Havens, whom Richard had recommended when he and I had lunch.

Rex is absolutely hilarious! Check him out if you're unfamiliar with him :)

16-18 Inches!

Well, at least that's what the talking heads on TV all kept insisting that that's what was coming overnight into Sunday the 25^th.

We'd taken our chances and decided not to run out and buy enough food to last us the next two months—although we'd bought our usual amount of food... and Kitten realized too late that she'd unwittingly bought herself mozzarella cheese instead of American.

So?

She layered up, staple-gunned some old badminton rackets to the bottom of her boots, tied a rope to the front door of our building, and ventured out to GIANT in the middle of a blizzard in search of some American cheese!

Our area's 16-18 inches ended up being more like six inches, at best. And we were delighted to find that, by some miracle, our electricity had stayed on; and so we tried our hand at homemade cheese steaks for dinner...

They were AWESOME! (Except for the cheap-y rolls we'd settled for.)

Ralph and Leon were out cleaning up before the snow had even stopped falling...

It's a bit hard to tell in this frame-grab from our security camera, but our lot and walkways had already been plowed and shoveled by 8:00 on Sunday evening...

A Sense of Community: One Day Only!

Kitten still called out Monday anyway, for obvious reasons:

1. Who knew what her 45-mile one-way commute would have been like?
2. It was Monday.

After I finished breakfast, I told her I was heading down to clean off the car.

So, she decided to accompany me.

Armed with a telescopic squeegee-ice-scraper combo and an industrial-strength snow shovel complete with one of those reinforced metal blades along the bottom, we ventured out to face the 16-18 centimeters.

And nothing could have prepared us for what happened...

Our neighbors Jeff and Keith were already out there—along with Teef and the female Jamaican, and some other people I haven't even bothered to nickname.

I would've been content to just clean off our car and head back inside...

...but it seemed that Keith had sort of made it his mission to get as many people out as possible—because the plow guy was making his rounds again, and he'd apparently told Keith that he would clear our parking spaces if we just moved our cars out of his way so he could get the plow in.

So, for a solid 45 minutes to an hour, we had probably 90% of our side of the building out there—cleaning off strangers' cars, ringing doorbells to recruit more people to the Cult of Cleanouts, and peacefully coexisting with people whom we would absolutely abhor under any other circumstances.

But, can I just tell you... that we lent our snow shovel to more than one person that we've wished would be hit by a Mack truck or a comet.

It was beautiful.

Like that brief period immediately following 9/11, when everyone treated each other like fellow humans for two or three weeks, before they all inevitably oozed back into their selfish, entitled, true-dickhead forms.

By noon, our parking lot looked like the snow had fallen last week...

...And you're going to think I'm being satirical when I tell you this, but...

This dude has to be pushing 70... and looks so frail and useless... and walks around like he has an IQ of about 11...

...but, I swear to God, he was in full John Henry mode for a solid hour—like he was in direct competition with the snow plow itself.

It didn't matter whose car needed to be excavated next: Teef was just right there, front and center, attacking the snow piles with his wierdly hyperkinetic hybrid crossfit version of shoveling.

The guy was an absolute rock star. I wish I'd had our lot-cam recording it the entire time.

I still dislike him, but I dislike him considerably less now.

And, just before Kitten and I decided to call it a day and head back inside (before yet another stranger from a different building entirely could ask to borrow our monster of a snow shovel), I saw that the plow guy had plowed in the main door to Teef's apartment (and Rob and Nicole's, Tits McGee's, and the Cleaning Lady's).

So, I went over and shoveled a little path for them to use until whenever Ralph and Leon might get around again to clean things up more thoroughly...

Meanwhile, in Greater Poorisville

The road out back was absolutely abysmal!

It looked like the borough's plow guy had come along to push snow into the road!

And, you know what?

All that's gonna do is cut down on the amount of thugs who blast their shitty rap music while they cut through the alley to bypass a couple stop signs.

Even by Tuesday the 27^th, Morrisville Borough was still looking like Morrisville Burrow—as in, try to tunnel underneath it all, because otherwise you'll just get stuck in it.

Like the UPS truck did...

...or the resident Drift King, "Charles in Charger"...

Chuck had a bold strategy:

So, he made his bed...

...and he's been taking lots of naps in it...

...all week long...

Meanwhile in OUR parking lot, things are A-okay...

...unless you're this guy—against whom it looks like we all made a coordinated effort not to render any assistance whatsoever...

[c]Old Faithful

The water main access-cap-thingy must've been geysering extra hard this week, because that whole first parking space turned into a skating rink at some point.

Luckily, Ralph and Leon are here to deal with it—by not dealing with it, as I updated Kitten while she was at work...

Wednesday night, Kitten and I watched one of comedian Brad Williams's specials—and, like Rex Havens, he is hilarious... albeit a bit raunchy at times, so be warned ;)

Scarecrows... Scarecrows Everywhere

On Thursday the 29^th, we saw that Ruth had finally removed her camera from the stairwell—thereby rendering inaccurate a decent portion of the fiery retort I'd been penning for Gwen the Bitch in the leasing office.

So, we've decided to cut our losses for now and let Gwen the Bitch feel like she's won. I may look into mounting our camera to the back of our door to have it to look through our peep-hole—which, incidentally, will be way worse for Ruth's privacy than the way it was before.

On a "brighter" note (and a not-so-bright one), Ruth got herself a new welcome mat...

And finally, I had these three clown-shoes show up at the guard rail for a couple hours Friday afternoon...

All things considered, they were actually relatively quiet for doing automotive work. (I'm sure I'm the only one in the building who had his windows open to let in some fresh air, too; so I doubt anybody else was even bothered by the noise at all.)

To me it's just the principal of...

• you don't live here
• you're blocking a fire hydrant
• you're blocking an elderly lady's driveway

...Why can't you do this literally anywhere else?

It just doesn't make sense to me.

Duplexed Birthdays, Triplexed Cats!

Finally, my friend Joe and I are both celebrating our birthdays this weekend!

Kitten, the Molerat, and I are headed to my parents' house later this evening for my early birthday dinner, and then we'll be swinging by Paula's to give Joe his gifts.

