Writing prompt… Movies.

My movie genre preference is similar to my book genre preference. I like mystery, suspense, thrillers, paranormal and some drama with very few exceptions along the way.

One such exception was the movie Titanic. The one starring Leonard DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Of course I loved The Wizard of Oz as a child, and for comedy, I really liked the Police Academy series. My sci-fi exception was definitely the Terminator, especially Terminator 2.

Not much more I can say on this subject other than that I think I’ll go browse through some horror movies on Amazon Prime and see if there’s anything I want to watch tonight.

Writing prompt… Songs

I know that for most people it’s the sound of the singer, the appearance of the singer, or the lyrics that gets somebody interested in a particular song. For me, however, it’s the music. If I like the way the music sounds then it really doesn’t matter who’s singing it, what they look like, or what they’re saying.

I used to be really big on songs from the seventies and eighties and I still am, but I got a little tired of them after so many years of listening to them. For several years I liked modern stuff as well as oldies. Lately, though, I have become bored shitless by modern music. It’s like it’s the same old shit no matter where you go.

These days I don’t have any favorites where singers and bands are concerned. I like many genres of music except for some hardcore rap, heavy metal, gospel, jazz, classical and most country music.

Writing prompt… Short-Term Goals

One short-term goal is to get on with the home improvements. We took a break from that for a while and soon I will want to resume our plans to upgrade the place little by little. I expect we’ll put thousands of dollars into this house over the next few years alone.

I also hope to get my thyroid and medication issues squared away and end up on a dose that I can handle without side effects. I don’t care if I’m never able to lose the extra weight, but I definitely care about not suffering the way I did last year. It was a really horrible thing to go through.

So other than that and to just hope that things run smoothly as they have been overall, that’s really all I have for short-term goals.

Writing prompt… Long-Term Goals

My long-term goal is for us to move to a tropical climate someday, probably when he retires. It is the one climate I have yet to experience living in. I have lived where they have real winters, I have lived in seasonal but more temperate climates such as where we are now, and I have lived in the desert.

I would really love to move to Maui, but I don’t think that’s a very realistic dream. It’s just way too expensive there, even though there are ways to get around some of the expenses.

I think that more than likely we will end up in Florida, and that’s okay too. I look forward to it, assuming nothing comes up to either kill us or trap us here forever.

Writing prompt… Nobody knows.

Nobody knows what I’m not willing to let anybody know. It’s that simple. :) If there is anything that I haven’t told anybody it was probably for a reason. So then why would I mention it here?

I guess my response to this particular prompt is lame as hell. Okay, nobody knows I just took a sip of water. There. I just confessed something nobody knew until now. :)

Writing prompt… I never told you.

If there’s something that I never told a particular person, it was most likely because I either didn’t know where they were or it wasn’t important enough for me to tell them. I’m usually pretty straightforward and if I really want somebody to know something, I find a way to get the message to them.

Right now there really isn’t much that I haven’t gotten off my chest to those who have burned me in the past, for example, and I don’t have any deep dark secrets that I feel a need to hide from anybody. Sure, there is always more I could say to those who have wronged me, but I know that it really wouldn’t do me any good. It may make me feel better to a degree to give them a verbal shakedown, but I have talked things out both with those I’m closest to as well as in my journal. I know that my words would likely go in one ear and out the other if I spoke directly to them anyway. If somebody doesn’t believe they’ve done anything wrong or they don’t want to believe they have, then they’re not going to admit what they’ve done and apologize. Usually, when we confront somebody who has wronged us their first instinct is to counterattack no matter how right we may be. Especially if they really do know that they’re guilty of something and are afraid to admit it.

So as far as the “I never told you” thing, there really isn’t much to say in that department. I mean, I never told Kate Jackson that I really loved her on Charlie’s Angels, and that’s because I never met her.

Writing prompt… The biggest lie I ever told.

This one took me time to think about because it was really hard to come up with a grand lie I told as an adult because of the way I have such a blunt nature. As a child I lied to escape punishment, but as an adult, who can come and spank me or take away my prized possessions for a few weeks because of something I say?

I hate to lie because the more lies you tell, the more you have to tell to cover your ass and that can get pretty confusing. I always try to be as honest as I can even though nobody has such power and control over me that they could use anything I say against me in the way they could when I was a child.

Other than maybe softening the truth and leaving some details out of things, the only real “lie” I told as an adult was a denial of guilt in court when charged with prank phone calls over 20 years ago.

So the biggest lie I ever told was probably when I was a kid, like when I tried to tell everyone that I was bionic and to convince people that I had superhuman strength and all kinds of cool powers. Yeah, I would do silly things like that at times. I would try to convince my classmates that I was magic and all kinds of stupid shit like that. I suppose a lot of kids do similar things, but of course my mother had to make me feel like I did something as horrible as beat some poor classmate to death over the head with a book or something.

Writing prompt… Guilt.

