I’ve got soooo much to write about!

The kids that get off the school bus weren’t as rude today. Yesterday, they ran around our yard and driveway for a while before going home.

Yesterday, Tom got his new hard drive (a replacement for the one that went corrupt on us) and Giselle came! We were surprised she came on a Monday, too. She’s beautiful and kind of tall. I was right about her face and waist being smaller than Maria’s and Bailey’s, but she’s not as skinny as Summer Dream. The women dolls tend to be thinner, cuz they don’t have the baby fat that the little girls have.

I was gonna keep the second one we ordered, but then I decided I didn’t want twins, so Tom called to stop her from being sent, but she’s already on her way. We’ll send her back. Then Tom’s gonna ask that they reimburse us for the postage, sure that we’ll get a discount from them on our next purchase. There are three doll shows on Thursday that I’m gonna watch.

I can’t believe I’ve gotten ten dolls in just five and a half months! This isn’t counting the Barbies, of course.

Anyway, her dress is beautiful. It’s blue satin with pearls and pearl sequins that shimmer across the bodice and waist. She has a layer of white lace over the skirt, and the feathers in her hair, which would be very hard to get out, look nice after all. I’ve kept her hair up. She has long curls at the sides, and then she has a pile of curls on her head in a ponytail. I’ve kept it up cuz it looks better this way. Besides, the hair that’s up isn’t as long as the side pieces that are down, so it’d look funny down. I have enough dolls with long flowing hair anyway, and the way her hair is suits her best, just as with Summer Dream who also has curls gathered up on her head. She came with a pearl bracelet and necklace.

I took her outside so I wouldn’t have to use the flash, and I took a full-bodied picture of her, as well as a face shot. I’ll send a copy to show Tammy and the girls and keep it on the computer. I did something really cool which I want to do with all my dolls. I want to put a face shot and a full shot on a screen-size page within Windraw and put a watermark background with their names. I did this for Bailey and Giselle and it’s really cool. You can pick the spacing, the font, the size, the color of the text, the background color, etc. I probably won’t do this for Anne and Edie, though. They look so good side by side, that I’ll just take one picture of them together.

It’s getting harder to decide who’s got the best dress. I’d have to say the best dress is still on Summer Dream. I bought her primarily for her dress. Giselle has an OK face and OK hair, so I’d say I mostly got her for her pose and dress. She does have nice vivid blue eyes, even if they’re not very realistic looking. The detail on this doll and her dress is amazing for just $50. She has detailed separated fingers. Not Maria. And she was $60. Maybe that’s cuz you weren’t meant to see Maria’s hands like you are with Giselle.

Our weather, which had gotten a bit summery, has cooled down once again and it even drizzled today. Typical early week weather.

Yesterday, the UT pain crept back up on me, although faintly. I got some more cranberry juice and today - I’m pain-free. Once again, though, I just swapped. I swapped back from having better lungs and UT pain, to not having UT pain and tighter lungs. Yeah, my lungs were slightly tight today. That could very well be due to the weather, so I’m not gonna worry about it at this point, but I’ll still call and report tomorrow to the doctor.

Later...

Got a weird message from Evie saying she lost her voice. She says it’s on its way back and asked if I’ve had that happen to me and that if I have any advice for her, she’ll take it. It was kind of funny. I mean, I’m sorry she had to go through this, but what was funny was how she asked if I’d lost my voice. That’ll be the day! Not with how loud and strong my voice is. And do I have any advice for her on how to get her voice back? Nope. Just how to strengthen and shape it up (singing).

Marla left me a message asking for Eric’s girlfriend’s name and number, which I asked Andy for and he gave it to me right away.

Tom said she’s right about manufactured homes going down in value. However, we don’t intend to sell it, so it doesn’t matter.

I nearly burst out laughing when Marla asked if Andy really was sick or if he just hated the job. I just talked to him a while ago. Today’s the day he said he’d go back, but sure enough, and as I guessed, he was home when I called him. He said he was sick from nerves which he couldn’t help, and I thought to myself, No you’re not. You just hate your job and don’t want to work. Then, sure enough, he said he hated his job. I knew it. I just knew it. I spared him the lectures though, about getting out and working so he can live, cuz it’s his life. I can’t tell him what to do. I wonder, though, just how long he’s gonna keep this up. He’s alone now and has to pay the bills himself. His part-time dealing may give him free pot and cigarettes, but how’s he gonna pay his rent and bills working just a few hours a week? How can he expect to sit at home and eat all day, watch TV and talk on the phone, and still be able to survive?