But... since my birthday's technically in February—and I don't exactly feel like doing all the work of drafting a write-up and curating and arranging all the attendant photos—you're gonna have to wait until next month to get the scoop on that!

Not to worry though... I'll hook you up with some cat pics instead.

This last week and a half has been interesting. For one thing, Joe and I have taken our woodworking business out of super slow-mo and into just regular ol' slow-mo.

We've worked, like... four times in the past two weeks, instead of just once!

Teef Brushums

Ah, but first I have to bring you up to speed on everything else—starting with the night of 12^th, when our neighbor "Teef" apparently tried to steal his own car.

We've talked a few times about our newest neighbors "The Jamaicans": They're the ones who bottlenecked the entire parking lot when they left their 50-foot long U-Haul truck parked here for an eternity and a half when they moved in a few months back; and they've since resorted to parking three cars here even though parking is limited and the lease specifies a maximum of two cars per apartment.

But anyway, I've nicknamed the one Jamaican "Teef" for the simple fact that he still has two or three of 'em in his "moufh."

He's also got this gold BMW—which never moves, and instead sits parked indefinitely in one of the prime spaces right outside his door (and close enough to ours to rob us of a potential space as well).

Every now and then—usually at a completely inappropriate hour to be making excessive noise—he manages to set off his own alarm, which is precisely what happened on the night of the 12^th...

I know a picture's worth a thousand words; and so, I really just need to get a video of this clown in the sunlight one of these days. But, if you remember Horace and Jasper from 101 Dalmations...

...just picture a 60-something black version of the tall, lanky one.

I swear, this dude has a full-time job of sitting around at home all day and coming outside every 22 minutes to smoke a cigarette before walking a lap around his precious BMW as though he's casing it like Nicolas Cage preparing to steal the Shelby Mustang in Gone in 60 Seconds.

But anyway, there's something about the way the guy moves that just always makes him look like an absolute shadeball—almost like an eight-year-old who just pocketed a roll of Bubble Tape in the checkout line at the grocery store, and then trying to play it so cool that all the other people in line who watched him do it might start questioning their own reality and wondering whether they truly saw what they know they saw.

I've come to wonder if this guy's cursed to walk the earth forever, looking guilty A.F. until the end of time. Like, instead of the mark of Cain, maybe he has the mark of Cain't: No matter how desperately he wants so desperately to be normal, he can't and he ain't.

It seems like, for whatever reason, God was so ticked off with him that he just said,

Joint Effort

On Tuesday the 13^th, I went to Joe's to get some work done.

Back in the first week of the month, we'd broken out the jointer for the first time and cleaned up the edges of all the pallet wood we planed last month...

Jointing was a breeze, and I'm super happy with the quality of the entry-level Wen model I ultimately decided to purchase. It's very efficient and way quieter than the planer :)

Later that afternoon, Joe and I decided to embark on a shopping trip in search of another work table, since having only one just wasn't cutting it. But, after doing some online research to compare product offerings at Home Depot and Wal-Mart, we learned that table manufacturers must all be conspiring with each other to cut corners and jack up prices.

Nobody wants to sell a table rated for more than 200 pounds anymore; and even tables flimsier than that are priced comparably to what a table with a 400-pound rating would have gone for just a few years ago.

No, thanks.

We decided to wait until we can snag something solid but cheap on Craigslist or Marketplace, and Joe said he could repurpose some smaller tables around the house for our use until then.

On a brighter note, we finally unboxed the remainder of my tools—which had just been sitting in his sunroom for weeks at that point—and we came up with a relatively easy-to-access storage system for the four big guys...

But, again, this is all stuff we did back on 06 January.

On the 13^th, we decided to try our hand at turning the wood from our "nicest-looking" pallet into a coffee table.

So, with the planks jointed—and planed not to a perfectly uniform depth, but all within 1/16^th of an inch or so to each other)—we glued 'em all up and clamped them together to turn them into a panel...

For best results, we'd have to let that dry overnight; so then we broke out the table saw so we could cut some table legs.

We were both nervous about the table saw...

The planer is damn near impossible to injure yourself with. (Well, not impossible... but you'd really have to try.)

The jointer has a slightly lower barrier to entry, as far as the potential for injury; but even still, it's a pretty common-sense tool, and you'd more or less have to go out of your way to do something dumb where your hands could end up contacting the blades.

But, the table saw? I don't know, man. I've watched enough videos to know that there are about a hundred different ways your table saw might try to kill you; and I wasn't sure I was ready for that kind of pressure.

Shit or Get Off the... Table?

You have to face your fears eventually though. So, we did.

And, remember that armoire-entertainment-center-console-thingy that Joe and I disassembled in his shed back in September?

But, we still had all that scrap wood sitting out in the shed. And some of those scraps were like six-foot-long hardwood 2x2s that just needed a really thin layer of veneer shaved off of them.

So, I armed myself with a couple of push-sticks, fired up the table saw, and gave one of those bad boys The Closest Shave Ever^TM.

The cut was super-smooth—especially for just the 40-tooth stock blade that came with the saw. I felt confident the entire time, and... yeah, I'm like Kevin McCallister from Home Alone after he's conquered his fear of the furnace in the basement.

Totally comfortable using a table saw now :)

Obviously, given that this was our first time using the saw at all, we haven't gotten around to building a cross-cut sled for it yet... which meant we had to lug out the miter saw to cut our smooth new 2x2 into four actual table legs of a uniform length.

That was no problem at all—although we were both taken aback by how much torque the miter saw has when you engage it. You'd better be ready for that kick when you squeeze the trigger!

Tech Support

When I got back to the apartment later, I saw that the laser engraver I'd ordered on Christmas Eve day had finally been delivered (after Creality had swiped my $700 immediately, despite the product being out of stock for three weeks).

Then later that evening, I helped Riley install Minecraft on her laptop so she could start playing :)

The following evening, Riley said that Taaro was trying to get her to download some additional piece of software so that they could play Minecraft online together.

You don't need anything extra: You just need to host a server or connect to somebody else's.

Luckily, whatever he was trying to get her to install was only for Windows machines and Macs; so Linux wasn't even having any of it ;)

The whole thing gave me some mild PTSD from four years ago when I repurposed some old computers for the girls, and then-19-year-old know-nothing Ahlina took it upon herself to make Riley's "run faster" by deleting the entire f*cking desktop environment!

