Thanks Given, Thanks Taken
Ups and downs in the final week of November. Let's try to stay positive :)
A Silver Lining
Our loan officer at the USDA didn't answer any of my calls or emails Monday and Tuesday of Thanksgiving week—leading me to conclude that, while the rest of the working class is lucky to have off for Thanksgiving Day and maybe Black Friday, the government's hundreds of thousands of civil serpents must get the entire holiday week off.
More importantly, I assumed that Athennia and I would probably get the axe with regards to our certificate of eligibility—thereby having no choice but to reapply from square one.
But, there's a silver lining: our 800+ credit scores haven't changed, and our debt-to-income ratio is slightly lower than it was the first time around back in June; so, we'll certainly be approved again and we may even qualify for a slightly higher amount this time.
Not that we need a higher amount at this point, since all the pricing is more or less locked in. But, it would certainly be nice to have some padding in case the government still has another trick up its sleeve and tries to blindside us for the 80th time.
For example...
But, more importantly, YOU'VE neglected to budget for butterfly lights and submit a butterfly plan to the township, and now your negligence is going to tank your entire project BWA-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAA!
Plus, we'll get to reset the clock on our eligibility for another 120 days, which is plenty more than we require at this point to wait for Brody's engineer to get the last of the build plans together so our loan officer has a full package she can submit to her betters.
Interfacing with the government always sucks; but, in this case, it could be worse :)
Turkey Day
Like, how old are you; five?
Monday evening, Athennia and I did a bit of Christmas shopping together and briefly stopped by my parents' house while we were out.
Tuesday, we stayed in and took it easy.
Wednesday, she baked two pans' worth of cornbread and a pumpkin cheesecake pie.
And Thursday morning, I chopped a bunch of vegetables for the veggie tray my mom asked us to bring...
I happened to glance outside and find that one of our downstairs neighbors had turned herself from Aaliyah into the Carrot Queen...
On our way over to my parents', I noticed this curiosity in the center of Langhorne at Maple and Bellevue...
The reverse-psychology nearly worked: I can't recall a time that I've been more curious to see what was inside of a box!
But, if anyone was wondering what happened to the Jumanji board after they finished filming the movie, I may have just located it.
Thanksgiving dinner with my mom's side of the family was great as always.
Chef Olivia whipped up an exciting new concoction...
You start with a half-eaten dinner roll; then make a pepperoni and cracker sandwich and place it on top.
Then you take a big bite and find that it's neither delicious nor nutritious.
Happy Thanksgiving!
After dinner, I battled Darth Crawford and skewered him with his own sword...
Riley was hoping her friend Kassie would be able to sleep over later that night into Friday; but, according to Kassie...
I asked my mom during Thanksgiving dinner and when she told everyone that you live behind the Giant, everyone in my entire family gasped.
Is that you, Pot? It's me, Kettle.
Of course we can!
This time next year, we'll be living in safe, quiet Kutztown with more property than any five houses in Morrisville have. There won't be a fast-food joint or a smoke shop within 10 miles of us in any direction, and Septa won't deliver trash to our doorstep.
But the judgers will still be slummin' it here in Morrisville! Because, unlike us, they bought a house and put roots down here for some reason!
Happy Thanksgiving, guys :)
Dark-Gray Friday
Athennia used Black Friday morning as an opportunity to go do the laundry in an essentially deserted laundromat for a change, while all the morons went out to battle each other to the death over 20% off Furbies and Playstations.
Because, you know... humanity. After a few hundred thousand years on this planet, we're all classy and evolved like that.
By the time late afternoon rolled around though, we were craving some Qdoba for dinner.
...But, if we were heading out anyway, we figured we might as well stop by PetSmart and stock up on cat food and litter.
...And, since the Wine & Spirits store is just next door to Qdoba, we may as well pop in and grab ourselves a bit of booze, too.
...And, of course, why would Riley want to eat fresh Mexican cuisine when she can get dirty-dish-sponge "chicken" nuggets from McDonald's? So, we rolled through the drive-thru to pick up a 10-piece of sponges and a vat of Coke for her.
Welcome to McDonald's; are you using our mobile app today?
It's not like I'm custom-ordering a $300,000 supercar and I need an interface for complete control over the specs and minute-by-minute updates on when to expect delivery at any given time, even if I'm on one of my 12 yachts or at the country club.
You guys sell sponge nuggets and crusty horse-meat hamburgers. Exactly no one needs a mobile app for that. Get over yourselves.
Happy Thanksgiving though!
Friday evening, we watched four episodes of Fringe and finished Season Two. And later into the night, Athennia got a call from Lou and found out her sister Sandy is in intensive care down in the city.
Bad news is, she's in pretty desperate need of a liver transplant and probably won't be leaving the hospital until she gets one.
Good news is, she's a universal recipient!
Saturday behind the Giant
Athennia took Lou down to the hospital to visit Sandy for a few hours.
By the time they got back to our area—
—we didn't much feel like cooking from scratch; so we went to Burger King.
We didn't use their mobile app either.
And they didn't ask us whether we had.
