The Force of July

The first half of July has been hitting hard and I feel like I'm about to break. Here's hoping the light at the end of this tunnel isn't a freight train!

Flouting Water

On Thursday the 2nd I stopped at the food store on my way home from work, to avoid having to go grocery shopping over the coming holiday weekend. As per our usual routine I texted Kevin as I was pulling into our parking lot, to ask if he could come down and help me carry everything up.

Which he did. And then we put everything away in the fridge or the pantry or wherever it went. And then Kevin glanced out the window and said, "I can't believe this guy's still out here!"

So I filled up a giant cup of ice water and I went downstairs and marched across the parking lot.

The man was conscious... and completely inebriated. He had saltine cracker crumbs all over his face and shirt, and when I offered him the water, he took one sip before handing it back to me and telling me that all he really wanted was another beer.

He didn't know where he was when I asked him. And then after I told him, he sighed and said he had to "get all the way to the other side." (Whatever that means.)

He did have a Wawa bag like Kevin said, but it seemed to be full of a bunch of other empty plastic bags, which were escaping one by one and blowing all around the parking lot in the wind. His 100-degree-friendly snack from Wawa though was a hard boiled egg and a bag of sweaty pepperoni.

I stayed there trying to talk to him for a few minutes but it honestly seemed like I was bothering him, so I finally came back upstairs. I told Kevin what had happened and asked if he thought I should call the police. I felt bad at the thought of ruining the guy's life over a public drunkenness citation (especially since he had on a wedding band and some nice looking jewelry, and didn't at all have the look of someone who does this on a regular basis). But I was also highly concerned for his well being given that it was so hot outside and all he seemed to have had to drink was beer, beer, and more beer.

But before I could make my decision, Kevin noticed that the guy had gotten up and was on the move again (probably because he was now worried that I might call the cops). We watched him "zombie stagger" across our parking lot, plastic bags blowing off of him left and right, and made his way to the guard rail and down the street behind us... walking in the middle of the road, naturally.

The whole thing was so bizarre that neither Kevin or I thought to get a video until the very tail end of his "escape":

At least he got close enough to the bottom of the street that someone would have been sure to see him if he collapsed at some point. The cross street down beyond those trees is the main artery through the neighborhood and highly traveled.

Later that evening, Kassie got dropped off here and I took her and Riley to their kickboxing class. Then we grabbed dinner from Bambino's on our way home, and Kassie slept over.

Clouding Weather

On Friday the 3rd I had off from work, so Riley and I tried to go visit my mom. But she was fast asleep.

Kevin and I had already decided on Chinese food for dinner, and our preference is to get it from Master Wok inside the Oxford Valley Mall. So Riley and I headed over to Oxford Valley, walked the mall, and did some clothes shopping.

But before we knew it the mall was closing, and by the time we got back to Master Wok they didn't have enough food left to accommodate all three of our orders. So I told Riley we would have to stop by 21 Chinese Kitchen on the way home to grab a bit extra there.

The clouds were pretty wild the entire way home:

When we pulled into the parking lot, I had to get a 360 degree video of the sky over the apartment. Then when Riley and I got upstairs, I exclaimed to Kevin, "Have you seen these clouds out here!?"

And he was like, "Yeah! I've been watching them for the last five minutes or so. Trying to get good pictures, but I'm like sideways against the window, and my camera keeps wanting to focus on the smudges on the glass instead of on the sky."

He proudly showed me his shots:

So then I had him check out mine, including this one from directly overhead:

Of course, an hour later everything was back to normal and it was like nothing had ever happened:

Founding Fathers

Saturday was the Fourth of July. As always we had plans to go to Catherine and Ron's for a cookout (though no pool party this year since there was a hole in the pool liner and the pool was half empty, and the guys weren't able to come out to do the replacement until later in the week.)

As we pulled out of our parking lot, Kevin spotted a car parked on the opposite side of the street. He burst out laughing and said, "Holy crap! That's the guy that kept parking closer and closer to our door a month or so back, and then he'd walk clear to the other side of the building. I guess he finally got karma'ed!"

Well, I'm not sure whether it was in fact karma, but it does indeed look like he got rear ended and now his trunk won't even close.

The party was Catherine and Ron, Kelly's family, us, and everyone from Catherine's brother's family except for Alissa and the kids. Ron grilled burgers and hotdogs, and there were plenty of sides, snacks, and party food to go around as well.

Apparently Kevin and I took a grand total of zero pictures between the two of us.

Sorry about that 😦

Kevin took this one on the way home though since we were driving straight into a thunderstorm:

Okay, well come on now. I know I drive fast, but I don't drive that fast.

That's better 😉

We were fortunate to dodge the rain the entire way home. But just as we pulled into our parking lot at home, it really felt like a tornado was about to roll through. There were some people setting setting off fireworks by the dumpsters, about six feet away from the No Fireworks Zone sign, and our neighbor who Kevin calls "Teef" was loafing in his car smoking his marijuana with all the windows open as he usually does.

And then the sky cracked. It started pouring out of nowhere, and something somewhere knocked out all the electricity to every building in the complex except ours (which was incredible since usually the exact opposite happens, where we lose power along with the rest of the neighborhood behind us, but every other building in front of us keeps chugging right along).

But hey, it was Independence Day, and our building was independent from the rest of the complex. We'll take it!

Drowning Daughter

But now we start to get into the storm that I've been dealing with over the past few weeks.

Taylor is slowly (and not so slowly, in some ways) sinking in her relationship with Ahlina. God knows that Kevin and I have both documented both girls' past behavior over the years here on the blog, and although the girls are far from perfect, they have both done a lot of growing up in the past two years since they moved up to Connecticut.

