The Plot Sickens

This first week of May has certainly been eventful—at least in the sense that it felt like Finagle's corollary to Murphy's law walked into a barber shop and asked for a close shave with Hanlon's razor, and the universe was handing out tickets for front-row seats at the Dumbest Thing Ever™ contest.

Let's start the count!

K-k-k-Kenny and the Guest

The evening of 01 May, Kenny drove Taaro to our apartment to hang out with Riley; and, I guess we parents of the lovebirds are all on the same page of having no desire whatsoever to see each other again, because Kenny made no attempt to come upstairs.

Fine by me, bud :)

But he also must have been worried about the very real possibility that Taaro might've grown hungry and pulled a secret taco out of his pocket, only for me to traumatize him by popping out of the shadows with a light-hearted jest about what kind of Martian puts American cheese on Mexican cuisine. And so, the dude literally sat out in his car in our parking lot for more than three hours like some sort of point man in wait, in case Taaro went MIA behind enemy lines and required immediate extraction.

UnbeLEAFable

Saturday 02 May, my Aunt Jill and Uncle Terry came for a visit—which was obviously awesome and not dumb at all.

We'd of course been out to see them back in October—and my parents even more recently than that—but I don't think Jill and Terry had seen Kelly, Steve, or the girls in about three years... which would mean that Hannah would've still been practically a newborn.

So, there was a lot of lost time to make up for...

Then we took pictures on two phones simultaneously; so nobody knew which camera lens to look at any given time...

Meanwhile, I had a volunteer mustard green plant come up in the garden this year (despite having not planted mustard greens since 2021!), and somehow Terry and I got to talking about it...

He wasn't familiar with it; so I explained that the leaves have an intense wasabi/horseradish-y bite that feels like it's going to blow your head off for a second or two before immediately subsiding.

Terry's a farmer, and therefore no stranger to munching on stuff right out of the ground. So, I popped outside, tore off a single leaf, and brought it back in for him to try... with the assumption that he'd just pop it in his mouth and give me a verdict right then and there—at which point I would've happily given him the entire rest of the plant if he decided he liked it.

But instead he just put the leaf aside to take it home with them; and so, by the time he and Aunt Jill left more than an hour later, the thing had started to wilt... and they still had a 2.5-hour drive home, to boot.

So...

Whenever we visit them, they send us home with a metric ton of produce, apples from their orchard, and meat from their butcher shop. But, given the rare chance to reciprocate in any capacity, I inadvertently sent Jill and Terry home with basically a soggy wasabi-flavored bay leaf.

Every Man Jack[son]

On Sunday 03 May, Riley went to the movies to see the new Michael Jackson film with Kassie and her older sister Kaylee.

Then, as fate would have it, when Athennia came home from work and checked our mailbox the following evening, she had a notice from our mailman that there was a certified letter from "Jackson" waiting for her at the post office.

Talk about a supremely unhelpful lack of context...

Is "Jackson" a place...? And if so, which one are we talking about?

Is "Jackson" a person...? Like Shirley, or Andrew, or Michael or Janet, or even Galaxy or Pollock?

Athennia didn't have the faintest idea who would have sent her certified mail or why; so she naturally assumed the worst and started to panic: What if it was something about her mom? What if it was something about her dad? What if it was someone suing her? What if it was the IRS?

At any rate, my mom and I had already made lunch plans for Tuesday 05 May anyway; so we stopped by the post office and grabbed the stupid thing on our way out.

It was certified, all right: certified pointless. It was a letter from Riley's school about a day of class that she had missed more than two weeks ago, that Athennia and the "family coach" had subsequently discussed and dealt with, and that the school had since excused.

So, the big, bad, fear-inducing letter turned out to be little more than a waste of a stamp and an 18-hour stress test for Athennia's nervous system.

Paved Milled with Good Intentions

Also on Tuesday, Morrisville Borough sent out their entire Noisemaker Squad at the ass-crack of dawn—both to shave down the asphalt on the street behind us, and to come excavate the perpetually-leaking water-main access valve in the first parking space in our lot.

This particular Morrisville burro thought it was appropriate to ride up and down the street while relentlessly honking his obnoxious horn: 'Duhhh, dere are a car parked here and dere are a house here, so derefore da car must belong to da person dat live in da house; and dat person are in my way, so I are honk my horn until he come outside!'...

Absolutely unbelievable. Someone should be fired for that.

...And here are the police working with tow trucks a full two hours later, after it became apparent that the cars parked in the street all belong to people in those apartment buildings; and so waking up the rest of us was as pointless as it was inconsiderate...

Fortunately, our neighbor Rob had happened to park in the space with the water main valve the night before... and so the jerkoffs got karma'ed for waking everyone up earlier, when they couldn't start working until they spent the better part of an hour getting him to move it...