But Taaro eventually managed either to figure out port-forwarding on Nina's home network and host his own server (unlikely), or to find a free server elsewhere online where he and Riley can play together (more likely).

Riley said they were working on building a house together. Hopefully in addition to dealing with creepers, zombies, and skeletons, they will not also have to fend off overzealous code enforcers trying to forbid them from using extension cords and power strips :)

Glue-Ups and Glue-Downs

Thursday the 15^th, I worked with Joe again.

Our panel had glued up super nicely!

The camera angles in the pics of our glue-up two days earlier make it look like we glued everything into one giant piece; but, can you imagine if we had actually done that?!

That would've made it too wide to run through the planer!

Then we would've had to lug out the table saw and rip the damn thing down the middle, just so we could run each half through the planer to save ourselves literal hours of manually bringing everything to a common depth with a pair of orbital sanders.

In all seriousness though, if not for the nail holes, would you believe that this was originally pallet wood?

After we got the clamps situated, Paula treated us to lunch at Metro Diner, and then Joe and I took the time to register all the tools in case we ever need to make use of the warranties.

Building Tables, Buying Tables

Joe and I worked again on Friday the 16^th.

I treated to a quick lunch at Chick-fil-A; then we went back to his place to sand down our re-glued tabletop, and I cut some scrap wood to use as undergirding—and also some thin-cut wood strips I can paint to look like steel banding to cover all those nail holes ;)

Later that afternoon when we got sick of standing out in the cold, Joe and I scoured the internet for some used tables and found two beefy-looking boys listed for $20 each.

We met a young guy named Tristan at his storage unit in North Wales to pick up the tables; and it turns out that he does junk removal for a living... so, he had some 2x4s and 2x8s in his truck that he threw in for free as well!

Here's a picture of the haul—and of the miter saw, because it just looks badass!

I treated Joe and Paula to dinner at Gianni's that evening and then headed home to spend some time with my Kitten before she nodded off to sleep :)

Nixty Sixties

But, when I arrived home, I received the wonderful news that Kitten was going to be taking Riley into the bowels of North Philly to drop her off at Nina's and hang out with Taaro for the day—which meant that last month's little heart-to-heart in which we had sat Riley down and explained that Nina and Kenny are a couple of nutsack-chucklefucks and she probably wouldn't be seeing Taaro in person for the foreseeable future actually translated to "for about three weeks."

And so, on Saturday the 17^th, Kitten drove the Molerat down to Nina's on her own... in the snow... and happened upon the aftermath of an accident that shut down three entire lanes of Roosevelt Blvd...

As it got closer to dinner time, Kitten suggested that the two of us go on a date to Nifty Fiftys together.

Unbeknownst to me, she had just discovered the "new" location that opened up by us back in the spring. But all I could think was,

Kitten relented and we went to Julio's instead, and then—since snow forecasts are always about 15% of what was promised, and we have four-wheel drive now anyway—we shot over to my parents to surprise them and visit for a bit...

Nina and Taaro dropped Riley off at home around 9:30 that evening... and, of course, she came bounding up the stairs with a box of leftovers under her arm.

You'll never guess where they had eaten...

Then, as Nina and Taaro got back in their car, I saw Taaro get into the back seat.

Good God.

Cut the cord, Mom. He's ready.

Unreal.

Neighborly Sorts

Here's a quick clip of Teef casing his BMW again...

And another one of some guy I don't even recognize: Maybe Hoodrat has a boyfriend now?

At any rate, we got about 3.5 inches of snow Saturday night into Sunday; and we had seen Rob and Nicole's little boys outside building a snowman Sunday afternoon...

But then some gang of turds (who don't even live in our complex) had to roll through and stomp it into oblivion.

One of the little pukes also touched Kitten's car—so we stood in the window ready to set off the alarm and scare the piss out of them if they did it again...

...But, they came, and they pillaged, and then they were on their merry way to go terrorize another building's parking lot...

Coulda, Shoulda, Wooda

Fast-forward to yesterday (the 21^st), and Joe and I continued working on our coffee table.

Bear in mind, this is primarily a practice piece to familiarize ourselves with our tools—and, if we do decide it's good enough to try selling, we'll be pushing the "reclaimed wood" angle as a feature rather than a bug.

That being said, we're both happy and disappointed with how things have turned out so far...

The table looks really cool—and even better in person—but the L-brackets we used to attach the legs to the table's underside (in lieu of learning actual joinery just yet) left quite a bit to be desired.

It was immediately apparent to us that we'll need to shore things up somehow and come up with a way to keep everything square and ensure the four legs remain parallel to each other despite the brackets' complete inability to achieve this.

If anything, we may scrap everything but the tabletop and try something else entirely, like perhaps adding a bottom shelf (which would solve the whole keeping-the-legs-straight problem).

Who knows?

It's been down in the teens outside, and they say we're about to get dumped on with as much as 18 inches of snow in a few days; so, we might not even work again until after our birthdays!

We've mentioned several times so far this month how we had a letter taped to our door on 05 January demanding that we remove our camera from the stairwell...

But, given that this is purely in response to our inquiry back in mid-December about Ruth's camera being pointed directly at our door—and factoring in the equally-twatwafflish-and-fact-free letter this "Gwen" lady had left on everyone's door back on Christmas Eve—I decided I'm not much for her style of baseless intimidation.

So, I decided to spar with her instead of surrendering... and I walked the following letter over to the leasing office and personally handed it to her at 8:30 A.M. on 09 January.

Enjoy!

Our First Response

To Gwen Nelson:

We're writing in response to the letter taped to our door on 05 January 2026, regarding the security camera we have in the stairwell.

As a reminder, we were the ones who brought your attention to our neighbor Ms. Barnyou's camera on 19 December 2025—after she moved hers from its spot on the floor and mounted it on her door to point directly into our apartment at eye level, introducing a violation of our privacy.

In response to our solicitation of your assistance with this matter—namely, our simple inquiry as to the specifics of Americana's (nonexistent?) policy regarding security-camera use in common spaces—your sole and exclusive reply has been to tape a letter to our door which you've asserted that we should take as a “warning,” and which you elected to conclude with the verbiage, “If this continues, you will receive a Cease Notice which will lead to termination of your lease.”

Now, far be it from us to be in the habit of openly defying requests—much less warnings—from the landlord; but we feel it warrants noting that, despite extensive research, we have found nothing in the terms of our lease—nor in Morrisville or Pennsylvania law—of which our camera is in violation.

And yet, we also cannot help but to regard your curiously aggressive approach here as quite a serious and egregious affront—especially considering your plain admission over the phone on 19 December that even you were not certain of any policy, and that you would have to check and get back to us.

You can rest assured that we are now treating this as a VERY serious matter indeed—and we feel it is of the utmost importance that we find a resolution that discourages both continued escalation of this aggression and further complication of what we believe was a very simple and straightforward initial matter. (Hence, this is now a formal letter instead of the friendly phone call it could have been.)

Though you have unfortunately chosen not to share with us whatever logic you employed to get from the point where we asked you a simple question, to the point where you are now openly threatening to arbitrarily terminate our lease, we are more than happy to outline the reality that underpins our position regarding our sensible and respectful use of a security camera in the stairwell outside our door:

• Our initial issue was not with the mere fact that Ms. Barnyou uses a security camera: She has had her camera connected since June of 2024, and we lodged our first and only complaint about it just recently when she opted to point it directly inside our apartment. We could not care less about Ms. Barnyou's camera—provided that it points away from our door, as ours does hers.
• We connected our camera just this past February; and, in the nearly-entire year since, nobody has raised issue with it—at least not that was ever brought to our attention—despite numerous instances when maintenance or other Americana staff surely had opportunity to do so. Yet, you now claim in your letter that you have “received complaints”—plural—about our camera. (?)
• We were unable to locate anything in the terms of our lease agreement with Americana—nor in the greater law itself—of which sensible use of a camera for personal security is in violation.
• It is our understanding that the stairwell—much like the parking lot—is expressly considered a “common area,” where the expectation of privacy is substantially lower than that which one expects within the walls of an actual apartment. It is precisely for this reason that we were mindful in ensuring that our camera does not point inside Ms. Barnyou's apartment—but rather at our own doorstep and at the stairs, such that we can see when packages arrive, when someone is at our door, et cetera.
• Furthermore, our daughter attends a virtual charter school and is routinely home alone both during the day and occasionally in the evening. And, although she is perfectly old enough to be alone at 16, she is still a minor and it is important to us that we have the peace of mind that comes with being able to monitor whether somebody who doesn't belong here should ever somehow find his or her way inside!
• On a similar note, as Americana may or may not be aware, our neighbor Ms. Barnyou has... a bit of a checkered past herself: Most recently (at least as far as we know) she assaulted her ex-boyfriend on 20 August, 2024—to the point that it sounded like he was being body-slammed, and he repeatedly shouted for someone to call 911. Police arrived to find the man disheveled and with his clothing torn—even down to his underwear!—and it was only by his declination to press charges that Ms. Barnyou escaped being charged with assault and taken to jail. So, we're confident that you can understand why we like being able to monitor our doorstep, as long as we share a common space with an individual of this caliber.

Nevertheless, threats like “cease notices” and “termination of your lease” are EXTREMELY explicit; and so, with all of the above being said, we would ask that you simply be so kind as to provide us your definitive clarification of the specific clause we're allegedly violating in the lease agreement we've signed—at which point we will remove our camera promptly and without further argument.

In all honesty, however, please know that we find the undue sternness of your initial letter—and the perplexingly aggressive nature of the threats therein—more than a bit off-putting and extraordinarily concerning, especially considering that these threats serve to constitute your sole and exclusive response to a matter that we initiated (!?) and factoring in Athennia's 16-year history with [redacted] Apartments!

We could better appreciate the severity of such a letter, had we been a nuisance of some sort—such as by feuding with Ms. Barnyou directly, retaliating by pointing our camera at her door, voicing repeated complaints to [redacted] Apartments over a more trivial issue, et cetera. Yet this is definitively not the case, as we merely inquired about the specifics of camera usage in the stairwells—since we could find absolutely nothing in our lease one way or the other.

We genuinely expected that you would merely reach out to Ms. Barnyou and request that she simply point her camera elsewhere besides directly into our apartment—which, incidentally, she has now done—and that that would have been the end of it.

Instead, your categorical response to our solicitation of your assistance in what was a clear violation of our privacy was literally to arbitrarily threaten termination of our lease over a nebulous policy of which even you were unsure mere days prior—and which you are STILL yet to share with us at all!

Thus, in light of the gravity of this threat, we respectfully request that any further correspondence on this matter occur in writing. Moreover, should you happen to find, as we did, that you cannot identify any specific clause being violated, we request a written concession acknowledging the veracity of our current understanding that having a camera in the stairwell (positioned, of course, to respect the privacy of all parties) is in fact not in violation of anything at all—whether in our lease or out of it.

We look forward to your response. Many thanks and best regards,

    ~ Kevin and Athennia

Gwen's Second Response

It took her 10 entire days to furnish this response to my response...

Remarkably, the overt threats are no longer anywhere to be found!

Yet, we're still not really at a point where I feel like we're having a "good-faith" argument over the nature of the rules that do and do not exist.

She cites bogus rules here; and—though I'm sure she has no awareness personally—I know of plenty of other apartments who keep personal belongings in their stairwells and skate by without consequence.

So...

Yeah, I think I'm gonna have to pound the message home a second time.

Bear in mind, this is still a work in progress for now—and I'm sure Kitten will make me soften parts of it to a considerable extent—but, at any rate, I do NOT take kindly to bullying (of which I consider selective enforcement of quasi-arbitrary rules to be a common form).

Our Second Response [working draft]

To Gwen Nelson:

Thank you for the follow-up response to our security-camera inquiry. Since you have this time deigned to cite an actual rule from the lease agreement, we have at your insistence removed our security camera from the stairwell as we promised we would do in our previous letter.

However, we must once again request your assistance in helping us to understand why our neighbor Ms. Barnyou has inexplicably been permitted to retain her camera; and furthermore, despite our reporting in our previous letter that she had at least pointed said camera away from our door, we would like to report that she has once again moved it to face directly into our apartment.

