Where Angels Fear to Tread

"Previously on the KARTography..."

We sent last month's newsletter out two days early; so, of course we ended up doing all kinds of cool stuff in the final hours of March—with nowhere to tell you about it except for right here.

First, we found ourselves in a pinch for dinner Thursday night; and, since it had been two whole weeks since we called Bambino's out on their shrinkflation and insisted we were in no hurry to come back any time soon, we naturally felt that the most sensible thing to do was order a couple pizzas... from Bambino's. (And, with that being pretty much the whole story, it's really not all that interesting at all, now that I think about it. You should probably go ahead and un-read this entire paragraph.)

After dinner, Athennia and I rented Snowden—which I'd been curious but on the fence about watching ever since it came out in 2016: It has an all-star cast with a lot of actors whose work I've enjoyed; but, at the same time, Edward Snowden's revelations in the real world were a topic with which I became very deeply familiar in 2013 and the years following, and I didn't imagine a Hollywood film would come anywhere close to doing any justice to Ed as a person, to the sacrifice he made in forfeiting life as he knew it to blow the whistle, or to actual meaningful coverage of the magnitude of the U.S. government's atrocities—meaning that I just sort of "softly boycotted" the film and never went out of my way to see it for the last seven years.

All in all, it was an okay flick. I enjoyed the performances—particularly Joseph Gordon-Levitt's (accurate) portrayal of Ed as a humble genius conflicted from the very beginning about the blatant corruption and overreach running rampant through the intelligence community... and the firsthand education he received in how "patriotism" is rarely anything beyond a cheap, myopic soy-milk knockoff of humanitarianism.

At the same time, if I hadn't already known the actual history of events going into the film, I wouldn't have had much of an idea who anybody else in the story was supposed to be (much less why I should care). So, I'd still recommend watching Laura Poitras's actual documentary Citizenfour instead. Or, better yet, grab yourself a copy of Snowden's book Permanent Record, which is superbly written, wildly entertaining, and remarkably accessible despite its subject matter.

Friday night, Athennia, Riley and I started watching Breaking Bad together.

Although I recommended the show to Athennia in the early months of our relationship, it was at Riley's request that we decided to start it now. (I suppose the girl with a gateway pot blanket eventually graduates to cooking meth by proxy... and sooner rather than later; right?)

So, Riley got cozy by cocooning herself under every stuffed animal on our sofa; then we set the living room lights to Breaking Bad colors, and I fired up the pilot episode on my HTPC...

April Fools

As far as we can tell, April Fool's Day lasted two days (and counting) this year. And, be warned: this is a long list... complete with drunks, cops, snakes, weathermen, and a handful of randos (with a combined IQ of about nine) in between.

But, who else could start the list besides the molerat?

We had just kicked April off with a delicious and nutritious (well... one of the two, at least) breakfast of cinnamon rolls and coffee, when I got "Sad Sweet Heart of the Rodeo" (by Harvey Danger) stuck in my head. I had Athennia pull it up on her phone to see if she knew it, and Riley commented that it sounded like "grandpa music."

After pointing out that I technically won't be a "grandpa" until Riley has kids—which will be never, according to her—I asked Athennia about another song...

Do you know the song 'Riley Smells Like Cheese'?

By Easy Cheesy and the Breezers?

I believe it's written in the key of C...

...for cheese.

The molerat had nothing to say to that. She just squinted at me with disdain... which meant my work here was done ;)

Next up, we had our old buddy with the Jeep Cherokee show up a bit later in the morning.

Cherkoff seems to have a quota of at least four show-ups per week these days; so, he was right on schedule...

Is the No Parking zone in front of a fire hydrant a good place to de-IKEA my crappy Jeep for the fifth time in 72 hours?

Ahhhhhh, yeah; I might as well: I've already had my crappy pickup illegally parked here since Thanksgiving. And, look at me: I'm SO jazzed about it, I'm sitting in that bizarre way that two-year-olds sit when they watch television: All I need's my Winnie the Pooh sippy-cup and some Dunkaroos, and I am in absolute paradise!

Thank God nobody has stolen the supplies out of my truck all these months, because Squirrely Pete and I are still planning to build our tree fort one of these days! It's gonna have TWO tire swings, a Dixie-cup phone system with call waiting, and a secret handshake so complex that even WE won't remember it. NO GIRLS ALLOWED!

(No problem, buddy. No problem. I'm quite sure girls will never be an issue for you.)

Later Saturday afternoon, we dropped Riley off at her friend Kassie's birthday party, and then Athennia and I headed over to Newtown to have dinner at Marco's Pizzeria with my sister...

Athennia wasn't 100% smiling yet in this one, but Kelly was blinking in the next. <shrug>

"They" (the omniscient they) had been calling for thunderstorms later in the evening; and, after watching a beautiful cloudless sky all through dinner, I saw the edge of the nimbus finally coast in just as we were about to leave.

Three minutes later, it looked like armageddon; and another five after that, it was total chaos.

But, since Riley was at Kassie's for the night, Athennia and I had already decided to follow Kelly back to my parents' to visit and get to see Liv and Hannah for a bit.

