Tomorrow I see Helen, then the next day I see Scot. The question is when’s he going to come here and fuck up my schedule? This week or next? And how many weeks am I going to have to wait for my final appointment with Helen? I’m going to tell her I want to wrap this up and get it over with as soon as possible. Then that’ll be one less source of appointments and one more freeloader chapter closed, so to speak. Hopefully, she won’t be taking off to Texas or North Dakota for a month after I see her tomorrow.

Been out just over 5 months now yet I still look like shit. I’m still fat, I’m still flabby, but the good news is that I think I’m getting closer to starving. I just needed to get disgusted enough with myself to muster up enough willpower. I think on Monday I’ll go on a popcorn diet. There’s no way I’m passing up getting a cappuccino tomorrow and a mud pie on Friday, though. I’m actually looking a little forward to tomorrow’s appointment and getting out. I don’t care to get out for Scot, but Helen I don’t mind, it’s been a while, and I do want that cappuccino!

We’re going to stop at the pet store near her office and look for a big brown jumbo female rat, but I have yet to see this store, despite their huge selection, sell jumbos. I’m hoping they do now. I not only miss traditional brown rats and want a jumbo rat, but I want to breed her with Little Buddy.

Male rats kill mice, but according to what Tom said he heard at work, lady rats treat mice as if they were baby rats.

Before I get to the best news, which may not be all that great after all, I’m sitting here trying to decide which projects I wish to do tonight. I don’t have any work from Mary, so that leaves rearranging the bedroom and office closets, starting my consolidated autobiography, editing Teddy Bear’s copy of the parts of the jailhouse journal that’s been proofread, scanning in signs from my old sign language book, or doing more proofreading on my badly neglected jailhouse journal.

Well, I definitely don’t feel up to closet arranging, I can’t do anything else on the computer while I scan, so I guess I’ll work on my book.

Anyway, I thought for a minute there I found Rosa, but now I’m coming to think that this is an old address that hasn’t been updated in ages and that they did head down to Mexico as soon as she got released from jail.

It all started with a rather sad dream where I was still back in jail. I asked - Mena, I think it was - if she knew anything about Rosa and she told me she killed herself. I was stunned, thinking - no! Rosa wouldn’t do that! There were other parts to the dream that I can’t remember, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that washed over me as soon as I woke up and had time to let the dream sink in. It wasn’t just a dream. It was a message of some kind. Perhaps one saying I should look for her? After all, I never even tried. The name Rosa may be common, but Abraham isn’t, so I went to an online phone directory and got one hit in Phoenix. It’s near Mary, and I swear I recognize the address from when she’d address letters to him, and I showed her how to do the return address.

I’m not going to get my hopes up, but I sent a brief letter in Spanish to that address, explaining that I knew Rosa from jail and wished to visit with her, enclosing the PO Box and our number. As I said, the more I think about it, though, the more I doubt I’ll get a reply. I just don’t see why she and Abraham would want to remain in the US after what happened. Especially if the poor girl was falsely accused of murder. If it were me, I wouldn’t want to stay where there were so many painful memories. Besides, she told me how much she missed Mexico and that she did plan to head back there as soon as she got out.

Tom told me some crazy guy slit the throat of the driver of a Greyhound bus which resulted in an accident, killing 6 people. Of the people killed, the driver wasn’t one of them. Tom doesn’t know if the crazy guy was one of the ones killed.

I doubt it. God protects the crazy. He protects his crazies and his vindictive lazy little freeloaders with a vengeance.