Unfortunately Ahlina happens to come from a colorful family, with her father having a long rap sheet, and her mother committing fraud multiple times and torpedoing both Ahlina's credit and her older sister's. I can't recall whether Kevin or I have ever come out and explicitly said it, but I've interacted with Ahlina enough times across the year she lived under my roof, then the following year she spent under my my mother's roof, and the two years since she and Taylor have lived together on their own: I am personally convinced that she is a narcissist through and through.

Ahlina's abuse has been getting progressively worse in recent months, in a psychological sense, a physical sense, and a sexual sense. But... she and Taylor are also trauma bonded to each other, which creates a classic power imbalance between them that keeps Taylor just forever hanging on to the belief that Ahlina's behavior will eventually change (when everybody else can clearly see that it will not, just as it has not the entire time Ahlina has been active in the sphere of our family).

Meanwhile, Ahlina is surrounded by family and friends up in Connecticut, and so she is largely thriving, while Taylor has nobody, since Riley, Kevin, and I are all down here in PA. But in addition to all the common difficulties abuse victims face in trying to find the strength to leave an abusive relationship, I know Taylor is also wrestling with the idea of what she would do with her pets that wouldn't be able to come back to the apartment. And probably also the blow to her pride, in having to come back home and acknowledge that she messed up and made some poor choices.

But on July 7th, Taylor called me and had me on speaker phone. And she was literally in tears pleading with Ahlina to let her out of their car!

I assured Ahlina that this was technically enough to constitute kidnapping, and I repeatedly urged Taylor to call 911. I ended up screaming at both of them so loud and for so long that I lost my voice.

And in classic Ahlina fashion, she retorted with a long tirade about how Taylor's being this and that, and how she can see why Taylor's such a "piece of shit", because both Riley and I are "pieces of shit" too.

And yet Taylor's still not ready to call it quits, no matter how much I plead with her to just walk away!

Greener Pastures

On Wednesday the 8th, I had my fourth interview with the same company that headhunted me last month and has been wooing me (at a snail's pace) ever since.

This time it was another in-person interview with the Vice President/General Manager.

I felt like it went well, just like I did about the first three. We seemed to hit it off in all the right ways, and he seemed to be impressed by what I had to say.

But God, this has been nerve racking!

Or at least, it had been...

The next day, they reached out to offer me the job 😁

Kevin and Riley and I went out to dinner at IHOP that night to celebrate:

Kevin thought the green tint from the sign behind his water made it look like he was about to get super powers by drinking it.

Frowning Farther

Just before I left work on Friday afternoon, I was telling my boss Brian (the good one, who I adore) about the job offer and the fact that I had formally accepted it that morning before I came into work.

Little did we know that our general manager Bob (the one who drives everybody nuts, and a big reason why several people have decided to leave the company in recent weeks) was silently measuring something on the other side of the wall we were standing near. Like, we really had no idea that Bob was even in the building at all, let alone lurking in the shadows six feet away.

So you can probably imagine my surprise when I was in the middle of candidly telling Brian all about how I would be giving my two weeks notice and tendering my resignation when I came in on Monday, only to have Bob pop out from around the corner and say, "Wait, what's all this now?"

And you can probably also imagine my surprise when Bob immediately extended a counter offer to match what I had told Brian my new salary would be (a good 20% over my salary at my current job)!

But Bob begged me to wait until Angelique (the company founder and also his wife... not that there's any conflict of interest there) had a chance to talk to me before I made any final decisions, even though I had already made my final decision at 5:25 that morning when I formally committed to the new position.

Later Friday evening, Riley and I went again to try to visit my mom. We saw this little guy outside when we got there:

What we found inside was a tad less benevolent: My mom was laying stark naked on her bed, with her door wide open and all of her blankets on the floor. She was leaning to her side as though she might eventually fall out of bed entirely. And her attendant was at the complete opposite end of a long hallway and totally oblivious to her plight.

To make matters worse, when I alerted the staff to the situation and they sent the attendant in to help straighten my mom back up, he just sort of picked her up unceremoniously and manhandled her back into position. Not exactly the way you should treat an elderly woman with chronic pain from a hip joint that basically no longer exists!

Needless to say, I was not happy. And when I was telling Kevin's family about all of this during dinner at Catherine and Ron's the next evening, Kelly gave me the number for Adult Protective Services and insisted that I should call and report both the neglect and the rough treatment. (And she of course works in a field where her staff deal with restraining people with all sorts of physical and mental handicaps on a relatively regular basis, so she's far better versed than most when it comes to gauging what may or may not constitute abuse in this sort of setting.)

My mom's brother has power of attorney over her at this point though, and I didn't exactly relish the idea of having him think I went behind his back, when really it was just a matter of the fact that I would have to be the one to make the abuse allegation since I was the one who had witnessed it firsthand.

My uncle and I haven't spoken in nearly three years though, and as I expected, he didn't respond to the text messages I sent him. I did the next best thing and reached out to my sister in hopes that she could relay the message to him since they have been in semi regular contact in recent months.

As is my sister's style though, she must have taken my message and amplified it by a thousand percent when relaying it to our uncle, because the next thing I knew, she was telling me that he had called the nursing home fuming about the alleged treatment and was threatening to get the police involved.

I did get a call earlier today from an administrator at the nursing home who took my entire statement and said she (or the police) might be in contact with me again depending on how the nursing home's internal investigation goes.

So that's where we are on that front.

But needless to say, it has been a very stressful few weeks for us, and especially for me: Taylor's situation, my mom, waiting nearly a month to see whether I would be offered this new job, worrying now about what kind of bullshit my last two weeks might bring at my current job.

I'm hoping that at least some of these will start looking a little brighter sooner rather than later.

Looking at these pictures Kevin took yesterday, Hannah seems to think that they will!