The Quinceañera Continues

Saturday evening Kevin and I took Riley to dinner at Las Margaritas and planned to treat her boyfriend Taaro and his parents Nina and Kenny to dinner as well.

Kenny ended up not coming, for what Taaro told Riley was "a number of reasons", but one of them seemed to be that he was miffed about the fact that Riley apparently didn't say hello to him when he and Taaro stopped by the apartment on her actual birthday.

It seems he considers that "ungrateful".

So anyway we had a lovely dinner with just Taaro and Nina instead.

I took a short nap beforehand, and for some reason my hair was perfect when I woke up. Kevin insisted on taking a picture:

Then he asked why I get to have perfect hair while he always wakes up with a pillow line going back the side of his head. And he wanted to show off his perfect hair as well, which takes "minutes and minutes" of hard work:

And then we were off. Las Margaritas is just a mile or two from Catherine and Ron's house. So about half an hour's drive for us.

Riley thought Taaro had given her all her presents when he and Kenny stopped by on Thursday. But he and Nina had a surprise for her:

It was a gift basket from Bath & Body Works that we apparently didn't get a picture of.

Dinner was incredible as always. And then Catherine and Ron were nice enough to let us stop by their house so that Riley and Taaro could have some time to talk on their own instead of being stuck sitting at the table with their parents.

On the way out of the restaurant, Nina insisted that they let us get some pictures of them in the... whatever those things are called where you stick your head in the hole for a photo.

There were some technical difficulties though.

For starters, Taaro is really tall:

Then there seemed to be some confusion with gender roles:

But eventually we ironed out the kinks and even got Riley to smile for a camera!

At Catherine and Ron's we let the kids hang out in the dining room. And despite being 14 and 15, they insisted that they wanted to play Candy Land.

And Nina, Kevin, and I visited with Catherine and Ron for maybe an hour until we decided it was getting late and we had to get home to feed the cats. (Nina and Taaro had about a 40 minute drive home too, just in the opposite direction).

On Monday Kevin emailed our builder Brody to let him know that we've decided to pull away for now and take probably a year or two to focus on knocking out the last of our debt.

Without the USDA's help, things are just too tight right now for us to have any real hope of making anything work as far as getting a house we actually want, on a piece of land as big as we'd like.

So, we assured Brody that our plans have not changed in the slightest, but we just need a little more time. (And in the meantime, the $2500 deposit we have on hold with Brody can be put to better use here and now.)

Speaking of builders, I got home from work Monday evening to find that Kevin (or maybe his buddy "the actual Linus Torvalds") built me a desk in our bedroom so that I can finally start using my laptop that's been buried in paperwork and cardboard boxes out on my main desk in the living room so that Odin won't chew on it and destroy it.

Some people might have called me rude and ungrateful for not using an operating system that's literally named after them that they gave me for free.

But not The Actual Linus: He said, "Hey, I see that you haven't had a chance to use your computer in quite some time, so I got you a desk."

The rest of the week was pretty slow, until Friday morning.

I always wake Kevin to kiss him goodbye when I leave for work around 5:30 every morning. Half the time, he decides to get up and start his day, and the other half he goes back to sleep for another hour or two.

He had been getting up with me every morning all week to go downstairs and start my car for me in the single digit temperatures. So on Friday I encouraged him to stay in bed for a bit.

We said our goodbyes and he was reaching for his phone to set an alarm for himself as I left the bedroom. But then not even 10 seconds later, I heard him follow me out to the living room and he said, "Well, I'm awake now..."

I asked if everything was okay, and he said his cousin Becky had just texted him just after 5:00 A.M.:

Morning! Sorry it's so early! My mom was worried about Uncle Ralph because he was sick and not answering his phone, so she called for a welfare check; and when the Tucson police went, he had passed.

So then I asked if Kevin was okay, even though I knew he hadn't talked to his uncle in 20+ years. (It's still his dad's brother.)

Kevin shrugged and said he was fine but lamented how hard this was going to hit his aunts (losing their other brother after having already lost Kevin's dad 30 years ago).

Then he urged me to get going before traffic got any heavier, and to let him reply to Becky and update his mom and Kelly.

Later that evening while I was making dinner, Kevin came out to the kitchen with a somber look on his face.

I asked what was wrong and he turned up his nose and said, "The football twats are here again. Even with headphones on and the window fan at full power, they're just SO loud and obnoxious."

And, he's not wrong:

The language is unnecessary, the noise is a bit much, and they really shouldn't be playing here since don't even live in our apartment complex. But good luck getting the police or the landlord to do anything about it.

And Kevin's take is,

I can try asking them nicely to quiet down, but then if they tell me to go !@#$ myself, where do I go from there?

The cops aren't likely to come out. And on the off chance that they do, then the kids know exactly who called them. And these twerps all look like they're 13 years old, so I can't just go out there and pound them all either. Though that would solve the problem.

Fortunately I had dinner just about ready to go anyway. And by the time we finished up and he got back to his desk, it was dark and they had gone home.

Until next time at least.

We had a slow and uneventful weekend (which is okay every now and then!). And I decided last night that I would just call out of work today since they were calling for snow with possible accumulation up in the range of 6-8 inches.

In hindsight, I would have been just fine going in. But hindsight is always 20/20, and I don't regret taking a three day weekend :)

Kevin went out and cleaned off my car:

And he tracked in some mysterious cold, white substance that really confused Odin, who had never experienced snow before:

Then Ralph and Leon came around with their little Richard Scarry plow to clean up the parking lot: