Gina still misses me, she told Tom when he dumped stuff at the recycling center. The people she has right now are doing such a lousy job. She hinted at the possibility of having to hire someone, but I’m not about to get my hopes up. If I were meant to be a homemaker like I have been over the years, why would that suddenly change? Seems to me that if I were meant to be working, I’d have been working all along. Also, it’s too good to be true. The job would just be too ideal, and the idea of the freeloaders leading us to more money after they took us for thousands, seems rather ironic. I also have to wonder, if we made more money, would the Gods be more tempted to send someone to steal it from us? It just seems that whenever we have more money than usual, someone rips us off.

For just $20 Tom got an awesome new vacuum. It’s small and you can sling it over your shoulder with a strap. As small as it is, though, it has major suction. It’d be ideal for vacuuming the couch, blinds, utility area, countertops, and the area around the animal cages.

I received mail from the doll company yesterday (Paradise Galleries) and now I have to wait two months for Sugar Plum, the musical ballerina. I guess they’re made and assembled in batches in China.

I also got mail from Mary. It was a quick letter saying she has to testify on the 4th. I wonder if it’d be on the news, being a high-profile case. I’d think the baby killer would generate more media coverage than the stalker.

She said she hasn’t seen Pérez yet, but when she does, she’ll slip her my note/pictures. I get the impression Pérez hasn’t been there in a while. I wonder if she’s still even there. She says there are a lot of new DOs. No Teddy Bear.

She also praised my writing, saying I was a very talented writer and that my life has been like a good thriller. Ha! If she thinks that, wait till she reads my life out here. I’ve decided to have two books. Book one will be Life in New England (the first 26 years of my life) and book two will be Life in the Southwest (ages 26-35). Book one is going to be about 50 pages long with 58 chapters.

I spotted an easy way through the wash that’s in back of the house. It’s not as close to the house as the front wash is. Anyway, I walked through and back towards the rentals. What pieces of shit! No decent white person with a decent, honest job is going to want to live in a dump like that.

It’s quite a walk from this house to the back property line. There are 4 washes on our land. The front one’s just a dozen or so feet from the house, maybe a bit more. The second one’s about 100 feet behind the house, then there’s one about 50 feet from the rental, with one in between. The one in between is pretty half-assed. It’s like it barely formed. This is where he wants to build a barn, whether or not we have horses. It’ll be a good privacy block, as well as the hedges we’re going to put up, and a good way to get water to them. For now, we’re gonna dig a trench and use the old plastic well piping to pipe water out to the hedges.

So, our tentative plans are to put up an interior fence, a doggie door, barb wire the west and north perimeters, porch/screen the 3 doors, though we may not get them screened in this year, plant exterior hedges (mostly in back), and a couple of palms and clumps of cactus in front.

Next year we’ll screen the porches, do the barn, do the pool/AZ room, finish the exterior fencing, and create a circular drive in front that’ll extend over the wash. So he’ll still park where he parks. He just won’t get to that spot the same way he does now, which is driving in between ours and next door’s property.