As you have consistently avoided rendering any assistance with this matter to focus instead on crusading against our security camera over the five weeks that have passed since we first brought this issue to your attention, we now ask you for a FOURTH time to please see that Ms. Barnyou's violation of our personal privacy comes to an immediate and permanent end.

We cannot overstate how thoroughly disappointed we have been by every step of your chosen strategy for [not] handling this matter. To recap, here is the chain of events that have transpired thus far:

19 December, 2025
We brought it to your attention that Ms. Barnyou had decided to move her camera from its long-standing position on the floor outside her door, to instead mount it on the door such that it pointed directly into our apartment.

Expressing our concerns over this very real (and almost certainly non-accidental) violation of our privacy, we inquired about the specifics regarding any existing policy for security cameras in common areas. You admitted that you did not know of any such policy and claimed that you would check with higher management and get back to us.

We waited an entire week, during which no response whatsoever was forthcoming; and so Athennia inquired by phone a second time as to what, if anything, could perhaps be done compel Ms. Barnyou not to remove her camera outright, but rather to kindly point it elsewhere besides directly at our door and into our apartment.

05 January, 2026
18 days later, you finally tendered a response in the form of a letter left taped to our door. Yet, rather than addressing the issue with which we had solicited assistance—Ms. Barnyou's violation of our privacy—your letter did nothing but threaten punitive action against us!

To quote specifically, you said, “Please take this letter as a reminder and a warning. We have received complaints about a security camera installed outside your apartment door. To maintain the privacy of other tenants living inside your building and their guest(s), we ask that you remove the cameras no later than January 9, 2026. […] If this continues you will receive a Cease Notice which will lead to termination of your lease” [emphasis yours].

There was ZERO mention whatsoever of ANY steps that you or [redacted] Apartments had done to preserve our privacy: There was ONLY an assertion that we were violating others' privacy—and that we could expect punitive action right up to full-fledged eviction—all stemming from an elusive policy of which we were still yet to be informed (and, last we'd heard, of which even you were unsure).

Wow.

09 January, 2026
Upon scouring our lease, we could find nothing definitively discussing the allowance, forbiddance, or guidelines for accepted usage of personal security cameras in any capacity. Furthermore, after reading extensively into modern case law as it relates to such matters, we quickly identified a widely-accepted and well-precedented opinion that the expectation of privacy is indeed lower in common areas such as stairwells (given the inherent “shared space” nature of such areas), and that sensible usage of personal security cameras in such spaces has been well-found to be legally admissible—especially in the absence of anything clearly expressed to the contrary within the verbiage of our lease agreement.

Thus, having weighed these findings against your initial letter's virtually fact-free assertions, we decided to challenge those assertions via a letter of response, in which we pointed out several well-reasoned nuances of our specific situation—specifically, that:

• We have a teenaged daughter who is a minor but sometimes stays home alone.
• Ms. Barnyou has had at least one violent criminal incident of which we are aware (rather intensely assaulting an ex-boyfriend in August of 2024).
• We had taken strides to place our camera in the most sensible way possible, so as not to violate Ms. Barnyou's privacy in her actual apartment, the way that she was (and still is) violating ours.

Though we felt—and continue to feel—that our arguments are completely sensible, it was quite strange nonetheless to feel like we were suddenly on trial for our neighbor's violation of our privacy! As such, we tried to walk the fine line between being firm while also being polite: We abstained from making any threats of contemplation of legal action, and we did our best to simply state the facts—expressly pointing out along the way that we had no interest in attempting to deny Ms. Barnyou the use of her camera, but, again, that she simply be compelled to kindly point it away from our door!

19 January, 2026
You delivered a second letter, responding to our response. In this one, you've declined to acknowledge in any capacity the potential seriousness of our living adjacent to and sharing a common area with an individual with a known history of violence.

Your letter insinuates that Ms. Barnyou has been similarly instructed to remove her camera as well—though we see no evidence of that, given that hers still remains active in the stairwell at the time of this writing, and she has again pointed it at our door. And, since she has configured it to automatically begin recording upon detection of motion, this means that she is recording us INSIDE OUR APARTMENT every time we come and go!

We advised you that this was happening on 19 December: [redacted] Apartments has had knowledge and understanding that this has been happening for nearly SIX WEEKS NOW, and you have done absolutely nothing but issue threats of punitive action and termination of our lease.

You now cite three specific rules from the lease agreement—two of which are completely irrelevant:

• Section 13-D concerns the attachment of satellite dishes or antennae.
• Section 11-M forbids the hanging of personal belongings from windows or doors.

We have a security camera... placed on the floor... and so, we're unclear on how these rules apply. (Moreover, given that we've now had two letters of response literally taped to the door of our apartment, we know with certainty that a member of American staff has now twice been in close enough proximity to have laid eyes on said camera—and so we're similarly unclear on how you could possibly think either of these rules applies either.)

At any rate, this leaves just one of your three cited rules having a modicum of relevance: Section 12-C, which—conveniently for your purposes—makes the blanket statement, “Do not leave your belongings in common halls, entrances, or anywhere outside of the apartment.” Thus, you have indeed managed to exploit a technicality, and we have concordantly (albeit begrudgingly) removed our security camera from the stairwell—though not without trepidation in considering the potential for some unfortunate circumstance to befall us or our daughter, given Ms. Barnyou's apparent proclivity for violence (and the mental instability that such a proclivity would seem to indicate).

This brings us to a new inquiry though: If Section 12-C is such a consequential matter—as your almost gleeful enforcement of it would seem to indicate—why it has for so long gone unenforced? As we've already noted, Ms. Barnyou's camera still remains present and active, even while we are being forced to discontinue the use of ours.

We also can't help but notice that our neighbors in apartment 26 have an enormous shelving rack just outside the door in their stairwell (which we can clearly see through our kitchen window). We can see exactly two other apartments' stairwells from inside the walls of our own apartment, and both of them have active and long-standing violations of Section 12-C—which [redacted] Apartments staff have been happy to overlook for months in one case, and years in the other.

Why is it, we wonder, that these offenses do not matter, but ours does?

Why is it that our camera—sensibly positioned to allow us to monitor the goings-on outside our door, without violating Ms. Barnyou's expectation privacy within the walls of her apartment—is inexplicably such a fierce issue, while her camera's intentioned position to violate our privacy, goes unanswered?

