Going about my business while embracing myself for the inevitable storm to come. Sooner or later the anxiety will bite, my lungs will tighten up, and on top of that, I’m sure someone around here will annoy the shit out of me with their noise. If the tightness is due to something in the air, though, as Tom suspects, then why is this the first fall that I’ve experienced it? 

I’m trying to think positive and hope for the best as hard as it is. I’m doing a test where I skip my meds every Sunday for 3 weeks. This will put me back down around 75 mcg. If the anxiety subsides, then it was likely that 88s were just a bit much for me. I will then ask my doctor to put me back down to 75 and try again at a later date to do the 88s. Sometimes the second time around works out. It did with the 75s. Meanwhile, my lab numbers should be posted soon too, but regardless of with they may say, it’s how I feel that counts. 

I felt well during most of yesterday and became a bit anxious and tight toward the end of my day at which time I took a lorazepam. 

We ate at Denny’s and went to Walgreens afterward. There I found a dual Chapstick, something I’ve never seen before. One side is banana and the other is strawberry. 

For just a couple of bucks each, I got body mist in a pink glitter bottle and one in a purple glitter bottle. The bottles look nicer than the sugarplum and strawberry scents smell. It’s like the smell has been watered down or something. It barely smells. 

Got a headband with clear gems and a similar-looking barrette wide enough to gather my thick hair. It’s not as thick as it used to be, but it’s still kinda thick. 

Got pink glitter duck tape that was to be strung across metal bands we were going to string across the couch and dresser legs to keep Roomba from getting stuck under there, but then Tom read that all we have to do is just glue little knobs on top of it. So now I have all this beautiful tape, but nothing to tape, LOL. 

After we came back home we took the bikes out and it was after that that I started to feel bad. So just maybe there is something out there. We’re skipping our morning ride today. I’ll hit the treadmill instead. 

We decided that rather than get taller oval toilets with an overflow system, we’d just get shorter round toilets like what Jesse had. Our toilets seldom overflow anyway. 

I asked Tom if he thought we stood a chance of ever moving to Hawaii and said that I didn’t think we ever would because all we could probably afford was attached living. Well, even if we were all on one floor with concrete foundations where you couldn’t feel the vibration of heavy footsteps, we’d still get the blasting TVs and other things that you don’t hear in houses. Old folks love to blast their TVs, and if there were cabinets along the dividing wall, you’d hear those being closed too. Unless there was a firewall between the units, of course. 

I lived in a couple of different 4-story brick buildings back east, a common apartment set up there, and never heard these two sisters whose place ran alongside my kitchen and bedroom. That was because of the brick firewall between us. Meanwhile, I could hear the lady on the other side of me playing the radio that sat on her kitchen counter from two rooms away. 

What was funny was the point he made in his response. He said, “I can’t possibly know what the future holds. Had someone once asked me if I’d ever move to Oregon, I’d have said probably not. If someone told me I’d drive a Cadillac someday, I’d have doubted that, too.” 

LOL, I’d never have guessed I’d leave New England, learn so many languages, quit smoking, be happily married for so long, share my journal online for all the world to see, or publish books even if I didn’t make shit doing it, etc. 

A large boat “crashed” ashore in my dreams last night, though I don’t know what beach I was on. It struck me that that was just how those kinds of boats “docked,” and I watched as people began to trickle off the boat. 

Then Tom and I moved into a strange house that was in the shape of a long L. Its long corridors and polished floors suggested it might have once been used as a non-residential building. Tom’s bedroom was at the very end of the long part of the L, toward the left. Mine was further up the hall on the right. I was standing in the doorway of his bedroom where he was trying to sort blankets that were twisted around him in his twin-size bed as he readied himself for sleep. I asked him if he wanted me to close his door, saying I didn’t care if it was left open or not, but I needed to know so I could be sure the rats didn’t wander in there. 

Then I ran up the hallway, shoes echoing off the painted brick walls, past my bedroom where my sound machine softly played white noise, and over to the rats’ cage on the left, straight across from the short end of the L in which the kitchen and then the living room were located. 

In the last dream, I might have been in a therapist’s office. The woman, whoever she was, told Tom, who sat next to me, that when I called it “home” and not just “where we live,” I would then be in the right place. 

The dream therapist then asked me to close my eyes, visualize myself in a nice place, and then describe it to her. 

“I’m floating on a cloud,” I said. “Only that cloud is the ocean. I think it’s in Hawaii. There’s so much color all around me. So many pink flowers.”