The Year of the Molerat
The year turns 2024. Riley turns 14. Earth turns counterclockwise.
Well, 2024 has officially arrived...
Perhaps this will be the year we get a house and escape the ghetto that is L'il Trenton; but, for now, we shall continue reporting on the goings on in this lovely ghetto that is L'il Trenton.
Ready? Go!
Waking up on the morning of 01 January, it seemed we weren't the only ones ringing in the new year:
The downstairs neighbors were still partying straight through from the night before—with their tribal club music cranked up to 11, as though we hadn't called the cops on them thrice in the middle of the night.
Meanwhile, these three crawled out of a storm drain somewhere to roam the streets in celebration as well...
The elderly woman who lives in the house behind us had just had someone come by, not an hour earlier, to stick a bunch of these poles in the ground to mark the boundaries of her driveway and front walk for her shoveling crew, in preparation for the snowstorms expected to hit our area in the coming days.
Given the excessive volume with which uncultured swine always insists on conducting itself, I heard these three pukes shrieking and, I don't even know—"holla-ing back" at each other—when they were still two blocks down the street... so, I had already been watching them for a minute or two before the moment they noticed the orange poles and made a direct bee-line for them.
Ooh... Orange poles! Dems is for US! Dems is for US to steal.
— Pennywise and her little winged monkeys
It only took a deliberate cough on my part to prompt Red Hoodie Kid to advise the other two about "a guy in the window up there"; and then the three of them resumed toddling along their way, in a convincing rendition of "We Wasn't Doin' Nuffins" (never mind one of poles boi-oi-oi-oi-oinging back and forth, as a result of Pennywise's damn-near-successful yoink attempt).
I haven't cursed anyone out since those little dipshits that were smashing beer bottles on Christmas Day :/
Meanwhile, back out front, our old non-buddy Hopalong showed up for the first time in nearly a year, and the oompa-loompas from downstairs all rushed out to perform some sort of satanic seance in the parking lot...
Athennia and I hadn't started another show since we finished Fringe last month; and so, the evening of Wednesday the 3rd, we finally decided on something new to start.
Odin's spidey sense must've been tingling...
...because, somehow he knew something big was coming...
— Odin
Thursday evening, my friend Fotini stopped by in her final hours home on Christmas break from her med-school rotations out in Los Angeles.
She and a few former classmates are working on a research paper that they intend to publish, and she had asked for my assistance with her portion of the paper.
We looked over the paper until Athennia got home from work. Then Fotini gave us our presents and treated all of us to dinner from Wawa :)
But, I'm not a compost pile; and so, I don't make a habit of pouring avocado sludge on myself.
After Fotini left, I asked Riley, "Hey, you're a compost pile; right? Do you want my face mask?"
And that little molerat grabbed that thing out of my hand faster than Pennywise could boost an orange pole.
Friday was decidedly uneventful; but on Saturday the 6th, we headed over to my parents' house for an early 14th birthday party for Riley.
Actually, no: First, we woke up to find that our parking lot had pooped out this monstrosity sometime during the night...
Introducing the new Dodge Excretia—available in pea soup, gunmetal grunt, liverwurst, and seepia. The optional bidet upgrade comes standard on European models...
Oh, and... on Athennia's way home from the laundromat, the ATM in the (s)TD bank drive-thru decided to eat her debit card...
Sooo, that meant she had to take what ended up being well over an hour out of her day, to go inside and have them craft yet another new card for her—the third one in five months (each through absolutely no fault of her own, naturally).
And then, we headed over to my parents' house...
We had to navigate the effects of global warming...
But we got there alive and in one piece...
Liv was... blurry, as usual...
I finally got her to stand still for 0.00006 seconds though...
Luckily, Hannah doesn't move quite as fast yet :)
Even though she's Mexican, Riley requested Chinese food for dinner.
Athennia, my dad, and I were all fine with that; but my mom, Kelly, and Steve are a bunch of cuisine-racists that think they're too good for Chinese food... so they ordered pizza instead.
Enjoy not knowing the future, suckers! BA-HA-HA-HA-HA!
We knew Riley's fortune would be especially noteworthy, since this was her birthday celebration—and everyone knows our universe operates in a completely deterministic fashion, such that some minimum-waged drone in a cookie factory six months ago could've foreseen Riley's future and then rigged the order of the shipments in such a way that he could ensure she would receive the correct fortune all these weeks later...
But, how quickly that smile would turn to a look of sheer confusion!
Welp, that's a signal if I've ever seen one...
Get those candles lit, Kitten! Let's amp up the enthusiasm in here!
Riley's about to burn!
Riley was so enthusiastic that she exploded. People came from miles around to watch. One guy even said he'd come all the way from South Dakota.
My mom had the sense to cover her ears to protect them from the blast, but Hannah got taken out by the shockwave...
Luckily, Liv kept the party going by singing "Sweet Caroline"...
Then it was time for presents :)
Riley had basically just asked for money—although she actually meant currency... and, incidentally, that's what she got...
But, wouldn't you know it? She managed to snag some real money as well... because my parents understand the difference between money and currency, and they feel it's important to give the grandkids something with a little more staying power than crappy old savings bonds... and it's impossible to overstate how awesome that is :)
So, here's Riley with her first ounce of silver...
Better put on some shades: The future looks bright!
Not content to just give her cash like everyone else did, I traded an ounce of silver for something I thought Riley would like just as much as cash...
Al-righty; so, how do we use this thing?
Step 1: Shine the very bright light directly into your eyes.
Step 2: As you gaze into the abyss, find the creepiest effect you possibly can.
I'm pretty sure you just turned into Pinhead from Hellraiser for a second there.
Step 3: Cycle through every possible color combination to find the best ones.
Well, that seems straightforward enough...
There are three LED lights—red, green, and blue—and each one can be toggled on or off at any given time, independently of the others.
So, does everyone remember their high-school combinatorics?
\[{}^{n}C_{k} = \frac{n!}{k!(n-k)!}\]
So...
We have a set of three lights (red, blue, and green), from which we can choose to turn on just one, any two, or all three at once; thus,
\[{}^{3}C_{1} + {}^{3}C_{2} + {}^{3}C_{3}\]
\[= (\frac{3!}{1!(3-1)!}) + (\frac{3!}{2!(3-2)!}) + (\frac{3!}{3!(3-3)!})\]
Luckily, common sense tells us that there's only one way to have all three lights—from a set of only three lights—be on at the same time; so, we can just substitute a 1 for that entire part of the equation.
Black hole averted. ;)
\[= 3 + 3 + 1\]
\[= 7\]
So, we probably could've just worked those out by trial and error: R, G, B, RG, RB, GB, RGB
Oh well ;)
Which ones did the molerat like the best?
Later that evening, Riley had plans for her friend Kassie to sleep over... and, despite Kassie having a 30-minute heads-up that we were leaving my parents' house and were on our way to pick her up, she still made the three of us sit outside her house for another 10 minutes while she finished getting ready.
Plus, you're only gonna be at our apartment for 16 hours tops... You probably could've left 97% of this crap behind.
A few miles from home, we were treated to a sighting of this totally-street-legal gem...
Then Riley and Kassie went off to do their thing—although, for the record, not a single lacrosse game was played—while Kitten and I shotgunned the entire first season of Vikings.
We took it easy on Sunday; and then on Monday, it was back to work.
Angel reached out to me mid-afternoon to say that he had "smoothed things over" with the selling agent on the property once again... you know, since we've been yellowjackets at a picnic for six entire months now—hovering obsessively over the property, while never actually managing to quite land on it.
But, Angel said that the seller has no intention of putting the property back on the market yet. (The fact that the guy sat on it for six years with virtually no bites is the only reason our offer isn't dead in the water at this point!) But, the other realtor also doesn't want to keep going back to his client with a stream of new CTAs pushing settlement out another 60 days at a time with no end in sight.
And so, we seem to be caught in this Schrödingerian state of quantum contractuality—where we're simultaneously under contract and not under contract (although, as long as those guys are holding onto the $2,000 check we sent them in good faith back in August, we'll be operating under the assumption that dealing with us, even in slow motion, is still preferable to having to re-list the property on the MLS all over again and start over from scratch with someone new).
Other than that though, Monday was pretty humdrum—minus the delicious chicken parm that Athennia made for dinner :)
Finally, on Tuesday the 9th, we got around to taking Riley out for her birthday dinner.
She requested Friendly's; and, with recent events being what they've been, we also had another long-lost member of the family come back into the fold :)
So, here's Riley and... her little big sister Taylor :)
And a couple of fools...
We had a lovely dinner and an excessive dessert: I'm 100% sure our blood-icecream level was 10 times the legal limit by the time we walked rolled out of there.
In the meantime, our entire area had been getting pounded by heavy rains with really intense wind gusts all evening...
But, since we leave our bedroom window open with a fan in it basically all year long, we came home to find our curtains drenched and the wind ripping through the window and clawing at the bedroom door—which was rattling violently in its frame (since we keep it closed to pen the cats in whenever we're out).
It only took a minute or two for us to realize that, every time the wind blew and the door rattled, the downstairs neighbors would bang on the ceiling...
And that's when it occurred to me that they'd probably been sitting through the banging and rattling of the door the entire time we'd been out.
Oops!
Should we have been more mindful?
To reiterate what the police told us when we called to complain about your clubby Kenyan tribal bullshit on New Year's Eve, "This is just part of what we call 'apartment living.' Unless I can hear it from the parking lot, there's really nothing I can do."
And, what was it that our deadbeat landlord had to add to that? Oh, right: "If it's before 10:00 P.M., they can more or less be as loud as they want."
But, it just so happens that I just finished stuffing my face full of ice cream, and I weigh even more than right now than I already did to begin with...
So, yeah; you guys keep banging on the ceiling with your little broomstick every time the wind blows. And I'll just repeatedly jump up and down directly over your heads every time you do; mmmkay?
Let's see who annoys whom first and find out how long you actually wanna keep it up! Shall we?
We didn't hear a peep out of the dumbasses the rest of the night.
Other than that, we'd brought Taylor back to the apartment so she and Riley could hang out awhile longer—just the two of them, now that Taylor no longer has a retinue of staff to accompany her when she comes over.
The rest of us have still been right here all along though; so, now that CJ and Ahlina are back in Connecticut (and I'm guessing Alex is likely out of the picture as well), maybe things between us and Taylor can change for the better.
Time will tell!