Un Aniversario y una Semana Lenta

This past Tuesday night was the one-year anniversary of my asking Athennia to marry me; so, of course we wanted to do something special.

Dinner at Las Margaritas seemed a sensible choice, since that's where I had taken her on our first date—and it's also where we ate in recreating our first date when I proposed last year.

But, we also wanted to include Riley this time around; and, since she reminds us quite frequently how much she enjoyed Mad Mex back in October, neither of us had any objection to changing things up a bit.

It turns out, however, that Mad Mex has closed indefinitely as a result of labor shortages and other economic factors that may or may not directly correlate to the whole 15 1,100 days to "flatten the curve" situation.

So, it looked like we were headed to Las Margaritas after all!

We kicked off the evening with some high-quality family time...

Whoa! Have you guys got mail? Are you Instagramming a bunch of TikToks to your Friendsters' MySpace Geocities? Make sure you leave a couple Lotus Notes on their wall!

What does that even mean?!

Then we received our beverages and the usual complimentary fresh chips and salsa...

While waiting for our meals to arrive, we pondered the anatomy of...

...The Horseless Head-man? on the booth behind Riley.

And then it was finally time to dig in!

Athennia and I got our customary "nachos with everything"; and, to our delight, we were able to convince Riley to opt for something a little more adventurous than her go-to chicken fingers and fries...

She tried enchiladas for the first time... and loved them!

I wish there was someone in our family who could just make these every single day.

— Riley, two bites into her dinner

We had no room left in our stomachs at all; but, that didn't stop us from ordering some churros!

Riley showed me how the meth-cartel gangsters dip down in Juarez...

I wrote a rap about it for her the next day...

We couldn't resist a quick photo shoot on our way out. For a split second, I think I felt my pronouns starting to shift!

We saw a cousin of Riley's in the parking lot!

Two days later, my mom came over so she and I could go for a walk together and catch up on things.

When I knocked on Riley's door to let her know I'd be going out for an hour or so, she motioned for me to come closer and fell into me for a big hug. The last time that happened was back in September—when Lucky escaped Taylor's custody and it seemed like he might be gone forever! So, I was naturally more than a bit concerned... even when she assured me thrice that she was okay.

I called Athennia once I was out of earshot, and I asked if Riley had reached out to her about anything so far that morning... But, Athennia assured me that everything was fine and Riley was simply expressing affection!

Well, all right then :)

I suggested to my mom that we check out Five Mile Woods just a couple miles down the road, rather than walk around a neighborhood full of low-rent people I've largely come to loathe.

I think that was a good decision!

...though my mom didn't appreciate the (inevitable) snake sighting as much as I did :)

On Saturday, Athennia and I had some errands to run. We made a quick trip to Home Depot, then stopped to grab some fresh veggies at our local produce center, and finally popped into Giant for some ice cream.

There was supposed to have been a chance of rain all day; but, coming out of Giant well into the afternoon, the sky still looked like this...

An hour later though?

We up-potted our basil, rosemary, and mint plants that were quickly outgrowing their original containers; and then it was time to start thinking about dinner.

Have I mentioned that our daughter is Mexican?

So, we thought oh, what the hell? We'll try some!

Sunday night, it was crunch time: We'd received a notice late last week that maintenance would be coming around to all the apartments to test everyone's smoke alarms... which of course meant it was time to put batteries in all our dead smoke alarms and hang them back up in their proper places (at least for a day).

Then Monday night we had salads for dinner—which would hardly be worth mentioning, except for the fact that I snapped these award-winning shots...

Tuesday morning, Athennia texted me to let me know there was an enormous wasp tormenting her in the clean room at work, and promised she would keep me posted with subsequent developments.

A short time later, she started drip-feeding me about 20 of these...

...And as a result of all her hard work, her boss called a company-wide meeting the following day and announced that merit raises were right around the corner!

There was even a helpful diagram showing... approximately how deep the toxic sludge will be for employees in various roles, I guess?

As a lead technician, Athennia will be in up to her chest. That's quite a bit of toxic sludge, and we'll be sure not to let it go to waste!

I can think of several people to whom I'd love to send toxic-sludge gift baskets. In fact, why don't we check in on some of them right now?

First we have the ever-charming downstairs neighbors: Here's the box truck they showed up with the other night at 9:50 (10 minutes before the noise ordinance)...

...And here's Shovelwhomps in her natural habitat—shouting on her phone by the guardrail just outside our bedroom window, and then having a loud conversation with Hopalong (who had to hit the road back in February after we reported the seemingly-infinite clown-car of tenants that were living downstairs; so, at least he only pops up once a month or so now)...

Here's some jackass from the neighboring building, who's apparently enough of a self-entitled cockalorum to park like this and leave his car unattended while he goes upstairs to grab his laundry...

I guess we've all been there at least once: Sometimes you just can't find an empty parking spot anywhere!

Here's our adjacent neighbor "Mrs. Douglass"—with whom I have no problem personally, because I never hear her and don't have to interact with her. But, she's kept the handicapped license plate on her dead husband's car for years now so she can park in the one handicapped spot in the entire parking lot—which I find remarkably dickish...

And finally there's this guy: The first person I've seen actually have a valid reason to park in front of the fire hydrant! (But, honestly dude; did you really have to block my neighbor's driveway while you sat there flushing the hydrant for 10 minutes?)

Like, there's a whole extra 20 feet of street between her driveway and the guard rail... And don't tell me you didn't see it, because I literally watched you !@#$%^& traverse it so that you could sit on the rail!

Thursday morning, Riley and I got a great laugh during her math class. (Not that that alone is anything new: her teacher's a total flake and several of her classmates are alarmingly innumerate.)

On this particular occasion, the teacher was showing the class how to create a box and whisker plot from a data set... Only, she hadn't seen fit to put the data points in order before she began demonstrating how to identify the minimum and maximum, the first and third quartiles, and the median...

So, two seconds into her spiel, I could see that she was going to spend five minutes confusing the class by doing the entire thing wrong.

I suggested that Riley post a message in the class chat, asking Don't you have to put the data in order first? She was afraid to do it at first, but I kept urging her. And finally she typed it out and sent it.

Now, another funny thing about this teacher is that she's never actually seen Riley's face on camera, and so she's been operating under the assumption all year that a kid named "Riley" must be a boy. (And, of course, Riley doesn't have the heart to tell her otherwise.)

So, this is an exact transcript of the teacher's reaction upon completely redoing the problem after Riley called her out for having forgotten to put the data in order first...

Riley saved the day again! He did it yesterday too.

Riley got it all done AND saved the day. He's, like, a superhero!

He's, like, guardian of the galaxy! He's like a star in the movie Guardians of the Galaxy!

He's incognito! You didn't know we had a superhero in the classroom; did you? He's dressed up as a student named Riley.

But now you know: It's really not Riley; it's really a superhero.

It was terrifically cringe-y. I've definitely got some good mileage out of it by obnoxiously quoting it every day since.