As usual, he had to stuff his face while we were on the phone, which is so gross and distracting to me. It makes it so hard to keep up with him cuz then he talks intermittently in broken sentences and it’s so boring. He claims that that’s the first thing he ate all day. Oh, yeah, right! And it just had to be when he was talking to me. How convenient that he happened to feel such a need for his first bite of food when he got on the phone with me. Some people are so selfish! That was not the first thing he ate all day. I guarantee it.

Trying to talk to tell him my exciting news wasn’t easy. He can’t sit and listen. He has to ramble on and on and believe me when I say it’s hard to butt in! As usual, he had to be negative and bring up all kinds of what-ifs. He can never just be happy for someone and not question it.

Yesterday we checked out these huge, gorgeous, modern manufactured homes! The original idea was to get a simple house, then build our dream house, but what I saw was our dream house. Nothing’s sure yet, we didn’t actually pick one out and put the 5% down on it, but we got some info., some figures, and we are gonna shoot for this one that’s 79 G’s, 2,153 square feet, w/ 4 bedrooms. You can’t get one with just two bedrooms or just one bath! We could use bedroom 2 as a guest room, bedroom 3 for his computer and a little TV for him, and bedroom 4 for my computer, my stereo, and my exercise equipment. Then there’s a huge kitchen, a dining room, a living room, and a family room. The family room can be a project room (doll making, etc.).

The bathrooms were pretty nice. The master bath had a big oval tub at one end of it, and a shower stall at the other. The other bathroom didn’t have just a sink and toilet. It had a tub too, but just a tub, so we’ll have to tell them to put a shower in it. Tom can mostly use this bathroom and I can mostly use the master bathroom unless I have to pee and am in the living room or near that bathroom. Tom will pretty much use the two bedrooms at the end of the house, and I’ll use the one closest to the living room and I’ll use the family room, too. I don’t know what the difference between the family room and the living room is. The living room’s slightly larger, but they’re just rooms. An option is to make the family room a fifth bedroom and wall off that room in a way that’ll add a hallway leading to that room, the master bedroom, and the utility area, but I’m not sure we’d want to do that.

Our plan was to be out of here in June but the catch is that we may not be able to get out till July or August. It figures, huh? Everything always takes longer than expected, but I’d rather wait and do it right if I have to. I just hope that if we don’t get out by June, it’s only an 8-or-so-week delay and not an 18-week delay. The reason we’re thinking July or August is that although it only takes 4 days to put the house together, we have to wait 9 weeks, cuz then we have to pick out the land, sell this house (we’re gonna ask 79 G’s so we’re not stuck here forever even though it’s worth more), then they have to get permits and line up a driver to drive it to the land we pick out (it’s a triple-wide that they move in pieces) and then they join the wall seams, put the carpet down, etc. We’re hoping to find land that’s already prepped with a phone, plumbing, and electricity which shouldn’t be a problem. Even the smallest one they’ve got is bigger than this house and blows your average house away with its ultramodern, unique layout. The one we want is like a maze and I got lost in it at first! I love the Spanish arcs in it (maybe Bailey would like nice sitting in one) and the frosted skylight in the kitchen. A cookie-cutter house would be cheaper and cost around 50 G’s, but then I wouldn’t be able to have the fun of choosing my own options. There are so many too, ($8,000 worth) and it can take hours just to do that and it’s all included. Appliances come with the place, then you get to pick out your color carpet, draperies, etc.

The further out you go from the city, the cheaper land is. However, we don’t want to go too far cuz he still has to work here.

Anyway, we’ll move this summer if all goes as planned, but we can’t move till we sell this house. We don’t want to be strapped with two mortgages. This house we saw really makes this one look sick. This house is 1400 square feet (maybe 1200 not counting the garage). Not a shoebox, but it’s still an old, dumpy-looking place (built in 1950) and it’s too small for our tastes cuz we both love space and we have a lot of stuff and so many hobbies that need the room.

After moving, we’ll put a wall around the house for more privacy, even though we’ll be pretty secluded compared to where we are now (the wall will also keep out coyotes and javelinas, I hope!) and then we’ll add a pool. The pool is a lower priority and if we have to wait a while on that, fine, cuz there are other ways to cool off. We can run through sprinklers and hold hoses over our heads, and as small as I am, I can fit in a kiddy pool. Tom, who loves basketball, will also want to put a hoop somewhere, and maybe we’ll put in a slab of concrete for me to skate on.