That's the way it should be.
Of course, the service was still slow and the food still sucked. But, hey; that's Burger King.
Happy Thanksgiving!
We spent the rest of the evening and night watching half a dozen episodes of Fringe.
Black... Sunday?
Sunday afternoon, Athennia spotted our flaky next-door neighbor Ruth dragging her old chest freezer out to the trash.
I made it a point to tell Athennia not to answer the door if Ruth knocked to ask for our help carrying it upstairs: She consistently parks like a jackass; she's loud; she leaves trash all over the stairwell on a regular basis... and I don't consider her someone with whom I share a species, let alone a society.
If she were a nicer human, it would be no trouble at all to take three minutes and bring her freezer upstairs: I gave Jeff and Lillian tomatoes all summer; so I'm sure I could've knocked on their door to enlist Jeff's help, and we'd have it done in no time.
But, no.
Ruth sucks. And she makes the conscious choice to suck, day after day—like every time she gets out of her car, admires her horrendous park-job, and nonchalantly shrugs (indicating that she's well aware of how bad it is, but she just doesn't care that she's going to block someone else from parking next to her later when the entire lot has filled up).
She could carry her stupid freezer up the stairs alone, for all I cared!
(And, apparently, she did: Athennia heard it clunking up each step, which is what prompted her to investigate in the first place.)
Then Athennia and I watched her load the old one into her vehicle, drive it over to the dumpsters, and leave the thing sitting right in front of one of the dumpsters (so that, when the guy came to empty them the next morning, he wouldn't be able to pull the truck close enough to get the prongs into the dumpster's slots and hoist the thing up to dump it).
Also, if you bother to read your lease, it's a $100 fine for blocking the dumpster... and you were being recorded by four cameras as you did it :)
Happy Thanksgiving!
A little while later, Athennia caught this guy taking pictures of our building...
She was pretty worried about it; but then we saw him taking pictures of every other building too—which prompted me to file it under who knows, who cares?
We took a drive over to my parents' house to surprise them with an early Christmas present: They really like the grocery totes we use, and Athennia found the same ones 50% off on Amazon for Black Friday; so we grabbed them a few :)
The rest of the day was uneventful... until 12:27 A.M. when there was a Morrisville-wide blackout that still hasn't been explained (and probably never will be)...
But, in pitch blackness?! You're liable to get snatched up by a ghoul!
Monday Mundanity
We finally received a response from our charming loan officer Monday morning. I had of course called her phone half a dozen times over the 10 previous days and left multiple voicemails requesting that she call me back.
So, naturally, she emailed me instead...
I was out all last week due to the holiday. As per my director she stated that if I did not have everything that was needed which was laid out in that email to you that I sent, that I would have to withdraw. I still don't have everything that was needed and requested. Unfortunately it is out of my hands at this point, because I did not receive everything that was needed, I had to withdraw.
I have attached another application, to this email, which once you fill out and get all the documentation that is needed, please then send everything back to me and I will then process it again.
Did she have a primitive AI draft this message??
What human being over the age of 10 writes like this???
Then again, this is the government we're talking about.
So, Athennia and I spent all of Monday afternoon gathering the necessary paperwork to reapply for our loan, and now we get to wait 30-45 days for someone at the USDA to take the five seconds necessary to look at our perfect credit scores and our minimal financial liabilities, and say, of course these people are creditworthy; approve them immediately!
Too Cool for Stool
Tuesday and Wednesday were relatively tame: Athennia somehow sprained her ankle sometime between Monday night and Tuesday morning; so, she had to take it easy for a few days while it healed.
In the meantime, we had scheduled an appointment to the veterinarian for Thursday evening, to take Penny and Lucky in for long-overdue routine exams. (I missed Penny's last year on account of how busy we were with blending our households; and, with Athennia being a single mom all these years, she just never got around to taking Lucky to get checked out anywhere.)
For those of you who are pet-less and may not know, the vet will typically request a stool sample that they can analyze to check for parasites. I scooped Penny's litter box Tuesday morning and advised Riley to do the same with Lucky's—giving the cats a comfortable two-day margin to produce two fresh turds we could gift-wrap and bring to the vet with us.
Penny had no problem with this.
Lucky, on the other hand, decided to rebel and flex his inner Gandhi—except, instead of going on a hunger strike, he went on a two-day poop strike.
So, Riley ended up having to dig through a full bag of trash to get to the nugget-filled GIANT bag at the bottom, and then sift through that in search of the perfect ingot to bring the vet.
The drive over would ordinarily take about half an hour.
But, since it was rush hour, we gave ourselves a full hour.
And, since we anticipated the bullshit and gave ourselves so much extra time, there in fact ended up not being any bullshit... and the drive only took the half hour it should have to begin with.
You just can never win.
So, we got to the vet's office with plenty of time to spare and sat in the waiting room for eternity...
The technicians behind the counter couldn't wait to get their hands on the chocolate truffles we'd brought along though. We weren't there two minutes, before one of them chirped, "I can take the stool samples!"
