Family

What's the Damage?

Is it the age of Aquarius or something?

wintermute (Kevin)

Jun 30, 2025 • 13 min read

So, this second half of June has been filled with 90-some-degree days and some Class A bullshit. (Is there any other class of bullshit though?)

But we've been doing our best to navigate the minefield :)

💩

Then again, we're over here in Morrisville. So that isn't always easy.

The 300-Second Storm

The evening of Thursday the 19^th, we got hammered with a freak rain storm. It just kept pouring...

...and pouring.

It must've lasted five whole minutes!

It looked a little somethin' like this...

Then we got treated to this dinky rainbow out our back window...

...and a killer sunset shortly thereafter...

A Minty Fresh Reverse-Defenestration

Meanwhile the Molerat had gone to sleep over at her friend Kassie's; and when she came home Friday night she came to me with a hand-me-down laptop and a mission...

💻

"Kassie said I could have this old laptop because no one in their house has used it for like a year. But I can't get it to turn on, and I wanted to know if you can take a look at it."

😉

Absolutely, little buddy. I'll put my associate The Russian on it. He knows all kinds of crap about computers!

I got the thing to power up, and it booted into Windows 10 and prompted me for Noelle's (Kassie's mom's) password.

🤮

Ummm... that's a hard nyet.

We don't run Windows in this family.

🗑️

This calls for a reverse-defenestration!

(That's when you throw Windows out of your computer, instead of throwing your computer out the window.)

I explained to Riley that security updates for Windows 10 are going bye-bye in October and insisted that she'd be much better served by Linux...

🤔

...which is funny, since I have about a dozen unused machines sitting in cold storage at my parents' house, but Riley told me two years ago that she would rather have NO computer than a Linux computer...

😎

...to which I had said "challenge accepted," since I'm not about to give Microsoft a single cent.

But she begrudgingly relented this time and acknowledged that whatever I could do to at least make the computer usable would be better than nothing...

👧🏼

"...but hopefully I'll be able to play some games."

🕵️

Da; I are try my best, Ratmole. Now you are let Russian do what a Russian are do best—and that are to HAKE a mainframe, break a Window, and put a things Minty fresh.

Luckily I happened to be—or, I mean, the Russian happened to be wearing his Kali dragon shirt, which gives him extra hacking powers.

(He decided to set Riley up with Linux Mint—which is derived from Debian just like Kali is. So there's like... a synergy there or something.)

And, we were off!

It took me a bit to realize I had to disable Microsoft's stupid "Secure Boot" settings in the BIOS—and also to nuke the BitLocker partition on the hard drive because, for some reason, the computer didn't even want to present me the option of writing over it for some reason.

But we were banging on all cylinders soon enough...

I forgot to take a picture of the finished product; but it was... very pink.

Like, uncomfortably pink. Because I know that's what Riley likes.

I threw a bunch of apps on there for her—including Steam and a workaround to get Roblox to run (even though it doesn't run natively on Linux), and also some useful non-game tools like a guitar chord finder.

So far Riley loves it... and I'll bet the machine's running way smoother than it ever did with Windows 10 on it :)

Friendship (and Budget Cuts) in North Philly

Saturday the 21^st we drove Riley down to Nina's house for a date with Taaro.

That's always so much fun.

Here's "Friendship Street"...

🤨

A lot of words come to mind when I'm venturing into North Philly.

'Friendship' is decidedly not among them.

A few blocks further down the Boulevard, we were fortunate to get stopped at a red light—at which point we noticed a single strand of caution tape across all three of the outer lanes on which we'd been driving.

Turns out that that five-minute storm we'd had two nights before brought down a tree... and, rather than have a cleanup crew come out and spend 10 minutes taking care of it—or at least put up some actual Dorito-orange signage visible from more than three feet away—the city has apparently decided to cordon off the fallen tree with a lone strand of caution tape and leave where it lay, indefinitely.

We didn't have time to grab a pic on our way in; so snapped this on our way back *out* of the city.

🤔

Just how much fat did Trump and Musk cut? Was there that much financial waste in the North Philly Friendship and Tree-Clearing Department that those guys got the axe along with everyone else?

🪓

Sorry, kid; your DOGE was rabid: Had to put him down.