When I think of what makes me feel guilty there are two things that come to mind. The first one is how I pushed a girl off of a pile of rocks that people loved to climb at the beach where we would spend our summers. I did this for no reason at all. I simply did it just because I could, never realizing that I could have seriously hurt or even killed her. I don’t even remember who she was or what her name was. She was just someone I’d see at the beach. I would gladly apologize to her if I could.

The second thing that makes me feel guilty is when I dumped my cat, Shadow, in Paradise Valley, Arizona. I had just arrived in Phoenix from New England and moved into an apartment. I was broke, starving, and the bitch of a manager threaten to evict me if I didn’t get rid of the cat because I wasn’t in an apartment that allowed pets.

I know I should have dropped Shadow off at the pound even though he would have been put to sleep more than likely. Back then my attitude was hey, it’s an animal. He’ll survive on his own.

And maybe he did. Maybe somebody gave him a nice home. But then again maybe he died of hunger and thirst in the intense desert heat. I’ll never know for sure what became of him, the cat that loved and trusted me even though he was an obnoxious little devil at times. Even though this was over 20 years ago, a part of me will always feel a bit guilty when I think of him.

Later…

Feeling a little jittery tonight, but it’s more in an annoying kind of way than a scary way. I have no idea if it’s my medication, my thyroid, or just me. It’s kind of hard to believe it’s the medication because I’m still only on 25 micrograms of levothyroxine. I even stopped losing hair, finally. I guess my body is used to it now.

Tom and I have planned a small trip to Reno in the spring. You have to go over the Sierra Nevada Mountains to get there and going in the winter isn’t a great idea because you could get stuck in a snowstorm. In the spring we won’t have to worry about that and the brats will still be in school. We’ll probably only stay a night or two and have fun gambling and shopping. It won’t be Hawaii, but it will be a fun break from the same old, same old. It’s about a 2-hour drive. Not being that far from home gives us the option of being more spontaneous as far as how long we stay. I’ve been to Nevada before, both Vegas and Laughlin, but I have never been to Reno. It’s no place I’d ever want to live because it snows there. Not like up in Klamath Falls, but just one snowflake is too much for me.

Tom decided he’s going to get serious about coding, starting with phone apps. He realizes that he can say he wants to do something, or he can actually do it. No matter how overwhelming a task may seem at times, the best way to get started is to just do it.

So I go into my bedroom to get ready to shower where I can see myself quite well with all these floor-to-ceiling mirrors and the big mirror in the bathroom, strip naked and wow! I’m not only noticeably thinner despite the scale only being down a few pounds, but you can definitely tell I’m in shape for one less than a year from the half-century marker. Sure enough, my measurements are down a bit more. I still think I’m gonna cancel my next NS shipment cuz it’s going WAY too slow given my thyroid issues. I’ll do my own NS-based plan… not just eating right most days but not eating big portions. Of course I’ll still work out most days cuz that’s fun for me no matter what. It’s 45° and dropping out there. Too cold to go down the rollercoaster and up by the lake on the bike so I guess I’ll make it a treadmill night even if that’s not as fun. It’s not even mid-January and I am sooo sick of winter! Gibt mir das Frühlingswetter!

Nane didn’t take me into the woods to kill me, she took me there to kiss me, LOL. I was in Germany visiting some people that she knows in my dreams, and I think Christiane and Irene may have been there. Nane wouldn’t talk to me for the first part of our hiking or camping trip or whatever the hell it was we were doing. I wanted to go walking in the woods with somebody who promised to take me on a trail they were familiar with but that somebody ended up getting a headache or something like that, so Nane took me instead.

At first I happily commented on the sights and sounds around me both in English and German and then I suddenly became nervous. I spun around and looked at Nane who was casually leaning against a tree staring at me. It then dawned on me that she might have volunteered to walk me into the woods so she could harm me in some way, still pissed at me for dumping her. Instead, she started kissing me. :)

Then I was living someplace where there were four bathrooms. I had to pee really bad yet despite having that many bathrooms, someone (God knows who) was in every single one of them.

Then Tom and I went to different stores to do some shopping. After I picked out what I wanted in a clothing store, I sat on a bench and observed the people around me while I waited for Tom to pick me up. The store had a fairly decent amount of customers in it and most were middle-aged to older. The floor had flat carpet and the windows on the exterior walls were sunken in that they were in this little alcove of sorts.

A younger woman who was closest to where I sat started commenting to me about these dresses that were on sale for just $5. I rose from the bench and studied them. They were all solid red cotton dresses, only some were sleeveless and some had short sleeves. The woman said she was excited about the upcoming warm spell so she could wear dresses like that.

I decided I didn’t want any and then realized I didn’t have my purse and purchases in my hand with me. Just as I was about to freak out, I looked over and saw that they were still on the bench that I had been sitting on, amazed that nobody had stolen them while my attention was diverted.

In the last dream, I remember we were renting an apartment for several months before moving someplace, but I don’t know where. All I know is that it was as noisy as most apartments are. I was bitching about it to Tom in the car as we were heading somewhere, saying that nobody would do anything about it and how talking to the residents did me no good and neither would talking to the office. In my mind, I figured that whatever was up there would make sure that my final month there was hell.