Someone Call the Fire Depointment!

These past two weeks, our world's been burning like a 10,000-acre government-mismanaged forest fire that the "news" conglomerate have all agreed to blame on that damned climate change we keep hearing about.

Grab some popcorn and let's get into it.

Assisted Suicide

First we need to backtrack all the way to the closing days of August...

The afternoon of Friday the 28^th, Athennia realized that her one employee Brian had ducked out of work three hours early without telling asking anybody... again... for the umpteenth time.

See, the thing with Brian is that he's at the tail end of declaring bankruptcy; and, in relation to that, he also happens to be homeless for the time being. So, he likes to leave early sometimes to try to race traffic all the way over to Lansdale and claim a spot somewhere where he can grab a hot shower and such.

Fine.

Understandable, to a point... and the company was well aware of his situation even before they hired Athennia; and everyone has been super accommodating to this guy—even offering him a monthly gym membership on the company's dime so that he could forgo the whole "I have to make it to Lansdale by sundown or I'll turn into a pumpkin" routine.

But, no. He wouldn't accept that.

And so, about a week prior to all of this, Athennia and her immediate boss sat Brian down and gave him the whole, "Here's how the corporate world works" rigmarole...

Anyway, long story short, Athennia and her boss had sat Brian down a week before and jumped through the necessary hoops of,

• okay, go ahead and sign here, acknowledging that you know how to read a clock.
• and now, sign here to confirm that you're aware of your scheduled hours.
• and finally, go ahead and initial here to promise that you'll never ever pull a stunt like this again.

And then, on Friday the 28^th, he ghosted everyone an hour after lunchtime.

So, when Athennia found out, she sent him a text and called him on it...

And here was his response, verbatim...

Now, keep in mind that it's basically an open secret that this guy's homeless, and the company is actually trying to work with him on that instead of shunning him. But also, he's still a temp who is nearing the end of his 120-day probationary period—which of course makes his attitude more than a bit concerning, if this is a prelude to what his work ethic would be like if he were welcomed as a full-fledged member of the team.

Needless to say, when Athennia got in on Monday, she had a story to tell when her boss Joe asked her how her weekend had gone.

As it turned out, Brian called out Monday. Here's that one...

But Joe asked Athennia how she thought they should proceed... and she admitted that she felt it was time to cut him loose. Joe said that was his opinion as well, and he fired off an email to his superiors informing them of the events that had transpired...

...which brings us to Tuesday the 1^st.

When Brian showed up for work, Athennia and Joe had to drag him into the office for another fireside tête-à-tête. It went pretty much the only way it could have...

Athennia said that Brian spent the rest of the day in damage-control mode, trying to smooth things over with her. But, of course, that meeting was purely a formality since she and Joe had already made their decision the day before...

In all seriousness, she was actually super torn up about it and was framing it as though she had just ruined someone's life.

But objectively, it really sounds like this guy could've had everything going for him at this job, but he decided to go for suicide by cop and basically begged them to fire him for his habitual crappy behavior.

Under the Influence

Later that same afternoon, Athennia cut out of work early—after clearing it with her boss first, naturally—to go rescue her sister Sandy and take her to rehab.

Sandy had been sober and doing well until their mother's passing last month, and then promptly fell off the wagon and was very quickly drinking herself to death.

We knew she'd been renting a "room" from one of her coworkers at the grocery store; but we had not realized that the room in question was actually a musty, mold-infested basement in one of the ghettos of Chester County.

Athennia said that Sandy's stomach and abdomen are so bloated from the alcohol that she looks like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man on toothpick legs, and the build-up of ammonia in her brain is making her dementia-like forgetfulness even worse than Lou's was at the end.

To make matters worse, everything Sandy owns was soggy and absolutely covered in mold; but the neighborhood is so bad that Athennia had to carry her purse with her two and from the car each and every time she made a trip to bring more of Sandy's things to the car (for fear that someone would break into her car to steal the purse otherwise).

