If all goes well, next week should be our final full rent payment. We’d have been out of here a year ago if we hadn’t changed our plans and decided to go for the gold, so to speak. Good things are worth waiting for, but I can’t wait to get out of here! It’s going to be so nice living in a place that doesn’t get so damn cold at night and hot in the daytime. It’s in the 80s in here without the cooler running yet it’s not even that hot out. It’s only in the upper 60s. I can’t wait to have a real roof and normal walls surrounding me! And a fast connection, and well, I could go on and on and on with all that I look forward to.

Looks like my henna tats, which went from piss-yellow to diarrhea brown, are starting to fade.

Although I don’t miss my parents one bit, it’s still hard at times to know I can no longer simply reach for the phone and call them. It seems like just yesterday that they were just 10 digits away.

The only good thing I can say about them was that they were liberal. They didn’t think it was wrong for a woman to decide what to do with her own body. They didn’t think it was wrong for two people of the same gender to love each other. They hated those of different races (though I never knew them to have anything against Asians and American Indians) and just about everything else under the sun, but they were otherwise surprisingly liberal. I guess part of that is due to where they were from. So maybe it’s not so surprising after all when you were born and raised in the first state to allow gay marriage.

Tom’s snoring away right now, and my nocturnal friends are playing. I can hear them loud and clear in the other room and I even wonder how Tom can sleep through their racket. Rats are pretty wild at night. They wrestle with each other, make highly audible chewing sounds on their Coke box, and sometimes I’ll hear a squeal or two if one gets a bit rough with the other. So cute how they jump up to the top of the cage for treats and backrubs whenever I walk by. Now I hear their bell with the wood chews jingling.