Why is it that our trivial little object scarcely the size of a baseball and positioned within the recess of our door frame must be removed immediately, while a full-sized shelving unit that poses a potential tripping hazard goes unanswered?

Considering the reality in which these “offenses” have clearly long been considered by management to be nothing worth objecting over, we were under the impression that—while the letter of Section 12-C may make a blanket statement banning all personal belongings in common areas—the tacit “good faith” reading would have suggested that the spirit of such a rule is fundamentally meant to discourage tenant behavior that could potentially negatively affect other tenants: That is, objects presenting a physical hindrance or a trip/fire hazard (e.g. a shelving unit); objects which others might find offensive (e.g. political signage or pornographic imagery); and finally, objects meant to menace or intimidate others (e.g. a camera deliberately pointing into a neighboring apartment).

Those were the sorts of “personal belongings” that came to our minds when reading over Section 12-C in our lease agreement. Incidentally, this is why you'll find no shelving unit outside our door as you will at apartment 26—nor will you find religious stickers plastered all over our door as you will on Ms. Barnyou's. All you'll find is a tiny welcome mat and—until now—a security camera scarcely bigger than a ping-pong ball... sensibly placed within the recess of our door frame where nobody could ever have possibly tripped on it, and reasonably pointed at the stairs so as not to violate Ms. Barnyou's privacy.

But Ms. Barnyou has had her camera in the stairwell since June of 2024—much of that time with the attendant wire crossing over the threshold of her doorway where she could have tripped on it... and nobody from [redacted] Apartments staff has ever said a word.

The tenants in apartment 26 have had their shelving unit outside their door ever since their arrival in the last week of September last year... but nobody from [redacted] Apartments staff has said a word.

Ms. Barnyou's door has been covered in religious stickers for well over a decade... yet nobody from [redacted] Apartments staff has ever said a word.

Where has Section 12-C been all this time? Why, pray tell, is it suddenly relevant only now? And, again, these are merely the two other tenants' doorways we can see without even venturing outside the walls of our apartment! We have not even begun to enumerate the other Section 12-C “violations” of which we're aware, having discussed this matter with neighbors in other buildings.

Yet, for reasons we cannot begin to identify, when we inquire about Ms. Barnyou's violation of our privacy... your sole course of “resolving” the issue is first threaten us with punitive action, and then to fight tooth and nail in a desperate attempt to produce anything you can lob at us—even going so far as to cite a rule regarding the mounting of satellite dishes—in the hopes that something sticks.

It's rather confounding—astonishingly so, actually—and, to be perfectly frank, it's all but impossible not to assess the sum of your responses to our inquiry as some sort of targeted discrimination at this point: How else are we to interpret your decision to wield Section 12-C against us with such merciless literality, while you turn a blind eye to countless others?

If the rules do indeed matter, it seems readily apparent that they should to apply to everybody. Yet, we see no evidence that this is even remotely the case. But, this goes well beyond the mere unpleasant taste inevitably left in one's mouth upon perceiving the preferential treatment that selective enforcement of the rules necessarily cultivates:

Through your blatant selective enforcement of Section 12-C, you are now knowingly preventing us—for no real reason whatsoever, as far as we can tell—from enjoying the security and the peace of mind that was provided by our ability to monitor the goings-on outside our door without having to open it. Furthermore, you are knowingly exposing us and our underaged daughter to the potential danger of living next door to a neighbor with a known assault on her record, by allowing her camera to remain!

Rest assured, we are now looking into taking legal action pursuant to a resolution to the discrimination that we believe we have faced and continue to face through your response to this issue—which, again, we initially raised with you, and which you continue to allow to go unresolved! We demand either that you grant us the ability to once again enjoy the security that our camera provided us (for nearly a year now without any issues whatsoever), or that you immediately enforce Section 12-C for all [redacted] Apartments residents with the same merciless literality you've employed in our case.

Furthermore, should the unfortunate reality arise in which we or our daughter are subject to harm or menacing (at Ms. Barnyou's commission specifically, but also anyone else's) which our camera's presence might have served to document, thwart, or otherwise prevent, we absolutely WILL consider both you and [redacted] Apartments personally complicit as a result of the poor judgment being exercised here.

    ~ Kevin and Athennia

Update: 28 January

As I reported elsewhere, our neighbor Ruth has now removed her camera from the stairwell entirely.

Since this considerably weakens the position I had intended to take in my second response (and, let's be honest, none of us is even remotely afraid of Ruth), I have decided to refrain from delivering this second letter, and I will let the matter go for the time being.

As annoyed as I still am about two of the three rules she cited being complete horseshit, I have to assume it's more likely than not that she simply did so at the behest of her superiors.

All things considered, I'll miss the luxury of our stairwell cam, but I'm happy that I at least got to smack Gwen with an intellectual "shut the fuck up" via my first letter.

Who knows? Maybe she even learned something about how to address tenants with more tact.

Where has all the time gone???

Thursday night into Friday the 9th, Kevin was so mad at the new leasing office manager Gwen that he laid awake for three hours before finally falling asleep around 2:00am. And then when I woke up for work at 5:00am he decided to get up as well.

After writing the anonymous letter that he's already posted here (in which he would have called out Gwen's lies regarding the use of power strips in our apartment, had she not corrected those lies on her own), he then spent the remainder of last night writing three drafts of another letter in response to the one she left on our door regarding our stairwell camera and Ruth's:

He'll be posting his own writeup, I'm sure. But basically he wanted to call Gwen's bluff on threatening us with a cease notice and eviction, and to challenge her to produce a citation from the verbiage of our lease agreement that backs this claim (since neither he nor I could find anything).

I was totally on board with this, but he also wants to threaten legal action, which I don't see the need to do.

But anyway, after writing three separate drafts the night before, he woke up at 5:00am and wrote a fourth one from scratch, sent it to me at work, we went back and forth on his word choices in a few places, and then I finally gave my approval that he could walk it over to the front office.

Which he did. So we'll see what happens!

Birthday Dinner #1

Friday night was Riley's first birthday dinner: Just her, me, and Kevin.