Moreover, Athennia's lungs were full-on burning for the next 12 hours after spending a single evening in that basement. Somehow Sandy had been living down there for months.

When Athennia finally had all of Sandy's belongings loaded in the car (which she had to do 100% by herself, since Sandy was basically just standing there trembling from withdrawal the entire time), they drove to the rehab place... where they were promptly informed that they won't admit anyone whose blood alcohol content is higher than a .20.

The only reason they took her was because she had been there before and they knew her.

Parking-Lot Blues

Then we had a few days' reprieve from the super-intense bullshit, interspersed with the regularly scheduled programming of low-intensity bullshit.

Here's our neighbor Teef on Thursday the 3^rd, working his full-time job of walking around aimlessly in the parking lot like a highly-reactive free radical that's just dying to bond with anything at all.

Just look at the magnetic hold Rob's truck seems to have on him!

Here's the very next day, Friday the 4^th: Latin Cheeseball showed up to pick up The Waif for a date, and he just couldn't find a parking space ANYWHERE!

Taylor arrived later that evening: Ahlina was nice enough to chauffeur her down here after making Taylor pay for an oil change and a tank of gas for a car that's technically half hers even though she has no legal ability to drive it.

They got here around 7:45 P.M.—right as the pizza guy from Bambino's arrived with our dinner—and so, we got to send Ahlina on her way back to Connecticut with the knowledge that the three of us were sitting down to enjoy some fresh, delicious pizza while she was about to embark on a three-hour drive home to a cockroach-infested apartment.

Glorious.

But apparently just before Taylor had stepped out of the car, Ahlina had had the nerve to tell her, "Don't fuck anyone while you're down here this weekend."

Uncle Fester

On Saturday the 5^th, Athennia was supposed to meet her uncle Kevin midway between our "houses"—by which I mean our apartment and his... like, 1970s-era camper-van thingy that he lives.

This was so that he could give her Lou's ashes that he'd picked up from the crematorium.

But, being the special breed of stand-up guy that he is, Kevin said, "I know a place we can meet" and then texted her his home address in Aston, clear on the other side of the Philadelphia airport from us.

You want a real laugh though, bud? You're literally spending the golden years of your life all alone except for the Trump banners you've strung up with old clothesline and rusty soup cans.

Yeah. You go ahead and enjoy yourself. You deserve it!

Keeping pace with the never-ending parade of People I Have No Reason or Desire to Talk To, Nina and Kenny reached out Saturday evening to ask about bringing Taaro over just for half an hour or so.

Seeing Taaro and Kenny next to Athennia and the girls, it looks like Gulliver and his son just washed up in Lilliput...

The Best-Laid Schemes...

After breakfast on Sunday the 6^th, the four of us sat around the kitchen table making a sensible plan for taking Taylor back up to Connecticut.

The current plan, at that point in time, was that Ahlina would be making the drive down to PA again the following day to pick Taylor up and drive them both back up to CT.

However...

1. We collectively had a sneaking suspicion that there might be a rug-pull waiting on the horizon—since Ahlina's been known to go back on her word in the past, and
2. Even though Taylor hadn't been living at the girls' apartment for more than a month at this point, she still had several things there that she really wanted to be able to retrieve (most importantly her cat Mochi, but also a desktop computer and a handful of other things that would be inconvenient to have to replace).

So, how perfect would it be if she and Athennia drove up later tonight and arrived unannounced at the apartment—giving Ahlina no chance whatsoever to preempt them by breaking Taylor's stuff, or throwing it away, or pulling any other sort of shenanigans.

The more we thought about it, the more epic the plan seemed to become: a full-blown ambush, and one that couldn't happen to a more deserving person. The best-case scenario might be that Ahlina would actually try to bar them entry to an apartment that still had Taylor's name on the lease, and then they could promptly get the police involved and finally show this two-bit little shitstain what happens when stupid people with criminal records try to mess with smart people whose records are squeaky clean.

The only problem was that we had dinner plans at my parents' house first. And at one point, Athennia chirpily assured Taylor, "We can always just skip dinner if we have to; it's not the end of the world."

So I had to chime in with a well, actually...

Unfortunately, I had to ruin the surprise for Athennia; but I called my mom again and asked if we could move dinner and cake again—even if just by an hour or so, to give Athennia and Taylor more time to get on the road and up to Connecticut later in the evening.

On a scale from one to the Jamaicans using our parking lot as their own personal car dealership, this was no problem.

As for the Jamaicans? They're still a problem...

Let's count 'em: The blue sedan in the third spot, the blue SUV in the sixth spot, the one next to it in the seventh spot, and this ugly red thing that just rolled in. That's four.

But, we headed over to Mom and Dad's for the evening—where there's rarely a shortage of parking—and we celebrated Athennia's birthday a few days early 😄

My mom made a crumb cake, and Kelly made raspberry brownies...

Riley, Taylor, and I basically just got Athennia a bunch of bee stuff...

The Floor Is Wawa!

After cake and presents, we adjourned to the living room, where Liv and Hannah were absolutely hilarious as they pulled out all the stops for Taylor.

First they made a long ramp out of all their books, so that they could roll a plastic apple from their kitchen set from the sofa to the fireplace. Liv insisted on "presenting" it before every single roll...

Then they cleaned up all the books and Hannah informed me that the floor was lava... only, she can't quite say the word lava yet; so instead, it came out as...

But the Wawa soon cooled off and was safe to walk on; and then Hannah asked me to do my best "sit down boyce."

So I hit 'em both with basically that scream from Beauty and the Beast, when the Beast's yelling blows out Lumiere's candles... and they were remarkably unfazed.

Then they proceeded to spend the next 10 minutes trying to one-up each other...

Eventually it was time to shut them both down for good...

Mission Aborted

And then it was time to battle!

Right?

...Right...?

So, suddenly we were indecisive—and seemingly borrowing a page from Biden's Big Book of Battle Strats...

So, yeah; that masterful battleplan where Athennia and Taylor would pop up unannounced and surprise the ever-loving crap out of Ahlina?

That didn't happen 😞

Instead, Taylor stayed another night; and Athennia went out and got us all coffee and doughnuts from Dunkin in the morning.

Granted, it was a day of the week that ends in Y—which meant the Jamaicans would have a minimum of four cars here.

And, this time, the lot was mostly full...

Athennia and Taylor got on the road around noon; and, as fate would have it, Ahlina told Taylor that she'd be out all afternoon and evening with family.

She left the key to the apartment hidden somewhere where Taylor could retrieve it, and Taylor and Athennia were able to retrieve Mochi and the last of Taylor's things from the girls' apartment without issue.

Ahlina also still doesn't know that Taylor has been living at the dog-grooming shop where they work... but her car was there in the parking lot when Taylor and Athennia finished up taking Taylor's things from the apartment to her storage unit.

(Ahlina was just there "doing her numbers" though—logging her hours and the number of dogs she groomed throughout the week, so that their boss knows how much to pay her. Athennia just drove around the block a few times until she finally left, and then made sure Taylor got safely inside and deadbolted herself in for the night.)

That's about it on this front for now: As I already mentioned, Ahlina keeps managing to buy herself more time at her mom's place—even though we've been hearing rumors for months now that her mom is trying to vacate that place to move in with her boyfriend into his mom's basement or something. 🤷‍♂️

Taylor was planning to tell Ahlina yesterday that she has completely moved out, but then they got into an argument at work and she decided to hold off.

Alas, I can only leave you with more of the Jamaicans. Here's Teef doing whatever it is he does—halfway between a Freddy Mercury pose and a did that guy die standing up?

And, here are a few of them from Wednesday evening—just hanging out, or staging an armed robbery, or God only knows what...