And so now the entire NPFaTCD has been replaced by a single dude: Probably some ineffective pimply-faced little schmuck named like Jimmy Doughnuts or something.

📣

DOUGHNUTS! Get down there to Friendship Street and caution off that tree that fell back in March of '07!

We got a reputation to uphold in this city! We don't need people dying in car crashes with fallen trees, when they should be dying from stray bullets or stabbings on the subway!

Sub-Urban Supper at Suburban, and Then Some

Meanwhile, my friend Joe was playing a gig over in Jersey but reached out to see if we had dinner plans later in the evening.

We did not; so we ended up meeting at Suburban Diner in Feasterville.

🤣

...where we got seated at a table directly adjacent to Joe's mom and their family friend Bunny whom I'd met countless times in the past.

After dinner we all went back to Joe's and hung out.

We also had Nina drop Riley off there later, since Riley hadn't taken her house key along with her. (Plus, having Nina come to Joe's instead of our place would shave about 20 minutes off of their drive anyway.)

Then we stayed until 12:30 A.M. before we finally decided to call it a night and head home.

Or try to.

But Byberry Road was blocked off just before the Boulevard.

So we backtracked and picked up Southampton Road instead... which was also blocked off just before the Boulevard.

So we got to backtrack again and navigate the entire BMX course of Joe's neighborhood—where, despite budgetary cuts all around the rest of the ol' US of A, Somerton's 'Speed Bumps Made from Whatever We Could Find in the City Officials' Grandparents' Garages' Department is alive and well!

💩

Seriously. It's like Gary in the mail room was having a slow week, and so his boss tasked him with stealing a bunch of milk crates from behind a Wawa and hammering them into these weird trapezoidal land mines strewn across the roadway every 15 feet.

👍

You guys should take a page out of Morrisville's playbook: Our roads are so shitty, they just sort of police themselves (as you'll see in a few paragraphs).

Dueling Thermometers

Sunday was a slow day of chores and nothingness. Then on Monday, Kitten and I played Dueling Thermometers.

First I sent her this...

...But then she checkmated me with this...

Then on her way home, she was stuck in a cattle chute on the always under construction but somehow never finished turdpike—and had no way to avoid running over something in the middle of the road.

It may or may not have been a trapezoidal milk crate. I wasn't there to see.

But, whatever it was, it tore the front panel off her car.

Pizza, Pasta, and Pothole Central

Tuesday evening we had no plan for dinner and decided to cheat and order Bambino's.

Here are way more pictures of that than are necessary, given its insignificance...

Wednesday I decided to clean up some of my 600+ open Firefox tabs.

Ordinarily that wouldn't be particularly noteworthy, except that I ripped so many YouTube videos in such a short time that their system actually flagged my IP address as a potential bot and blocked me from accessing their servers for two hours.

I must confess, I'm rather proud of that.

😲

"You're so fast, I thought you were a machine!"

😎

Damn straight. Fast as f*ck, boy!

Thursday, Kitten and I walked just over three miles after dinner.

Here's a perfect example of an average Morrisville street...

The street on the left is a main thoroughfare through the neighborhood, leading to the high school; so it hasn't been paved since the Jefferson administration.

See how the speed bumps are just kinda built right in as a natural consequence of the decision to design the road like a patchwork quilt? No milk crates needed!

Then, the street on the right is a dead-end street that goes nowhere; so they just paved that like four days ago. I have to assume that the dude who lives in that house must be the new mayor or something... because everyone else around here is also paying the highest property taxes in Bucks County, yet we're all getting shafted with surface-of-the-moon quality roads.

Then again, who wants to arrive at Morrisville High School any quicker anyway? It looks like a prison...

...and someone even wasted funds to put up a speed limit sign, despite the fact that everyone in this borough is illiterate and innumerate.

Nice.

Losing a Friend

Unfortunately, my friend Joe's dad—who was also my friend Joe—passed away on Thursday the 26^th after a lengthy battle with aggressive cancer.

Joe was one of those remarkable combinations of wisdom, and ability, and humbleness, and generosity, and eagerness to help someone in need, and an unbreakable joie de vivre that meant he always had a smile on his face, no matter what he might have been dealing with personally.

