This Was Just a Drill
False alarms and no consequences, surprising no one.
Drillin' Dem Teef
On Thursday the 22nd, I spotted Ralph and Leon on our parking-lot camera and watched as Ralph scrawled something on a sticker before proceeding to slap that bad boy right on the windshield of Teef's BMW!
My guess was that Teef was about to get a root canal.
He popped up from God knows where a short while later and stood there mystified for a good 10 minutes—trying to decipher whatever cryptic message the sticker was meant to convey...
Most people learned 'em by kindergarten. What's your excuse?
But Teef wasn't having it!
He waited for the sun to set, and then he jumped in the car to make his escape—followed by his hetero housemate "Dreadlocks," who I presume was his ride back home again after they'd stashed the BMW at the Fortress of Solitude...
Or, perhaps, the Fortress of Ineptitude...
Or, more likely, just in an out-of-the-way corner of the GIANT parking lot a stone's throw from our apartment...
Who knows?
Guns 'N' Hoses
Friday the 23rd, my friend Richard and I had Mexican for lunch at Cancun, and then we checked out the Oxford Valley Mall since it was blisteringly cold outside and the woods probably would've been soggy from all the recent snow-melt anyway.
Since he knows Joe and I are getting into woodworking, Richard gave me his nail-gun—which is pneumatic; so I'm not even sure we have a means of using it. (I don't believe Joe has an air compressor. But, at any rate, I just bought a brand new high-performance brad-nailer last month anyway.)
I told Richard that, since his nail gun has no paper trail leading to me, I'd keep it here at the apartment and use it to deal with the thugs on the guard rail when spring rolls around ;)
In-Denture-d Serpent
Later that afternoon, Teef returned!
Like HIV, he's never really gone.
So anyway... imagine running away the night before because your car has been tagged for towing; but you half-scrape off the neon orange sticker, and then you come back and park literally 15 feet away from your previous location—right where the tow truck will have been instructed to look for you...
But THEN... imagine that the tow truck—somehow, some way—inexplicably fails to find you!
Leon and Ralph were even out here right next to the !@#$%^& car to put up this little No Parking sawhorse...
(There's a water main access-cap-thingy that's been leaking and then freezing; so Ralph and Leon have been trying to block the spot with a single orange cone for the past couple weeks. But Hoodrat kept deciding she didn't feel like parking far away when she got home after 11:00 P.M. every night, and so she would just mow the cone down and park there anyway.)
That went on for at least two whole weeks.
Pizza and New York Shitty
Saturday the 24th, Kitten, the Molerat, and I went to my parents' for a rare quiet dinner without our nieces commandeering every moment :)
We hadn't had pizza from Roman Delight in Southampton in quite a while; so that's what we settled on... and it was delicious.
On our way home later we stopped at Wawa for gas—where every pump was occupied except the one next to this Dome-Hippo van...
So, yeah... A real celebrity in our midst!
Then again, it was a New York plate. So, that made perfect sense.
Offended by everything; ashamed by nothing.
Kitten sat there and blasted him with her horn until his ego finally came back down to Earth and he pulled his Big-Apple ass out of our way.
Later that night, she and I watched a comedy special by Rex Havens, whom Richard had recommended when he and I had lunch.
Rex is absolutely hilarious! Check him out if you're unfamiliar with him :)
16-18 Inches!
Well, at least that's what the talking heads on TV all kept insisting that that's what was coming overnight into Sunday the 25th.
We'd taken our chances and decided not to run out and buy enough food to last us the next two months—although we'd bought our usual amount of food... and Kitten realized too late that she'd unwittingly bought herself mozzarella cheese instead of American.
Mozzarella instead of American doesn't exactly sound like very much of a bummer...
#totally-acceptable #free-upgrade
So?
She layered up, staple-gunned some old badminton rackets to the bottom of her boots, tied a rope to the front door of our building, and ventured out to GIANT in the middle of a blizzard in search of some American cheese!
Our area's 16-18 inches ended up being more like six inches, at best. And we were delighted to find that, by some miracle, our electricity had stayed on; and so we tried our hand at homemade cheese steaks for dinner...
They were AWESOME! (Except for the cheap-y rolls we'd settled for.)
Ralph and Leon were out cleaning up before the snow had even stopped falling...
It's a bit hard to tell in this frame-grab from our security camera, but our lot and walkways had already been plowed and shoveled by 8:00 on Sunday evening...
A Sense of Community: One Day Only!
Kitten still called out Monday anyway, for obvious reasons:
- Who knew what her 45-mile one-way commute would have been like?
- It was Monday.
After I finished breakfast, I told her I was heading down to clean off the car.
So, she decided to accompany me.
Armed with a telescopic squeegee-ice-scraper combo and an industrial-strength snow shovel complete with one of those reinforced metal blades along the bottom, we ventured out to face the 16-18 centimeters.
And nothing could have prepared us for what happened...
Our neighbors Jeff and Keith were already out there—along with Teef and the female Jamaican, and some other people I haven't even bothered to nickname.
I would've been content to just clean off our car and head back inside...
