Worst Quinceañera Ever!

Athennia kicked off the new month (and the new year) with some spring cleaning—and finally tackled, among other things, her long-neglected bookshelf in our bedroom.

Sooooo, I guess now I'll need to do mine one of these days...

Then on Sunday evening we headed over to my parents' for an early Molerat Quinceañera, since Riley's 0.002% Mexican... and would, in another few days, be 0.002% of the way to age 7,500.

Riley loves pink—or rosado, as we say in Español—so, Athennia kind of ran with that...

And, since it was her day, I figured I'd try out her patented "don't let the camera see the bottom half of your face under any circumstances" routine...

Then it was time for cake!

Have you ever noticed how every new toothpaste that comes onto the market seems to have the same 90% recommendation rate?

Then there's that 10^th guy that's just like, "No."

Well, tonight, that 10^th guy was Liv:

She was told not to try to blow out Riley's candles when the time came. And, I'll be damned if that didn't just ruin her entire year...

There's no time like the present—especially when there are presents.

So, Riley got started...

The first one was a reifilpma ratiug!

No, wait... a guitar amplifier!

Then, next up...

...was...

...a Tupac Shakur album; eh?

Okay; what's next? What's next?

Guess this next one will probably be a TR-808 drum machine or some turntables, so that l'il Onepack Splenda here can start makin' some beats of her own.

Let's find out...

It was...

...a guitar effects pedal?!

What in the world will you need that for, Molerat? What are you, starting a rap-metal band called Shrimp Brisket, or what?

At any rate, my mom didn't even know what an effects pedal was; so here's a quick pic from a few days later when I helped Riley hook everything up...

Finally, it was time for the "cards and cash" phase...

...and then, just like that, the quinceañera was over as quickly as it started.

In other news, Kitten and I have adopted a tradition where we argue about the "correct" temperature of the bedroom every night.

Kitten will see something like this...

...and try to use it as ammunition to insist that it's "too cold."

But, what she doesn't like to acknowledge is that it's only 46 degrees right there at the window—and precisely the intersection you'd expect, between the 22-degree outdoor temperature and the 70-degree indoor temperature.

Furthermore, she has a thermometer on the shelf under our television midway across the room: It was one of a two-pack of refrigerator thermometers, and so it depicts (rather fittingly) anything above 40 degrees as being in the danger zone...

...See? Anything above 40 and you can kiss your ass goodbye, because you're probably on fire.

So, from what I can tell, I'm sitting rather precariously over here under the window at 39 degrees... just a single degree away from this place turning into Chernobyl!

And Kitten, sitting directly in front of the television? She may as well be walking into Mordor.

But anyway, I keep the fan on auto mode and have it turn on anytime the temperature rises above 70 when Kitten's home, or above 60 otherwise.

So, from time to time, it'll come on at night while we're watching TV; and I'll usually try to move my office chair so that I'm directly between Kitten and the fan to hopefully block some of the cold air from hitting her.

And then she'll complain that it's not making any difference; so I'll turn my chair sideways so that the entire chairback is also between her and the fan.

But, the other night, she whined that even this was not enough.

So, I tried putting my hands up next to either side of my head to make myself an even more effective barrier...

...to which she responded by sending me a picture of Mork saying "Nanu Nanu!"

So, I slid my chair clear out of the way of the fan and told Kitten, "Guess who can freeze then? Yeah, you; yeah, you!"

On Monday we got two inches of snow, which was the perfect amount: Just enough to keep the thugs inside, but not enough to be a pain in the ass otherwise.

I'm dreamin'... of a white guard rail. Just like the ones I used to know.

—Notorious B.I.N.G.

Taylor and Ahlina called that evening, distraught over their realization that Ahlina's mom—who has always been a special kind of winner in one way or another—had fraudulently opened lines of credit in Ahlina's and her sister's names and completely tanked their credit scores.

Worse still, the girls have virtually no ability to verify their identities with the credit bureaus to begin the process of rectifying the issue, because Ahlina's mom has all the relevant mail being sent to her address instead of theirs.

So, Athennia had to kind of drill it into their heads that they needed to consider going to the police, and they needed to make their peace with the fact that Ahlina's mom might go to jail... and that if she does, it's her own damn fault!

Also, the girls are sick with Influenza A and have such bad coughs that they're coughing up blood. But they've got bills to pay (and shit credit in Ahlina's case); so they're too afraid to call out of work and risk losing their jobs and their ability to pay their rent.

Wednesday night Athennia made barbecue chicken, mashed potatoes, and broccoli for dinner.

Aaaaand that's basically the entire story; but apparently we got pictures of it. So, here...

Meanwhile, Amazon had sent Athennia a copy of a book she had ordered NEW. But they delivered it in a plastic mailer instead of in a box; so the spine and the cover were all beat up.

She was just going to let it go, but I insisted that she hold them to their guns and demand a NEW copy like she had paid for.

It was about 8:30 in the evening, and Amazon's customer service directed us to bring the book to our local Amazon Fresh store by 10:00 P.M.

What a crock of shit! What, like, if we didn't get it there within 90 minutes, they wouldn't have accepted the return?

But the store is only maybe eight minutes down the road; so we hopped in the car and drove over to the store. Naturally I stayed in the car: I'd never voluntarily venture anywhere that has as many cameras per square foot as an Amazon Fresh store does.

But when we got back home, Athennia pointed out that we should probably check the mailbox since it had been a few days since either of us had last bothered to do so.

I grabbed the backlog of crap from our box and dumped it on the kitchen table for her to sort through when we got upstairs: I just recently had myself officially added to the lease here back in October or something; so I rarely have much of anything arriving here in my name yet.

But as I was walking away to come back to my computer, she called me back when she found something for me.

Becky's been sending my parents a Christmas card for the past few years; so I just figured that since my Aunt Jill had seen the rest of my dad's family at Thanksgiving, she had probably shown them the thank-you letter Athennia and I sent her and Uncle Terry after our visit back in November—in which I had mentioned that it was good to hear they were all doing well.

I assumed Becky had just grabbed my address off the letter and was sending me a belated Christmas card as well.

And I was correct... but there was also a handwritten note as well :)

It turns out that her sons play lacrosse and have away games over this way from time to time; and so we're going to try to meet up somewhere "in the middle" one of these weeks or months. Hopefully in February :)

Toward the end of the week, our little Molerat officially turned 15 (now that she'd already had her big birthday bash days before).

Her boyfriend Taaro and his dad Kenny stopped by the apartment yesterday afternoon to surprise her and drop off her birthday presents.

She was in the middle of math class, so she was totally blindsided by it; but she definitely enjoyed getting to see Taaro in person. (The distance between us and Kenny and Nina makes face-to-face hangouts rarer than we'd like).

When dinner rolled around, Riley wanted Domino's; and then Athennia dangled the carrot of ice cream at Friendly's for dessert.

Any time someone tempts me with a peanut butter cup sundae from Friendly's, I basically turn into Napoleon Bonaparte from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure...

To the Molerat's chagrin, I insisted that we get some pictures. That went pretty much as you can imagine by now...

Today I had some outlining I wanted to do on a series of short stories I'm working on; but then I switched over to starting a letter back to Becky:

We have a busy weekend ahead of us and I know I won't have the time I'd like to dedicate to my response. But I would definitely like to get back in touch! It has been way too long.