The Storm before the Calm

Cloudy with a Chancellor of Meatballs

The tail-end of May got off to a stormy start for us. Kitten snapped this pic after a rainstorm on the evening of 19 May...

...and then, the very next afternoon, I happened to spot this tempestuous little sneakthief creeping up outside the bedroom window; so I decided to take a break from coding and go investigate...

Yep, we were definitely about to get hammered.

For once, the meteorologists had been right.

But, one guy who hadn't checked the weather was The Chancellor—as in, Chancellor Meatball...

I don't think I've referred to him by that name here yet; but he's the guy who—despite living clear at the other end of our building, seems to have a life goal of parking as close to our door as he can... since every afternoon he comes home to a 99% empty lot but makes the deliberate choice to park all the way down here anyway, like "Oh, boy! Now's my CHANCE! A new record long distance!"

I assume that he'll soon realize he can park clear on the other side of the guard rail and not even in our parking lot at all anymore—and that he'll eventually graduate to parking down in the Carolinas or the Everglades and kayaking back up the coast...

But for now he's content with clogging our side of the lot with his uber-classy two-toned turdsmobile.

AND... he was equally content with leaving both his front windows halfway down when he had arrived home hours earlier while the sun was still out.

So, the storm was rolling in fast, and there was no sign of The Chancellor to indicate that he was aware of his open windows and would be making an appearance to rectify the situation before it was too late...

I was full-on giddy at this point.

And then, BOOM.

I thought about going out and leaving a note on his car...

But, even though the storm had been chaotic, it miraculously hadn't managed to knock out the power. So I went back to coding instead.

Chancellor Meatball can deal with his own problems. Hopefully he has gills. He'll need 'em while he's driving that thing around in the coming days. <shrug>

Flu Too Close to the Sun

Fast-forwarding to Saturday the 23^rd, Riley slept over at Kassie's house; and Athennia and I went to a cookout at my parents'.

On Sunday the 24^th I heard "Cockbag" (our neighbor two houses behind us) whirring up the air gun to take the lugnuts off his wheels—which he's been doing thrice a week like clockwork ever since I moved in here three years ago.

But then I heard him arguing with his wife—which they also do with relative regularity, because they're both loud, low-rent assclowns with a combined IQ of about 90...

Monday the 25^th was Memorial Day; so Riley slept over at Kassie's again Sunday night.

But Kassie is kind of famous for waiting until Riley arrives at her house before she divulges "minor details" like, "Oh, by the way: I've had the flu all week."

So, you'll never guess who also had the flu when she came home Monday evening.

Spam, Bam, Thank You Ma'am

I was having an insanely productive day on Tuesday the 26^th, until I got an unexpected email just before 4:00 in the afternoon.

It was from Mailgun—an email-delivery service that I use for sending out the monthly newsletter here on the blog (because hosting and managing your own mail server is a royal pain in the ass, and almost nobody in the world even bothers).

Mailgun very generously offers a free tier—which we fall into, since we only send out about a dozen emails once a month—but, regardless of how miniscule our usage may be, I don't take it for granted that a company even offers such a thing at all...

...which is why I was highly alarmed to receive an email from them whose subject line read, "Your Account Has Been Disabled."

Mailgun’s automated abuse-prevention systems detected suspicious actions in your account indicating unauthorized use, like leaked API or SMTP credentials. These can be used by bad actors for spam and phishing, damaging your account’s sending reputation and Mailgun’s overall deliverability. In light of this, sending has been paused on the account as a precaution against abuse.

It will be necessary to secure the account, rotating sending credentials and updating login information. Once you have completed all outlined steps, open a Support ticket and our team will verify. The account can be enabled once it has been secured through this process. Your cooperation and understanding are appreciated in this matter.

Even though everything in the email looked legitimate, I still did the sensible thing and logged into Mailgun manually rather than clicking the link in the message.

But, sure enough, there was a similar message emblazoned across the top of my usage dashboard as soon as I logged in.

Ghost (the blog engine we use here) has been nagging me to update to a newer version for months now—which I kept putting off for two reasons:

1. updating always overwrites some of the customizations I've made, which are naturally irritating to have to go back and reset again after the fact; and
2. I'm running both The KARTography and Twisted Paradigm off of the same tiny Digital Ocean droplet—something that several people had insisted wasn't even possible (which is kind of what initially made me decide to try four years ago)—and so, RAM availability is actually SO tight on the server that I literally can't do any kind of maintenance to either blog without temporarily bringing the other one offline to free up a few megs of memory... which serves to artificially inflate the amount of time and attention that an otherwise simple version upgrade would require... to the point that I kept putting off doing it.

But, I guess someone was able to exploit something and grab a copy of my Mailgun API key; and then they tried to masquerade as me so they could start rapid-firing "Nigerian prince" and "Microsoft support" emails.

But, luckily, Mailgun had cut them off at the pass.

And so, since I already had to jump through a ton of hoops to get email working again (and stay in Mailgun's good graces!), I buckled down and took the extra time to bring both Ghost installations fully up to date as well so that the very same thing won't just happen all over again in a day or two :)

For the record, that was actually even more of a pain in the ass than I'd already anticipated it would be.

Free Lunch

Wednesday the 27^th I wanted to show my mom a demo of the app I'd been working on all month, and then we did lunch at Arby's.

It was her turn to pay, which was awesome.

Then on Thursday I had plans with Richard, and we decided to eat at Cancun.

It was my turn to pay, which evened out the free lunch from the day before ;)

Though this almost never happens, I just wasn't in the mood to trudge through the woods after lunch and have to go home and shower all over again to de-tick-ify myself against any little assholes that might have decided to hitch a ride.

So, Richard and I headed up the street to the Oxford Valley Mall and walked a few laps there instead...

Meanwhile, Athennia had a phone interview earlier that morning (which she feels that she aced) with a company in Horsham offering more money than she's currently making (and located half the distance she currently travels).

All things considered, Thursday had really been shaping up to be a beautiful day...

Out of the Blue

But, then Athennia had an unexpected call from her sister after dinner Thursday night: Sandy said that she (and their uncle Kevin) had gone to visit their mother on Memorial Day.

Long story short, Lou is in hospice... with a lot of the uncertainty that "hospice" often entails, as far as a specific timetable.

But obviously, Athennia got on the phone with Taylor to give her the update, since Taylor is literal states away; and then she called various members of her extended family to update them as well. Then she was back on the phone with Taylor again until well after 11:00 P.M. as they tried to coordinate how Taylor and Ahlina might be able to swing making an unplanned trip down here to visit Lou—with all of the obstacles that an interstate trip presents (tolls, lots of fuel expenses, missed time at work, and so on), especially for two early 20-somethings who don't yet have the luxury of any kind of rainy-day fund to dip into in a time like this.

Athennia ultimately decided to call out of work on Friday, and went to see her mom by herself so she could gauge Lou's condition for herself and then be able to prepare Taylor and Riley for what they could expect after not seeing Lou since nearly two years ago.

Her mind doesn't actually seem to seem to be all that far off from what it was two years ago, aside from the fact that she's temporally stuck in the moment she first went into the hospital two years ago: She thinks she just arrived yesterday, insists that Taylor needs to finish high school, and so on.

But physically, she's dealing with congestive heart failure: Her pulse-oxygen is about 80% (dangerously low), and that's with a cannula delivering oxygen. It drops down closer to 60% (catastrophically low) when she pulls the cannula out... which she has a tendency to do frequently.

Tending to What Needs Tending To...

Before Sandy's call Thursday night, we'd had plans to go over to my parents' house on Saturday to have dinner and help them open the pool. I had also wanted to stop and grab plants somewhere, since this is by far the latest we've ever put anything into the dirt in the garden.

But Taylor and Ahlina had lain the groundwork with their boss to knock off work Saturday and make the trip down; and then Sandy (who has been clean for more than a year now and doing pretty well in other regards too) suggested that our two families meet somewhere for dinner Saturday evening before Athennia took the girls to visit Lou.

Athennia and I discussed what to do and ultimately decided that I would keep the plans with my parents while she and the girls met Sandy's family for dinner and went to see Lou.

Granted, my dad later decided he didn't feel like dealing with the bullshit of opening the pool; so he paid his lawn guy to do it instead...

He could've had his lawn guy mulch the garden and plant the veggies for me, too!

Alas, I got stuck doing it myself—which was just fine, because God knows I need the workout :)

Here's what we're growing this year:

• a Juliet tomato from Richard
• two cherry tomatoes
• basil
• oregano
• volunteer cilantro that came up from last year
• garlic that failed to launch last year and since decided better late than never
• and five pumpkin plants from seeds that made their way into the garden after we composted our jack-o-lanterns back in the fall 🤣

Meanwhile, Athennia and the girls met Sandy and the boys at the Golden Eagle...

Hack-a-Mole 2.0!

Later Saturday evening, Riley sat down to work on some homework: One of her pending assignments is a big Spanish project, and she figured she'd take advantage of Ahlina being a native speaker.

But imagine her surprise when she opened her school laptop to be greeted by this...

The Storm before the Calm

Saturday night, we made an exception to our rule that Odin isn't allowed to have girls sleep over; and Taylor and Ahlina joined him on the sofa.

Then yesterday, Athennia and the girls went to visit Lou again or a couple hours and grabbed Chinese food for dinner on their way back to the apartment.

The day ran later than anyone imagined it would; so the girls ended up crashing on the sofa again (and Athennia called out of work again today).

But that's where we are currently: We're all doing well ourselves, but we're in a dark place as a family at the moment. It's basically the storm before the calm, where we can assume that Lou will be at peace sooner rather than later at this point; but nobody can pinpoint when with any precision yet, and there's nothing we can do but take it a day at a time.

For now, we do have some cat pics for the month :)

May started off more or less as Penny treating every surface of our bedroom as personal sleeping area...

Then Lucky jumped on the bandwagon...

...but his spidey-sense was tingling, and he knew that something was lurking just behind him...

Lucky begged Penny for help, and she acted like she was indifferent at first. But then an angelic chorus rang out and a beam of light came through the window, and she knew she was the chosen one who would lead feline-kind to freedom...

So she hopped into a foxhole and she waited... and waited... and waited...

...and waited...

...only for the Purr-minator to receive a remote update changing his mission from assassinating Lucky to straightening up the place because two girls were sleeping over!

He and Lucky served as crash-test dummies and did a trial run of sleeping on the sofa to make sure it would be comfortable enough for Taylor and Ahlina...

And then they decided it was even more comfortable after the girls arrived and covered everything in a metric ton of blankets...