It sucks that Athennia and Riley (and Taylor) never got to know him; but I will miss him immensely, and I'm eternally grateful that I at least got to see him one last time just a couple weeks prior.

❤️

You were a hell of a dude, Joe.

Rest in peace, my friend.

What's the Damage?

Friday night, Kitten and I walked another three miles after dinner; and, when we got home, Riley was waiting for us in the kitchen with sort of an anguished expression on her face...

🙁

"Soooo... Kassie said she made a mistake in giving me that laptop, because now her sister wants to use it for something, and Brian and Noelle need to get their old photos and stuff off of it anyway.

So, like, I don't know if there's a way you can—"

🤷🏼‍♂️

"Nope. There's really not."

I nuked that hard drive to put Linux on it; so, whatever was on it before is completely gone now.

🙄

This is why those of us in IT have the old adage that data you only have one copy of is data you don't care about.

Riley was really torn up and couldn't help but feel responsible—even though she knows she isn't (and we reinforced this!).

Kassie had given her the clear impression that Riley could have the laptop, and made it seem like this was with her parents' blessing.

But we're hoping for Riley's sake that this doesn't prove to be the end of the girls' friendship: From what I've seen in the four years that I've been in the picture, Brian and Noelle are kooky enough that there's no telling whether they'll use this as some kind of last straw to decide that Kassie can't see Riley anymore.

Southampton Friendship and Tree-Clearing

On Saturday we went to my parents' for takeout for dinner.

But when we pulled in, I saw a decent-sized tree branch laying in their front yard and figured it must have come down in that same blink and you miss it storm that seems to have demolished everything else across Southeastern PA.

Oddly enough, Ron fired up his chainsaw and he and I were able to make short work of the branch in about five minutes—which just made me wonder that much more why North Philly couldn't get their shit together and send Jimmy Doughnuts out to clean up that tree across Roosevelt Blvd.

Maybe ol' Doughnuts needs a cheerleader to pull for him...

Dinner was great—although Liv was a bit muted with a tummy ache, and Steve had stayed home because he wasn't feeling great either.

Kitten got a nice pic of the tail end of the sunset back at home later that evening...

Does Harry Live Here Yet?

We checked the mail Sunday afternoon and discovered that we had received still more stupid mail from stupid New Jersey for stupid 'Harry'... who still doesn't live here, no matter how many letters the Ewing court sends with bastardized versions of our address that are so far off the mark that the postal service shouldn't even be accepting them as deliverable.

🤔

I wonder if USPS poached Jimmy Doughnuts from the North Philly Friendship and Tree-Clearing Department.

That would explain why he hasn't handled that fallen tree, and it would also account for this new low from the post office.

Kitten held the letter up to the light again and was able to read about 75% of its contents through the envelope: Apparently the Ewing court is trying to extract a whopping $100 from this guy, and he has until 03 July to cough it up before the judge either imposes financial sanctions or refers the balance to a private collection agency.

🤣

Government can't get the job done? This sounds like a job for the private sector! Let's just farm it out to a collection agency.

But, yeah; everybody keep whining about the failures of capitalism :)

At any rate, if these assclowns can't even figure out where Harry lives, I'm guessing they have no idea where he works either—that is, if he even works at all.

(Let's be honest: Chances are substantially higher that he's on food stamps and carries around his free government-issued cell phone everywhere he goes, and Uncle Scam has no problem whatsoever locating him to hand out his free gibmedats month after month.)

<sigh>

And that brings us to today—the final day of June.

Not much to report on. We had a three-minute storm late in the afternoon...

Then we had no plan for dinner; so we waited for the worst of the storm to pass, before we ventured out to Wawa for a quick bite.

And of course...

Cat Pics!

Here's Penny, declaring that the heat wave had officially arrived...

Okay, quick! Everyone into the ice cave!

But Penny has little tolerance for the boys and their antics; so it wasn't long before she gazed out the window to make the call that the heat wave was over and everyone could piss back off to wherever they had come from...

'Cause she's the queen of this ice cave, and she likes it quiet and desolate...

So Odin went back to the living room...

And Lucky went back... into storage?

And it wasn't long before the boys started plotting to overthrow the ice cave's monarchy...

Little did they know that Penny listened in on the entire plot from the other side of the door; so she already knew that Odin is a spy before he even came back into the cave...