...but it seemed that Keith had sort of made it his mission to get as many people out as possible—because the plow guy was making his rounds again, and he'd apparently told Keith that he would clear our parking spaces if we just moved our cars out of his way so he could get the plow in.
So, for a solid 45 minutes to an hour, we had probably 90% of our side of the building out there—cleaning off strangers' cars, ringing doorbells to recruit more people to the Cult of Cleanouts, and peacefully coexisting with people whom we would absolutely abhor under any other circumstances.
But, can I just tell you... that we lent our snow shovel to more than one person that we've wished would be hit by a Mack truck or a comet.
It was beautiful.
Like that brief period immediately following 9/11, when everyone treated each other like fellow humans for two or three weeks, before they all inevitably oozed back into their selfish, entitled, true-dickhead forms.
By noon, our parking lot looked like the snow had fallen last week...
...And you're going to think I'm being satirical when I tell you this, but...
This dude has to be pushing 70... and looks so frail and useless... and walks around like he has an IQ of about 11...
...but, I swear to God, he was in full John Henry mode for a solid hour—like he was in direct competition with the snow plow itself.
It didn't matter whose car needed to be excavated next: Teef was just right there, front and center, attacking the snow piles with his wierdly hyperkinetic hybrid crossfit version of shoveling.
The guy was an absolute rock star. I wish I'd had our lot-cam recording it the entire time.
I still dislike him, but I dislike him considerably less now.
And, just before Kitten and I decided to call it a day and head back inside (before yet another stranger from a different building entirely could ask to borrow our monster of a snow shovel), I saw that the plow guy had plowed in the main door to Teef's apartment (and Rob and Nicole's, Tits McGee's, and the Cleaning Lady's).
So, I went over and shoveled a little path for them to use until whenever Ralph and Leon might get around again to clean things up more thoroughly...
Meanwhile, in Greater Poorisville
The road out back was absolutely abysmal!
It looked like the borough's plow guy had come along to push snow into the road!
And, you know what?
All that's gonna do is cut down on the amount of thugs who blast their shitty rap music while they cut through the alley to bypass a couple stop signs.
I don't know where all those tax dollars could possibly be going; but I know they're not being allocated toward snow plows!
Even by Tuesday the 27th, Morrisville Borough was still looking like Morrisville Burrow—as in, try to tunnel underneath it all, because otherwise you'll just get stuck in it.
Like the UPS truck did...
...or the resident Drift King, "Charles in Charger"...
Chuck had a bold strategy:
And, the alley isn't zoned for parking; but I'll park there anyway, like I always do...
That way the plow guy will only be able to clean up a single lane, while the other 70% of the alley and everyone's garage doors untouched—which will negatively affect everybody.
And he'll plow me in, to boot—which will negatively affect only me.
Yep! I'm doin' it.
So, he made his bed...
...and he's been taking lots of naps in it...
...all week long...
Meanwhile in OUR parking lot, things are A-okay...
...unless you're this guy—against whom it looks like we all made a coordinated effort not to render any assistance whatsoever...
[c]Old Faithful
The water main access-cap-thingy must've been geysering extra hard this week, because that whole first parking space turned into a skating rink at some point.
Luckily, Ralph and Leon are here to deal with it—by not dealing with it, as I updated Kitten while she was at work...
Wednesday night, Kitten and I watched one of comedian Brad Williams's specials—and, like Rex Havens, he is hilarious... albeit a bit raunchy at times, so be warned ;)
Scarecrows... Scarecrows Everywhere
On Thursday the 29th, we saw that Ruth had finally removed her camera from the stairwell—thereby rendering inaccurate a decent portion of the fiery retort I'd been penning for Gwen the Bitch in the leasing office.
So, we've decided to cut our losses for now and let Gwen the Bitch feel like she's won. I may look into mounting our camera to the back of our door to have it to look through our peep-hole—which, incidentally, will be way worse for Ruth's privacy than the way it was before.
On a "brighter" note (and a not-so-bright one), Ruth got herself a new welcome mat...
Also, maybe try not being such a dreadful person all the time and assaulting your boyfriends and parking across two spaces. Then maybe God will be more amenable to answering!
Just sayin'.
And finally, I had these three clown-shoes show up at the guard rail for a couple hours Friday afternoon...
All things considered, they were actually relatively quiet for doing automotive work. (I'm sure I'm the only one in the building who had his windows open to let in some fresh air, too; so I doubt anybody else was even bothered by the noise at all.)
To me it's just the principal of...
- you don't live here
- you're blocking a fire hydrant
- you're blocking an elderly lady's driveway
...Why can't you do this literally anywhere else?
It just doesn't make sense to me.
Duplexed Birthdays, Triplexed Cats!
Finally, my friend Joe and I are both celebrating our birthdays this weekend!
Kitten, the Molerat, and I are headed to my parents' house later this evening for my early birthday dinner, and then we'll be swinging by Paula's to give Joe his gifts.
But... since my birthday's technically in February—and I don't exactly feel like doing all the work of drafting a write-up and curating and arranging all the attendant photos—you're gonna have to wait until next month to get the scoop on that!
Not to worry though... I'll hook you up with some cat pics instead.