It had been a long time (about 48 whole hours) since Riley had had a good steak, so she chose Outback Steakhouse!

Riley and I each got steak, and Kevin got a burger packed with so much stuff that I didn't even know how he was going to get it in his mouth!

Then it was time for dessert!

And even though we had told our waitress when we first got seated that Riley did not want them to make a big fuss about her birthday, she must have forgotten about that by the time she had brought us drinks, and then appetizers, and then dinner.

So when dessert arrived, so did the entire staff:

Riley handled it like a champ... And in return she got a free "Chocolate Tower for 2":

Even though it was the size of her head, she decided it would be a "Chocolate Tower for 1":

About 20% of the way in, I asked her how it was going.

And finally, on our way home from Outback, we dropped Riley off at Kassie's for a sleepover.

Birthday Dinner #2

Then on Saturday the 10th, we headed over to Catherine and Ron's for family birthday dinner.

Riley had requested Taormina's for dinner and ice cream cake for dessert.

Liv wasn't initially in a smiling mood, but Uncle Kev's pretty good at getting her to crack.

Now, with all that talk of buttcheese, who's ready for cake?

First, we sing!

Then we feast!

And then Riley gets rich!

The spot price for silver has shot up over $100/oz in recent weeks, so Kevin was teasing Riley that his parents must really like her a lot more this year since they gave her a $100 coin instead of just a dinky $40 coin like they had last year :)

They also gave her some cash to spend, as did Kelly and Steve.

Then it was Kevin's turn:

But really, his actual gift was that he had bought Riley a copy of Minecraft and "The Orange Box" to play on her new laptop :)

Wait, no. Not that orange box.

This one:

And finally it was my turn!

I gave her some makeup pencils... and all the makeup she had put on her list for Bradley to get her that he ended up not getting:

Then a Betty Boop T-shirt and PJ shorts:

Then two cute little jars I had found.

I put a labubu doll in the first:

And $200 in the second:

You may recall that on Christmas Eve the landlord came around and plastered this horseshit onto everyone's front doors...

This was drafted by the new woman in the front office—Gwen—who has an apparent fondness for threatening termination of one's lease in every piece of correspondence she authors.

But now, as Kitten has reported, we've had the pleasure of hearing from Gwen again—via the letter she left on our door this past Tuesday in response to Kitten's December 19^th complaint about Ruth's camera being pointed directly into our apartment.

Here's that little gem...

If I had to rate Ms. Gwen's lovely personality—specifically, the way she insists on addressing us like a pre-school teacher might reprimand a room full of four-year-olds—I might utilize the same tone and pattern she employed in her opening paragraph...

Sometimes in our bitchy bitchiness we forget that our bitchiness sure does make us look bitch-tacularly bitchy. Please take this bitchiness as a reminder and a warning that you ARE, in fact, a big fat bitch... and big fat bitches eventually get checkmated.

(Also, you have the IQ of a turnip; and no one cares what you have to say.)

All that being said, I have been fuming about the "power strip and extension cord" bit since Christmas—largely since I have more crap plugged in just at my desk than we have enough wall outlets to accommodate throughout our entire apartment.

But, having received this second letter from her earlier this week, I decided it was worth spending a day putting in the effort to trounce her... and that this trouncing absolutely needed to be as big and as public as possible.

So...

I spent a couple hours penning a pretty excellent "anonymous letter" with the intent to blast out a copy to every apartment in our entire complex.

But, literally as I put the finishing touches on my first draft and was considering heading out to the store to drop $100 on stamps, our camera spotted our maintenance guy Ralph coming up the stairs to leave a amended corrections on our door and Ruth's.

Even still, I had worked long and hard on this letter, and I went "full Tyson" in unloading on this bitchy bitch and her bitchy bitchiness...

I had even taken the opportunity to impart some wisdom to my fellow tenants on the actual rules of power strips and extension cords: Why settle for just scrawling a hit piece, when I could bequeath to my neighbors (most of whom I also detest) a public service announcement as well?

Thus, I felt that it would be a shame not to let this little masterpiece see the light of day in at least some small capacity... So, on that note, here it is.

Enjoy.

Hi there, neighbor!

I'm writing in regards to the remarkably disingenuous letter we all had posted on our doors recently (on Christmas Eve of all days).

Now, if you're like me—and you've read the actual terms of the lease you signed,and educated yourself on the measures actually set forth in the version of the National Electric Code that Morrisville Borough has adopted—then you likely found this letter and the threats made therein to be somewhere between mildly amusing and incredibly infuriating. Perhaps you even went for a three-pointer as you balled the stupid thing up in your fist and lobbed it at your garbage can the moment you finished reading it.

But, then again... if you're not like me, then maybe you really don't know just how far off the mark the claims made in this letter are. Perhaps you've spent the better part of the last three weeks legitimately terrified at the idea that you could actually be evicted over a matter as trivial as an extension cord!

So, just to disambiguate a few things for the sake of clarity and our collective sanity, let's go ahead and take a quick gander at reality together and contrast the veracity of what actually is, against the fantasy being portrayed in the landlord's letter of dipshittery and deceit.

Ready? Go!

Let's start with the shitgibbon in the front office, since she's the one who chose to instigate this issue in just about the worst manner possible: Rather than take the more sensible approach of drafting a polite letter, conveying plain facts, and delivering said letter on just about any day besides one of the biggest holidays in modern Western civilization, well... she just couldn't resist going with the polar opposite: Her letter reads like she paid the local kindergarten class a visit and offered to pay "Dipshit Derek" a nickel to see how many threats, lies, and inaccuracies he could fit on one page.

And, man, did that kid deliver! This letter sucked—in every possible way, and on every possible level. But then, that might just be because Front-Office Fannie here seems to be a one-trick pony whose only tool in her entire interpersonal communications arsenal is to threaten to arbitrarily terminate leases.

I'm not sure it's even possible to overstate just how poorly played this approach is, from the perspective of [Redacted] Apartments and [Redacted] Management: Forget about how off-putting it may be to deal with a landlord who comes off like a grade-school hall monitor wielding her precious little modicum of power over your head; and, instead, take a moment to stop and appreciate the thoroughly unenviable position in which [Redacted] Apartments and [Redacted] Management find themselves in a legal sense, when an agent of theirs decides to make baseless but menacing threats like this—en masse and in writing, no less!

