Before I write about the co-op park which we agreed before seeing much of that we won’t even consider moving to, Tom had me laughing my ass off last night when trying to set up the microphone for the German language learning program I’ve been using. I once won a Sexy Jesus prize pack (when aiming for the first prize which was something big, though I don’t remember what) and one of the things was a little Sexy Jesus figurine on a spring with a round sticky base that you can stick wherever. Jesus sort of bounces around when any movement jars him. Well, this idiot stuck him on her microphone. The opening, which is up top, is so tiny I never even noticed it, and of course I don’t have the best of vision to begin with. So once I pried him off and tossed Jesus aside, Tom starts testing the microphone to one of the speaking exercises where you speak the name of the object in the picture you see. German commonly uses “the” before objects (der, die, das) and he didn’t know the word for pear, of course, so he just goes, “Der pear.” LOL, it was pretty funny. Andy would’ve laughed his ass off and I could picture him goofing off and trying to pronounce the words and me laughing over that, too.

We took off around 10am and arrived in Sac Shitty about 40 minutes later at a suburb of the Sac called Florin. This is where the really cheap co-op park is located. Once we saw how rundown the area was we wouldn’t even drive through the park. We saw enough of it from the outside anyway, and it was just so-so. The trailers were raised. I would much rather pay an additional 1-3 hundred a month for a safer, cleaner area and a nicer park where the tenants can’t vote against keeping dogs as household pets only.

Being there made me realize just how much nicer and safer this little town is, but we don’t see ourselves staying in Auburn. Other towns are also nice and closer to work and on bus lines if we ever need them, and have more stores and restaurants around. Besides, Sac City isn’t exactly where I want to live anyway. It was so hard to find the place, even with the navigator and printed directions due to the hilly terrain. In Arizona, it was so flat when you weren’t on a mountain that you could see landmarks way off in the distance to help guide you.

Once we returned to Auburn we hit KFC. Neither of us was ready to return home afterward, but we wanted to do something different and go someplace fun that we hadn’t been to in a while. So we went to Walgreens, which always has tons of nice things to look at without the crowds of Walmart. Some screaming kid was there when we first went in, but fortunately it left a few minutes later. All I could think was how my mother would’ve killed me if I carried on like that in public or at home as a kid. Really, I just wanted to slap it silent!

We got new AARP cards so we can get various discounts. Even though I’m under 50 being married to someone over 50 entitles me to the same benefits. Tom was lucky I was with him because I remembered that Walgreens was one of the AARP stores, not that we couldn’t afford to pay in full. It came to around $78 after the discount, but that was ok since I never ordered the incense I was going to order. That’s because they only accept PayPal and we don’t have a PayPal account at the moment, thanks to the scammers that caused us to have to shut our account down.

He got some games and a few electronic gadgets, and I got a nice sundress, a glittery overcoat for nails, a pink throw, plus some other odds and ends, like one of those air fresheners you hook to your car’s vent. I always wanted to try one of those.

Of the things he got for just $10, he got a dock/speakers for the iPod that would sit on the treadmill, since I won’t be able to blast my music when we move, and it also came with headphones and earbuds. The speakers aren’t very loud at all, though, and I don’t know if I could hear the music over the sound of the treadmill, but if not, I can just use earbuds.

The nicest thing I got is a beautiful bamboo plant with little pink flowers stuck between the 4 stalks that are supported by a gold twisty tie. They really did a good job making it look like one with the plant. Love the clear and purple rocks in the clear vase, too.

My older, bigger bamboo is just in water, but I think I may get decorative rocks for that one as well.

Tom got the water turned on to the cooler to the usual tune of saws and hammers, none of which was Jesse’s, and amazingly there were no issues with it this year. No ruptured hoses causing water to spray all over the place and no pump seizing up, so that’s good. As I said to Tom, I bet it would have something wrong with it if we were stuck here indefinitely and broke just to add to our stress, not that we’d have to pay to fix it as renters.

I took a few days off from working my arms, then did a light workout yesterday thinking my shoulder was healed, but that only aggravated it, so I’m taking a few more days off.

It’s so nice to be able to enjoy life without the stress we were under in the past, wondering if we’d be able to pay next month’s rent or even if we’d survive and be alive in a few months. But sadly, I’m hearing many of the same stories of struggling that we used to tell. So in the midst of my happiness, I do worry about the health and finances of others that I know aren’t as fortunate these days.

What else? Nothing really. I chatted with my Argentina friend for a bit and that’s pretty much it.

Later…

My new Spotlight glitter nail polish is so pretty to look at just sitting in its bottle, let alone on my nails. Instead of small specs of glitter, these are tiny strips of glitter that are about the size of a printed dash. So right now I have dashes of silver glitter that change color depending on how the light hits it over nail polish that matches apple green Tic Tacs perfectly.

Deciding that I like the bamboos planted in decorative rocks as opposed to sitting in just plain water, I’m going to be getting a bag of acrylic rocks for my big bamboo in fuchsia. This will help weigh it down and will be easier to just add new water to as it evaporates. They’re made for this sort of thing too, so I won’t have to worry about the “gems” floating.

I’m still enjoying my Instant Immersion language learning software, but it’s too soon to say if I like it better than LiveMocha’s setup. It’s different but similar. It has a memory match game that LM doesn’t have, and it helps drill in the vocabulary. So far I have yet to encounter anything as tough as LM’s magnet exercises where you form sentences from a scattering of words, but it’s still extensive enough that I think it would be tough for someone who was learning German from scratch. I think a lot of this is better for the more advanced levels. Tom read that we pretty much only use about 2500 words in any language, so the key is to learn those, plus proper grammar, but with German’s complex grammar rules, I don’t ever expect to have great grammar.

When I went into the bathroom in KFC to wash my hands after I was done eating, I glanced in the mirror. I don’t have any hair anymore, I thought to myself. All I have is fuzz. So I got some deluxe leave-in conditioner, and we’ll see if that helps it so it doesn’t look and feel so shabby. Dying it and straightening it has really done a number on it.