The different options are pretty neat. For example, you can have a closet fill up part of a bedroom wall and have a little sitting area next to it. Or you can replace the sitting area with additional closet space so that that whole wall is a closet. That’s what I’d do. I also don’t see a need for two sinks in the master bathroom. For us, it’s just a waste of time, money, and counter space, but I think that’s standard for the model we want. Hey, I’ll take it over leaky roofs! I wonder if they have water softeners as an option. I hope so. That’s a must. I hate the taste of the unfiltered water here and how it leaves water spots on things. It’d be nice to have a trash compactor, too.

The house has no AC, which is a bit of a con, but one we can live with. The windows here aren’t very openable for airing the place out when we bomb, use shitty-smelling chemicals, etc., cuz the few windows we have are either bolted shut or don’t open at all. But there are plenty of openable windows there, and since I don’t smoke, it’ll be OK. Just a bit costlier, so we’ll have to watch it. I’ll dress warmly in the winter and go practically naked in the summer. It doesn’t have an attic, so that’s why we couldn’t put a cooler in. We’d also have to string cable wires and shit like that outside the house. Tom can do that kind of thing, though.

Andy was saying that something about manufactured homes always bugged him and that he wondered why they were so low in cost, and that they were the first houses to blow away in storms. First of all, the house is made just like a regular house, and it’ll look just like a regular house that was built right where we put it once it’s set on the ground (the wheels and axles stay on it forever, Tom said, and technically, you could put it on top of a basement. You’d just have to dig the basement deeper than normal). They’re solid enough not to blow away in storms and the reason they don’t cost too much is that manufactured homes usually go outside of the city and outside of the city is cheaper. Most people want to live in the city, so that’s why city homes are more expensive. As Tom pointed out, though, it’s close in cost when you add the land in. This place doesn’t sell land, but we were given a Realtor’s name. Tom’s gonna look for land online when he gets up. He told me yesterday that a guy online got a 5-bedroom house for only 40 G’s. That’s cuz it was repossessed. Getting a repossessed house is cheaper, but then there goes the fun of picking out colors for carpet and stuff like that, and other options.

We discussed the different ways we could possibly go about moving soon enough without having to settle. I’m used to settling, giving up, and doing without. It’s no problem for me and it’d be OK (if living with Tom meant living in our car, I’d do it in a heartbeat, before I lived anywhere without him), but we’re still gonna do what we can to have our cake and eat it too.

We could buy land right now, put this house up for sale, hope it sells in about a month, then store our stuff and move into a rented trailer till we can get the house put in. There are different things that could happen, but right now it looks like we’re gonna stay here till July or August, move into the model we want or one like it, and get all the furniture we want too, upon moving, which I’d prefer to getting in chunks. Tom says that after we move, Ma would give us money, cuz she’d want us to use it towards the new house. That’d be nice of her, and I think with that, we could get all the things we hoped to start off with, minus the car and pool. But we could the murals, the furniture, the doll-making stuff, more plug-ins, phones, laundry baskets, fake plants to add a bright, colorful cheerfulness to the place, etc.

I scanned a picture of the layout for Tammy of the model we want, not that we may not find a very similar model for a cheaper price at some other manufactured home dealer, and a list of the standard features with the exterior, interior, kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms, utilities, appliances, insulation, and construction.

The only negative about it is that it’ll be a bitch to clean, but it’ll be well worth it. Tom promises not to trash it and not to have sloppy piles of clutter to spoil its looks and make it harder for me to clean. It’d help a lot if he kept this promise, cuz then it’d be easier to keep up on it, and it’ll be healthier for both of us. I don’t think I’d clean the whole thing at once. I’d do a few rooms one day, a few more the next, etc.

I feel really blessed and boy is I psyched up! To think that I, of all people, am gonna live in such a big, beautiful house! Each day I have to spend in these tiny old rooms is all the more I know I’m gonna appreciate the beauty I’m to live in. It’s gonna be so open, bright, spacious, colorful, and new. Here, it’s old, dark, dull, and small. Not to mention a bit stressful and claustrophobic. You just never know what the people of this warped city are gonna do. Don’t get me wrong. I still think Phoenix is wonderful compared to Springfield, Boston, Hartford, and Norwich, but cities are cities and I’ve had enough of them. I don’t want to be in the heart of a city anymore.