We were still about six minutes out when Athennia's phone went haywire with a tornado alert. (But not my phone, because spam is spam... is spam... is SPAM! And I block that crap religiously, even from people who claim to be experts in anything at all.)

Get off the road immediately, "they" insisted, and go hide in your basement forever! Don't forget to wear two masks and get the tornado vaxx and all seven boosters, too!

Right.

I'll bet it's that no-good Putin again, too! Right?

Hold on while we take our iodine capsules and scramble to the bunker.

Sure thing.

Needless to say, we kept right on driving... and we got to my parents' house perfectly safely (save for almost getting hit head-on by some jackass who thought he would pass two cars at the same time, on an incline, during a downpour with zero visibility).

Once we arrived at my parents', we had to get blasted with still more hyped-up insistence that this time it was a really-real tornado that was totally going to manifest and prove—on April Fool's Day, of all days—that the National Weather Service doesn't just blow this same smoke up everyone's ass every time there happens to be a cloud in the sky.

I asked Hannah if she finds the NWS credible in any capacity. She just kind of giggled for a second...

Then I think Liv did some kind of abra-cadabra magic trick to make the tornado disappear while nobody was looking...

The storm rolled through quickly enough, spawning a number of tornadoes all around us. (Unsurprisingly, that number was zero.)

Then Athennia and I headed home shortly thereafter.

At first glance, I thought it had snowed at the apartment. But on closer inspection, it turned out it was hail—mostly the size of marbles, but some as big as grapes...

Also, our particular building was the only one in the whole complex (and the general area at large) that had lost power. So, we went upstairs to check on the cats and get them some dinner; and then we headed back out to Athennia's car and started watching Ready Player One on her phone.

Remarkably, PECO restored the power inside of an hour—which has to be some kind of world record for them.

And so, we headed back inside to finish the movie on a big screen; and everything was going great until...

A commotion just outside our bedroom window?

Someone taking the opportunity to hang out on the vacant guard rail during one of Cherkoff's rare absences.

It was a true gangster!

Think DMX, back from the dead.

...Drunk off his ass and screaming into his cell phone about—I don't even remember the phrasing—the cap he was going to pop in someone's ass, or some shit...

...At the top of his lungs...

...At 11:30 at night.

Eleven. !@#$%^&. Thirty.

I'll spare you the colorful dialogue we shared... because this is a family blog, and our conversation was laden with enough profanity that it could've been a deleted scene from Pulp Fiction. But, long story short, I finally reached the end of my tether with this endless cast of shadeballs and their blatant disregard for the dozens of people whom their antics affect.

And I snapped.

So, with middle-shool history teaching me that "speak softly and carry a big stick" was considered a perfectly valid form of diplomacy in its time, I changed out of my pajamas, put my shoes back on, grabbed my baseball bat, and made it to the front door before Athennia relented and dialed the non-emergency police number (which she had insisted minutes earlier was pointless, because they wouldn't care enough to do anything).

(Welp... guess that's yet another difference between me and the police: I do!)

Of course, we had by then exchanged enough dialogue with DMX that he had made a few super-scary gangster threats at us—which Athennia was able to quote to the dispatcher and spur on a quicker police response ;)

But alas, we had also already bluffed and told DMX a good five or six minutes beforehand that we were calling the police; and so, he had taken to staggering away by then (down the middle of the street of course, as you do).

So, the police came—and in a relatively timely fashion, I'll concede...

...but DMX was long gone. Probably sleeping it off in a ditch somewhere by then. Perhaps never to awaken again? (Doubtful: I'm not that lucky.)

April 2... Fools, Round 2

Having been fully convinced I might end up in a fight to the death while asserting my natural right to be left alone by punk-ass, drunk-ass little shit-nuggets, I was a tad too adrenalized to simply lay down and expect to fall asleep; so, needless to say, I did not sleep well at all (even after I did finally fall asleep—only to wake up immediately wired again when Penny decided to walk across my pillow at the crack of dawn).

Athennia said she'd get started on breakfast, and surprised me with French toast instead of our usual breakfast sandwiches...

Then Kassie's mom brought Riley back around noon, and we got ready for the day of hiking we'd been looking forward to all week!

'Wicki-pedia

We hadn't been to Playwicki Park since early September, and I only got to show Athennia and Riley a small fraction of it because it had been hot and the park was overgrown back in the summer.

But, even though Dark Hollow is "the Playwicki of my adult life," Playwicki was the Playwicki of my childhood; and I had long been looking forward to sharing it with kitten and the molerat.

We decided to skip the rock beach by the bridge just inside the park entrance where everyone goes, and we headed right for the woods...

That turned out to be a good call: The water wasn't quite full-blown coffee, but the storm had churned everything up enough to be pretty unappealing nonetheless.

Call it decaf, I guess...

And, as we found out on our way out, the rock beach was presently underwater anyway! Here's a comparison against how it looked back in September...

Riley's eyes lit up when we came to the ridge path just inside the start of the woods: It's this cool natural causeway that runs right along the creek, and I've always been pretty mesmerized by it as well...