All-righty. I packed them in little zip-lock snack bags and brought enough for the whole class. Enjoy!
I handed both unlabeled baggies over to her and imparted some helpful wisdom on how to tell them apart...
The cats saw Dr. Kacham—a veterinarian who is newer to the practice. The exams went smoothly, and we were pleased with the doctor's knowledge and bedside manner.
Bit of sticker shock when it came time to pay though!
Two routine exams...
Two stool-sample analyses...
Two rabies vaccines...
Two distemper vaccines...
A $90 blood test to check Lucky for FIV and FeLV (at our request, since we had no prior history on him)...
Computers fundamentally operate on bits (ones and zeroes), often in eight-bit sets called bytes.
And, when we talk about the size of some chunk of information, we apply various prefixes to the word byte, depending on the order of magnitude...
1,024 bytes is a kilobyte
1,024 kilobytes is a megabyte
1,024 megabytes is a gigabyte
et cetera
So, when the girl at the front desk handed us an invoice that said $512 at the bottom, my first thought was...
We don't have stacks of cash just sitting around to make it rain at the vet's office!
I think you guys should be paying us!
So, yeah.
That was fun.
I always say that one day I'm going to speak first and just steamroll through the whole order process before the drive-thru operator can even get a word in edgewise...
...but I never work up the courage to do it; and so, we played their game of 20 pointless back-and-forth questions, like the dullest mental ping-pong match ever.
When we got home, the parking lot was just about full, as always.
The only spot remotely close to our door was this one...
BMW 325i; yeah right... This thing's, like, a 244i at best.
...so, I did what I hope any reasonable person would do: I stepped out of the passenger's seat and gave Athennia my blessing to totally park this guy in, to the absolute best of her ability.
It's not often that karma deals you the perfect hand to impart a life lesson to someone in desperate need of it; so, when you find yourself in the position to teach someone once and for all that yes it does matter whether you park in the lines, you take full advantage of it!
Now, my wife knows her car far better than the average person knows his or her car; so, she got so close, I thought the side mirrors were going to touch!
But, just as she was about to put it in park, out marched some Ja Rule-looking sack of low-rent horseshit from a door off to the right.
He swaggered up to me with a dismissive "shoo, fly" motion of his hand.
Yo, tell her a-move; I'm 'bout to leave.
Maybe this time in English?
I could already tell this was going to make my day.
I mean, if you didn't park like a jackass, you wouldn't have this problem."
Part of me really, REALLY want to keep provoking him...
Perhaps to the point that one of us called the police so that they could come out and explain to him how they can't logically ticket a good driver for parking perfectly in her lines, even if a bad driver happens to suffocate under an elephant-dump of karma in the interim.
Or perhaps to the point that he cut his losses and got in his car from the passenger's side and laboriously crawled across into the driver's seat.
Or, perhaps even to the point that I did convince him to take a swing at me—just so I could see what an entire year of pent-up rage would actually look like, were my adrenal glands to pump it all out at once as an on-demand double-shot of rocket fuel that I could channel into a well-landed punch in his stupid, low-rent face.
But, given that he and I were on the far side of Athennia's car, she had already started backing out of the spot to let him into his car before I could find a subtle way to tell her to stay put without having to take my eyes off of him.
Furthermore, a more rational part of my brain was insisting that we not go out of our way to escalate things any further...
There's a time and a place. You made your point. Just be the bigger person, you idiot.
Athennia did roll down the window to give the assclown a piece of her mind as well—pointing out that, in addition to having parked like a schmuck, he doesn't even live here; and so, he should have been parked in the visitor lot all the way out by the dumpsters.
The two of them went back and forth a few times—in between which he threatened me another four or five times, "I'm 'bout to slap yo bitch-ass."
Of course, by the second time, it was readily apparent that he was about to do no such thing.
If you were serious about taking a swing, you'd have done it an hour ago ;)
His driver's-side door was by now fully accessible; but of course, in his mind, he was 100% the victim here.
When he insisted on continuing to run his mouth to us both—even after Athennia invited him to be on his way—she finally just resorted to talking over him every time he tried to speak.
It took him a minute, but he eventually spotted the pattern, got in his car, and pulled away—with the knowledge that I had snapped ample pictures of his license plate in case his dumb ass decides to come back and slash Kitten's tires at some point.
1. As badly as I wanted to send his molars skittering all over the parking lot, I ended up not having to deal with the unpleasantries of breaking every bone in my hand or being arrested.
2. My wonderful wife and I did still manage to give an entitled thug's ego a nice, hard flick in the nuts without putting our family in any real danger. I imagine he'll remember this interaction every time he comes back to visit whomever he came to see—and cherish it for decades to come.
3. And, most importantly, the next time this street rat crawls out of whatever Trenton hole he came from, he'll more than likely employ both brain cells when he parks his car... which was, of course, the entire point.
So, mission accomplished on all counts!
(...If you guys even celebrate it over there in Trenton. I can't imagine what you could possibly be thankful for.)
Cat o' Clock
Keep going. I require more pets...
Clearly the humans are thankful for me as well!