But, while addressing your tenants like a condescending fucknozzle is merely criminally stupid from a business standpoint, knowingly passing lies off as truth and threatening to enforce fictitious lease terms while so many actual lease terms remain unenforced day after day is full-blown stupidly criminal: It places [Redacted] Management squarely in prosecutorial limbo and leaves them open to a world of potential litigation at the mercy of an overzealous lawyer... someone who loved playing hall monitor so much as a kid that he went and made a full-blown career out of it.

The plain truth of the matter is that this sort of menacing overbearingness—paired with an expressed intent to enforce arbitrary rules not covered anywhere in the verbiage of our leases—is precisely the sort of thing that leads to tenants joining together and calling their landlords' bluff by pursuing a class action lawsuit to force them to put their money where their fat, lying mouths are! Personally, if I were Front-Office Fannie, I'd be rushing out to to buy up a bunch of gift cards and a box of Hallmark's most festive-looking “Sorry I Was Such an Assclown” card, and I would literally be begging you not to band together and sue the ever-loving crap out of me right about now.

But, hey... that's just me.

At any rate, two very important things are true here: First, there is absolutely nothing in the lease you signed, by which you agreed to forgo the use of extension cords, power strips, or wall taps. Considering that these buildings were constructed in the 1960s—well before most of us were even alive—there is just no way in hell that the average person is getting by with the meager handful of wall sockets available to us in our individual apartments. The world has, after all, changed just a tad in the last half a century, and we're considerably more connected and dependent on our electronic devices—and the substantial amount of electricity they require—than people were in the 1960s.

Second, there is similarly nothing in the electric code that Morrisville Borough has chosen to follow that expressly forbids any and all use of extension cords, power strips, and wall taps! Instead, there are guidelines around the proper use of these devices; but, unlike the baseless ramblings shat forth by some know-nothing desk-jockey in the letter we all received, these guidelines are fully backed by a reality in which electricity has the potential to behave in catastrophic ways when you fail to comprehend the dangers and you misuse conveniences like extension cords, power strips, or wall taps.

Since I happen to be of the belief that you should not have to have your apartment burn to the ground because of your neighbor's stupidity, allow me to play devil's advocate and see if I can better convey the message that the landlord should have conveyed instead of going full-on nuclear and trying to scare you into throwing away all your power strips and living by candlelight like some stone-age caveman.

The simple truth of the matter is that, if you knew the dangers of using these things improperly, you'd be scrambling hand over fist to fix your janky-ass wiring of your own accord, even without the threat of Front-Office Fannie or some voyeuristic nanny-state code inspector breathing down your neck. And, while I don't have the space here to give you a complete crash course in Electricity 101, you can always ask ChatGPT to explain it to you if you'd like. The most important takeaway is the one you already know: Electricity can kill, and electricity can start fires—both with remarkable ease!

Electricity becomes dangerous when you start playing with it without understanding what you're doing: If you've ever needed to use a power strip—but you were too far away from a wall socket, and so you plugged your power strip into an extension cord to get it to where you needed it—you have played with fire! Electrical resistance increases with cord length, which results in more voltage flowing through the cord to power everything you have plugged in. This generates heat... and everyone over the age of three knows what happens when something gets too hot.

...Anyone? ...Anyone? Right, it catches fire.

Similarly, plugging a power strip into another power strip is also a good way to have a bad time. Yes, all of the stuff you plug in will probably power right up and work just fine... until the moment that it doesn't. This is called overloading your circuit. Think of it like having a shelf on your wall, and then putting way more weight on that shelf than it can support: Eventually the shelf will fail, but that won't necessarily happen at the exact moment you overload it. It could happen while you're not home, or sometime in the middle of the night. Hopefully there's nothing important—like a sleeping baby—underneath it when it does! The same thing happens when you plug too many things into the same circuit: It just takes one of those things to draw too much amperage (electrical current), and all sorts of not-so-fun things can happen: Spikes in voltage can damage other electronics plugged into the same circuit, and again an excess of generated heat can lead to the same fire risk we've already discussed.

This is precisely why the building code that's being enforced does expressly forbid what's called “daisy-chaining” multiple power strips (or power strips and extension cords) together—and also why you should never plug beefier appliances like refrigerators, microwaves, air conditioners, and so on into a power strip (but rather directly into the wall). Basically, if your wall sockets look like a Swiss army knife of strips and cords all plugged into each other one after the other, you're probably doing it wrong.

There are all sorts of additional common-sense guidelines that the inspector may point out to you:

• Don't run your extension cords across the middle of a room or a hallway where someone might trip on them (thereby pulling them half out of the wall and risking a loose connection with exposed prongs that can potentially start a fire).
• Don't let your power strips dangle from the wall socket (for the exact same reason).
• Try not to use cords substantially longer than you need to—and don't keep excess lengths of cord coiled up on themselves such that the potential build up of heat can become an issue.
• And so on.

Mostly, just use your brain: If it feels stupid, it probably is—and it's not worth losing your life over :)

But at the end of the day, there is no law on the books that says you cannot use a power strip or an extension cord—and anyone making the claim that there is should be promptly hauled into court and slapped with steep enough penalties that they have no desire to utter such nonsense ever again. Always know your rights and stand your ground!

The law says that these devices should not be used as permanent wiring—meaning that neither your landlord nor your electrician (nor you) should be splicing power strips and extension cords into the building's internal wiring that connects your various wall sockets, switches, and so on.

Extension cords, power strips, and wall taps are meant to be used as temporary wiring... and, guess what? If yours are anything like mine, you can just reach out and unplug them from the wall any time you want! It doesn't get much more temporary than that; does it?

So, I fail to see the issue here that led some pissant in the front office to go full-blown Scrooge and try to ruin your Christmas Eve with her shitty attitude and her mendacious little mcNuggets of coal.

Alas, you can't spell power strip without power trip... and, at the end of the day, that's all this was.

Let's hope she gets better soon!

Godspeed,

    ~ wintermute

But, I guess enough other tenants had beat me to the punch in complaining first...

And so, here's the aforementioned follow-up letter, in which O Bitched One walks back every single claim she had made in the original...