The mud wasn't quite as bad as even a dry day at Dark Hollow, but things were definitely a bit treacherous in places...

It occurred to me that The Little Tornado That Couldn't might be hiding out in the woods somewhere—just munching on some potato chips and waiting to ambush some unsuspecting rubes he could pick up and fling into a tree at 300 miles per hour...

But, whatever: There would three of us and one of him, and I almost fought DMX last night! So, it was time to cross the Rube-icon.

Let's go!

The park is bounded by the creek on one side and a disused railroad track on the other; so, you're pretty much just traveling in the same direction the entire time...

Riley tends not to take too many photos; but, she captured these four that I thought were pretty awesome...

Every now and then we came to one of the streams that run under the old train tracks, and we'd spend a few minutes looking for cool rocks...

Riley provided an ongoing litany of excuses the entire time of why she couldn't possibly go another step (and we should turn around so she could play on the playground next to the parking lot instead).

In the space of  just three or four miles, she claimed to have sprained three ankles, contracted scoliosis, felt her internal organs shutting down, and broke at least one toe.

But miraculously, she was able to walk all of these off without lasting damage...

And, when I dug out a really cool chunk of quartz that probably weighed four or five pounds, she insisted she would carry it all the way back to the car for $11. (That was a tremendous deal, which I would've accepted in a heartbeat if I thought there was any chance in hell a scoliotic molerat could lug five pounds several miles through the woods with a broken toe. I just didn't like my odds all that much.)

Eventually we came to a rocky shore that was actually still above water...

Even the muddy water was beautiful in its own way...

Then it was time to keep moving. I told Athennia and Riley it looked like we would have to cross this log...

...which I totally would have done, 20 years ago.

But, pushing 40 and out of shape from an entire winter of doing nothing? Let's be honest: That was an April Fool's joke!

We found another way around...

All in all, we encountered a decent amount of wildlife—starting with a bee who hitched a ride on Riley's jacket for a good 10 minutes or so...

Then some duck-duck-geese...

A total of five snakes—a new record (all garter snakes, thankfully)...

And finally, a deer—albeit in "past tense"...

About two hours in by now, and despite all her promises, Riley still hadn't dropped dead. And so, we made it to another mature section of the forest, where things were nice and open again...

I found a cool stone that was almost glowing in the dark. Riley quoted me $46 to have her dig it up and carry it several miles back to the car...

The path ahead looked inviting; but, I knew from experience that there wasn't much of anything worthwhile left to see—at least on this side of the train tracks.

(The other side is technically private property, which I haven't been on since practically my teenage years. But there's certainly some interesting stuff over there! Here are a couple pics from 2005 with my old friend Kenn-with-two-Ns...)

Anyway. we could already hear the traffic from Rt. 413 in Langhorne, and a quick glance at the map confirmed how close we were...

...So, we decided to turn around and start the long trek back to the car.

Athennia got a lot of artsy shots, as always...

Post-wicki

We went home through Langhorne and Fairless Hills, which allowed me to call out this monstrosity. (I've been waiting quite some time. Well over a year!)

What kind of perception problems did this line-painter have?

That wasn't even the worst part of the intersection though. I looked to our left and spotted by far the biggest April fool of all!

Great way to sit in a car!

I guess, on the plus side, the air bag will push your knees through your skull so quickly you won't even feel it. So, there's that.

We arrived home to grab some dinner (and showers), and then watched two episodes of Breaking Bad.

Then, just before bed, Athennia told me that Riley and Lucky were on a stakeout...

I thought perhaps DMX had returned with thoughts of vengeance; but, it turned out it was just DSH.

...As in domestic short-hair.

...As in, a stray cat that Lucky had happened to spot outside.

Hey, cats are clean and quiet and keep to themselves. I have no problem at all with any cat who wants to hang out underneath our window :)

And that brings us to today...

Another Monday.

A nice, quiet weekday when most people are out at work, and I can focus and get some work done too.

But imagine my surprise when Hydrant Hal pulled up just before noon and popped his hood to do an oil change right in front of the fire hydrant.

Okay. Bit of a dick move, but whatever. I was sure he'd be done and go away soon enough.

Except, then the bluetooth speaker came out.

And the loud music started.

And after tweaking a few things under the hood, he couldn't get his vehicle started again; so, he had to phone a friend.

And rather than turn the music down in order to converse with each other, they just shouted over it for the next half hour...

Realistically, what are my options in these situations?

If I ask them nicely to stop and they decide they don't feel like it, I've only managed to out myself as the complainer and painted a target on my back.

And yet, I don't imagine that going down and appearing on numerous cameras with a baseball bat in my hands—however satisfying in the moment—is a viable long-term strategy either.

So, am I helpless but to just put up with it?

Nope! Not playing this game anymore.

I pride myself on being FAR more reluctant than most to summon a goon with a gun and a license to kill in his or her sole discretion; but, guess what, boys?

This is happening!

From what I could see, it looked like the cop just told them to clear out and (hopefully) not do this again. No fines. No arrests. No kneeling on anyone's neck for the better part of an hour.

But I got my peace and quiet back; so, I was totally okay with that. Let's hope it starts to stick one of these days!