Marlee and Me

Ken came over yesterday with his pal Allen, and spent the better part of six hours obsessively washing and cleaning all of the cars he’s keeping in our driveway. (He snaked a power cord in through our dining room window, and “borrowed” our electricity to run a power washer.)

This led to two important developments:

1) When he knocked on the door at 8pm and ordered it, I refused to make Ken coffee. (I am woman, hear me roar.)

2) The RV is finally gone!

Ok, sure… His other three cars are still in the driveway. But, I’ll take progress where I can get it.

Matt and I also made one other interesting discovery: Ken might actually be deaf. We noticed yesterday that he was wearing hearing aids in both ears, and that whenever he couldn’t see us talking to him, he couldn’t hear a word. Either he's getting really good at ignoring us, or he might be doing a fair amount of lip reading.

It explains a lot, really. I wondered why he talked so loudly, and why he was so hard to understand. I just thought he had a really thick Cumbrian accent. But now, I’m realizing that he might sound the way he sounds because he’s British and deaf.

Don’t get me wrong… He’s still seriously odd. But if he is deaf, I actually feel badly that I didn’t notice sooner. It’d be like a British person coming to America, meeting Marlee Matlin, and thinking, “Wow… American accents sure are hard to understand!”