Of course, first they had to figure out whose truck it was. Then they found out the hard way that Rob works overnights... after he slept right through their numerous attempts to wake him by ringing his doorbell, until they finally managed to get Nicole on the phone and have her call him on his cell.

Good. Fuckers. What goes around comes around!

Then they spent the rest of the morning and afternoon orchestrating chaos...

...but I decided to escape the noise (and the lack of running water in the apartment) and have lunch with my mom instead; and then we checked out Warwick Memorial Park...

...but it was ungodly hot for mid-May and I forgot my baseball cap; so we walked for about 53 seconds and called it good enough.

Meanwhile, there are now two parking spaces out of commission in our lot...

Does it Hold Water?

Later still on Tuesday evening, we discovered that our toilet wouldn't stop running... and that it was literally vibrating the entire floor in the process (seemingly as the result of an incomplete seal).

So, Athennia called the emergency maintenance number and got Leon—who was quick to dispense with his usual dismissive know-it-all-ness. Now, granted, there had been major work done to the water main just outside our building that day... and Leon knows by now that I work from home and am here far more often than I'm away; BUT, Athennia's been complaining about this toilet for the better part of a decade now, and Leon and I had literally waved to each other as I headed out of the parking lot shortly after 10:00 that morning.

But, this is how the "conversation" went anyway...

That's damn near verbatim, too, for the record.

That's what constitutes professionalism in good ol' Morrisville.

But, you know what? We don't pay for the water, and we don't own this building; so yeah, fire up all the faucets, Kitten! Let them run all night if you'd like. Let the fucking pipes crack all the way down to the foundation. Not our problem, if that's how they wanna play it!

Here's a video I shot two nights later, proving that there's something going on here beyond a wee bit of air in the pipes...

...So, I guess we're playing the long game now, and just waiting for that magical moment that we get to call back and tell Leon, "Hey, remember back in May when we alerted you about our toilet and you blew us off? Well, you may wanna go shut off the water, because the odiferous effluvium just hit the rotating oscillator."

Hack-a-Mole

Late afternoon on Thursday 07 May, the Molerat knocked on my door and said, "I just got off the phone with Mom and she said to show you: I think my school got hacked."

So, I followed her into her bedroom to take a look at her computer screen...

Welp...

I'm not super familiar with ShinyHunters or their "work" by any means; but I've seen their name here and there over the years in some of the infosec news I read... and it seemed readily apparent to me that Instructure's infrastructure was... shall we say, FUBAR...

(Note, however, that Instructure isn't the name of Riley's actual school: They're just a company that provides a learning management system called Canvas that Riley and her classmates use in their everyday workflow to interface with teachers, hand in assignments, and so on.)

But anyway—surprising exactly no one—Riley's school released this in response later Thursday evening...

No kidding. I did not see that coming!

Due to the raging dumpster fire that has turned everything in the 1,600 square miles surrounding the school into the surface of Mercury, Chernobyl Elementary will be closed on Friday, and children are encouraged to read their schoolbooks at their leisure from the comfort of their own homes.

You don't say.

Killa B? Kill a Bee!

Meanwhile, Athennia got to work yesterday morning and had to do battle with what initially looked like an Asian murder hornet but turned out to be just an ordinary not-lethal-but-still-a-complete-asshole-nonetheless hornet...

Turns out, it was a European hornet—and roughly the size of a standard Zippo lighter...

It also ended up being a murdered hornet as well.

But my question is, who let this thing into the building without a security clearance or credentials of any kind?

Mill a Meter

Back in Poorisville, the road crew came out again yesterday to take even more asphalt off the street behind us.

The guys went super heavy in certain spots—I'm guessing for the same reason the crew who paved our parking lot two summers ago did: The soil throughout all of Bucks County just seems to be 99% clay; and given the endless expansion and contraction that results from the clay's constantly-changing saturation, there are just areas where you can tear up the street and find hollow pockets where there's literally nothing there.

Kind of unnerving to think about, really.

But, they have a machine that can just suck up asphalt as though it were just mud. It was pretty nuts to watch!

Meanwhile, even though some asshole had rolled up the street in a pickup truck honking his horn again at 7:00 A.M., there were still a handful of parked cars two hours later that again required coordination with the police and some tow trucks.

The cop on scene was able to locate one lucky bastard just seconds before his vehicle got hauled away...

Here are a couple more videos I shot from our bedroom window...

And, since Kitten and I watched the entire Buffy the Vampire Slayer series last year (three decades after everybody else did), we've decided to watch Angel now...

...but we've only watched two episodes; so I don't even know who 60% of these people are.

Is that dumb?