Rubbing Assault in the Wounds!

Riley has been requesting chocolate chip pancakes for a couple weeks, so that's what I made for dinner last Thursday:

Then on Friday evening Kevin and I wanted to head over to his parents' house: They were on vacation, but we hadn't been there to harvest tomatoes in almost two weeks on account of being sick. So we knew there had to be a lot to pick!

We didn't have a dinner plan, so we went around the corner to grab Riley some McDonald's and then we drove over to Qdoba with plans to get dinner to go and take it to Catherine and Ron's to eat there before picking our tomatoes.

But as we walked out of the restaurant with our dinner in hand, Kevin sighed with annoyance:

God damn it! I didn't bring my keys, so we can't even get into my parents' house to eat.

I just shrugged. No problem. We could shoot back up Rt. 1 to Morrisville, grab the keys, and then head over.

But then as we got back to our apartment, Kevin remembered that his sister's family had just arrived home from their own vacation earlier that afternoon. And we hadn't seen them in almost two weeks either.

It was approaching 7:00pm at this point though. So he called Kelly to ask if it was okay to stop by for a few minutes or if that would interfere with the girls' bedtime routine.

Sure, stop by. No problem at all!

And we did. And we ended up staying for the better part of an hour. (Repeatedly turning down Kelly and Steve's insistence that we bring our dinner in and eat, of course, because we couldn't have imagined we'd end up visiting so long.)

But then we finally got to Kevin's parents house around 8:00 and ate our (cold but still delicious) Qdoba bowls. At which point we realized it was pitch black outside and we had run out of daylight.

So no tomatoes after all. And, we had basically gone completely out of our way twice now, to go back for Kevin's keys, and then to bring our dinner over to Southampton and eat at Kevin's parents' kitchen table for absolutely no reason at all, when we totally could've just gone right from Qdoba to Kelly and Steve's if we had thought of that earlier.

Saturday evening we splurged for Chinese food from Master Wok at the Oxford Valley Mall. And as we were finishing up, Kevin got a call from his mom to let us know that Ron had tested positive for Covid :(

So she was postponing the plans we all had for everyone to come over for family dinner the next day when they got home from vacation.

You know Kevin and I still had to go over and get our huge backlog of tomatoes though! We just stayed outside the entire time.

(And just like we got over our flu in just a few days, Ron was feeling much better by midweek.)

Sunday night I made garlic Parmesan chicken with rosemary potatoes and green beans:

I'd love to be able to say that the chicken, the potatoes, and the beans were from our homestead. But at least the rosemary was ours, fresh from the garden the day before :)

And then we come to last night, Tuesday the 20th.

We got in bed a little after 11:00, and around 11:30 Kevin asked me "What the hell is that noise?"

Umm, I had assumed that was thunder.

But Kevin insisted that it sounded like heavy furniture sliding across a floor, and he got up to go see if we had new neighbors moving in downstairs or something.

By the time he came back to the bedroom a few minutes later, I was already asleep again. But he woke me up sort of tentatively and said,

So... there's a guy somewhere out in the parking lot. I can't see him but he sounds like an older Hispanic guy with no teeth or something.

And he just keeps saying "Call the police." But like, there's not an exclamation point on the end. There's no urgency in his voice. It's almost like he's drunk and relaying a story to someone, and he just doesn't realize how loud he is.

On the other hand, he's probably said "Call the police" like ten times now though. So, I don't know what to make of it.

Oh, also there's some Uber driver or something just sitting out in front of our door.

I got up and followed Kevin back out to the living room. And with that we saw a police SUV come into the parking lot and straight back toward our door.

The officer parked and got out of his vehicle, and next thing we knew he was inside somehow and we could hear him coming up the stairs!

He knocked on her door, and she opened it, and as usual we could barely understand her between her thick African accent and her tendency to talk at 90 miles per second.

But then another cop showed up a minute later, and he came upstairs to talk to Ruth's boyfriend in the stairwell just outside our door, while the first cop took Ruth downstairs to talk outside on the porch.

Long story short, Ruth's boyfriend ("Lawrence") was halfway to the Philadelphia airport when he realized he forgot his laptop. So he had made the driver turn around and bring him back to Ruth's apartment.

She wasn't home when he left the first time, but she came home before he had a chance to leave again a second time. And it seems he had taken some money from the apartment and told her he would pay her back. But when he went to leave again the second time, she decided to prevent him from going: blocking the door, throwing him to the ground, and according to the cops, ripping his shirt and his underwear in half!

The cop talking to her outside was very clear about the fact that this is considered assault in the state of Pennsylvania. And the cop outside our door left it up to Lawrence as to whether they took her away in cuffs or just let her off with a citation in the mail.

We were disappointed when he declined to have her arrested.

But how ironic that a woman who has spent the last month pretending she's so afraid of Kevin yelling at her for her terrible parking job that she had to go out and buy a security camera and point it at our front door, now has a citation for literal assault on the books!

Kevin recorded eleven minutes of (mostly audio.) The majority of it is unintelligible unless you really crank your speakers, but you can get a taste of how animated Ruth sounds when she speaks, and you can hear most of what Kevin and I are whispering back and forth to each other throughout: