Steamed Punks and High-Class Hijinx

So, Friday evening was shaping up to be pretty relaxed, pretty routine.

Kitten and I have been off-loading herbs and tomatoes onto Joe and Paula all summer; so Paula recently gave us a big tub of homemade pasta sauce she whipped up with a bunch of ingredients from our garden.

We'd used half of it on ravioli the night before, and we had the remainder earmarked for a pizza Friday night.

So, we got crackin'!

A Paula Pizza

First came the sauce...

Then our resident OSHA inspector made sure I laid out the toppings in proper proportion...

OSHA stands for One-eyed Sausage-Helping Advisor in this case—because Athennia likes some sausage, Riley prefers no sausage, and I'll take as much sausage as I can get.

So, if we get any that wrong, then the whole dinner is lost.

Also, toppings are actually middlings on our pizzas, because they go under the cheese instead of on top of it...

With the pie satisfactorily constructed under Odin's watchful half-gaze, it was time to bake that bad boy to the proverbial "until golden-brown."

I figured Kitten could handle that herself; so I retired to the bedroom to get some work done. Or to play video games. (I honestly don't remember at this point.)

High-Class Hijinx

But, about half an hour later, I got a rather curious text from her...

GET OUT HERE

I raced out to see what had happened, and Kitten intercepted me halfway through the living room...

Last I'd seen, there were just a handful of people moving stuff into Fuggy's old apartment over in the corner: They had a 10-foot U-Haul truck full of stuff; and it looked like a black couple with three little kids, and two hispanic guys helping them unload.

Welp, as it turned out, Kitten had first been alerted to the window when she heard the new neighbors' kids shrieking... and found them playing on and around her car.

So, she had started chirping her alarm in the hopes of repelling them; but then, the real excitement started. Here's the initial video she recorded before texting me...

It seems that the black woman is the one actually moving in (with her kids), and the black dude is her cousin who just came along to help.

The two Hispanic guys are anyone's guess. Friends of hers? Lovers of hers? Baby daddies? Don't know, don't care.

From what Kitten could tell, the plan was something along the lines of, "Let's all of us get in Momma's SUV and stick Muscles here with returning the U-Haul truck by himself."

Just one problem: Muscles didn't appreciate that plan very much! And ain't NOBODY leavin' if HE ain't leavin', bruh.

As she recorded all of this, Kitten found herself in a bit of a conundrum.

A riddle of the sphinx, if you will.

How could she call the police while continuing to record? Hence, the reason to bring me into the fold.

Or, to put it in Wedding Singer terms...

Ah, but for all the things—all the buffoonery, all the tomfoolery, all the assclownery—that Kitten has told me to "just tune out" in my three years of living here, THIS was somehow the one that she couldn't walk away from.

So, I said I would gladly take over recording duties if she wanted to call 911.

That said, here's my extended documentary in five sequels to her original.

Enjoy!

Long story short, the cops got the black guy on disorderly conduct... which will hopefully serve as a teaching moment.

I'm crossing my fingers that Big Momma and the Trouble Triplets (and Jose and Hose B) will also use this as a wake-up call and get better soon.

Now for That Paula Pizza

Alas, the Paula pizza was halfway from room-temp to cold by this point.

But we ate the ever-loving crap out of that thing anyway, and it was !@#$%^& awesome!

Precarious Positions

It would be hard to top all that drama the rest of the week—by which I mean impossible.

On Saturday we went over to my parents' house for beef stew, and all we saw was this doe chilling out just inches from the traffic whizzing by...

Then yesterday I caught a glimpse of Ralph walking around on the roof and cleaning out the gutters with zero supervision or safety equipment whatsoever.

(That's long overdue: Kitten doesn't think they've ever cleaned out the gutters in the 15 years she's lived here. But damn, dude: You're older than I am! I sure wouldn't want to be up there tap-dancing on the roof of a two-story building.)

Eventually Leon came stand and watch...

...and was even nice enough to throw a screwdriver at him!

Steamed Punks

Then I headed over to Joe's so we could get cracking on a project we've had in the works.

We've decided to try our hands at building steampunk furniture!

He's an auto-mechanic-turned-jazz-pianist, and I'm a software-engineer-turned-writer; so, between the two of us, our experience with designing, painting, woodworking, and marketing is...

But, fear not!

I'm the man with the plan.

Joe's the man with the van.

And, as the old saying goes...

But anyway, I've sketched out some ideas—and learned how to paint things to look like aged metal.

I've been painting crappy pieces of scrap cardboard; so I figure I'll be an absolute da Vinci once I have a real medium like wood or iron.

Or, to put it in Dodgeball terms...

So, yeah. Here's a sneak peek—at a resolution too small for anyone to have any chance of stealing our super-amazing, patent-not-even-remotely-pending ideas ;)

Granted, we didn't actually work on any of that stuff yesterday: Joe had this enormous entertainment center console armoire thing clogging up his shed, and he didn't want it anymore; so we disassembled it to see whether we could make use of any of the scrap wood.

Except, plot twist: It's all crappy MDF!

But we're gonna use it anyway, just out of spite.

And we're going to try our hands at making a pair of end tables.

So, we ordered a metric ton of little pipe segments and fittings and other plumbing praphernalia...

Naturally, the nipples come pre-seasoned with California cancer oil to protect them from the elements—just in case someone's running plumbing along the bottom of the Mariana Trench or something, I guess.

And so, the first order of business was to make them look like this instead of like this...

Then we had to square up two of our MDF boards and channel our inner Banksy to get a few chaotic base coats of spray paint on them so that we can hit them with some more fine-tuned acrylic touch-ups later in the week...

All that work made us hungry; so Paula offered to treat us, and Athennia, and Riley to dinner at Gianni's!

She and Joe and I pulled into the parking lot about two minutes before Athennia and Riley got there; but, just as they arrived, my cousin J.D. randomly popped in to grab himself some dinner on his way home from a haircut.

I didn't know if Jace would actually be up for joining us, or if he would just want to be on his way. But he said he didn't have anything going on; so he stayed and hung out and had dinner with all of us!

And of course Paula balked at the end of the meal when he tried to ask how much his portion of the bill was :)

CatGPT