We Come Bearing Gifts...

Last Sunday we headed over to my parents' house to harvest some tomatoes, peppers, and herbs from our garden—and because my dad was grilling up some London broil for dinner.

Naturally, we had just about more produce than we could carry; so when we got home later that evening, we had a pretty hefty bag full for Jeff and Lillian, and another for our new neighbors whom we were yet to meet.

Alas, the new neighbors weren't here when we arrived—and it's easy enough to tell whether they're here or away, because they're the only ones keen on insuring a white Mercedes here in the cesspool of L'il Trenton ;)

But, we stayed and talked with Jeff and Lillian in the stairwell; and the new neighbors returned home a few minutes later.

His name is Keith.

Hers? We have no idea, because she's from the Dominican Republic and has an accent so thick that we didn't catch a piece of her name even when we asked her to repeat it.

But they seemed genuinely friendly, and they were very appreciative of the vegetables; so perhaps we'll at least have a modicum of mutual respect that the old downstairs neighbors lacked the intellect and the ethics to muster.

Fingers crossed.

I headed back over to my parents' house on Thursday because we had some mail arrive there...

I opened and inspected Athennia's birthday present before repackaging it in a gift bag; and Riley had received her school books and supplies for the year—which I knew she must be positively stoked to tear into, just like every teenager across America.

"Presents for both of you," I texted them. "But Kitten, you have to wait until Sunday to open yours. The molerat gets to open hers right away."

There were some presents for me as well though...

Late last week Athennia's company was throwing away some tech, which I was more than happy to inherit.

They'd ripped out and destroyed the hard drives for security purposes; but what was left over were four Lenovo ThinkCentre machines—which are full-fledged PCs built right into the back of the monitors.

So, it was time for Linux to save the day, as always...

All in all, there's basically nothing wrong with these machines. The first one threw a fan-failure error—which is like dropping your car off at the dump just because it needs new windshield wipers—and the other three were fine.

Four gigabytes of RAM is admittedly pretty weak for 2024; but that's a trivial upgrade—especially considering that I can pop two of those modules out and stick them in the other two machines to double their memory, and then I'll only need to buy new memory for two machines instead of four (maybe even going up to 16GB instead of just 8GB).

And a few SSDs to replace the hard drives, of course.

But for $150 or so, I can turn these into four perfectly capable systems and give them to people who could benefit from them—like maybe my nieces.

On Friday I decided to whip up a batch of meatballs, since Athennia and I haven't made any in well over a year (after we played them out for months on end back when we first met).

I mixed them up and left them to marinate, then enlisted Riley's help in rolling them out.

Forgot to get pictures; but it was nice to surprise Kitten with the fact that dinner was already taken care of when she got home from work :)

So yesterday morning, she surprised us with breakfast from Dunkin...

Later yesterday afternoon, Kitten realized that maybe putting the laundry soap directly behind her front passenger seat (which I keep all the way back) wasn't the best idea...

...and now she's driving around looking like an inept cocaine dealer until we get a chance to clean this mess up.

Kitten heard our neighbor Ditz's young son commenting on a rainbow outside, so we went out to check it out for ourselves...

For dinner we joined forces to whip up a breakfast casserole together, which turned out phenomenally...

A tater-tot base, a dozen eggs, and all the sausage, tomato, pepper, and onion we had on hand...

Then late last night, Kitten and I started watching Black Sails—which is intended as a loose sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novel Treasure Island.

And finally, I snapped this picture in our parking lot this morning with the intention of mocking this little slogan...

...but I've since had a change of heart, and I'd like to recommend that more businesses adopt this advertising style:

Your three-year-old is smart. We're smarter!

— pre-school teacher

The trash on the ground is smart. I'm smarter!

— mall food-court janitor

Hemorrhoids are smart. I'm smarter!

— proctologist

I daresay the converse is often true as well...

The power grid is simplistic and unreliable. We're MORE simplistic and unreliable!

— PECO

The mail is slow and 99% useless. We're slower and 100% useless!

— the U.S. Postal Service