Okay, here’s the latest shit going on here and what we hope to do about it. Beware of lots of swearing in this long rant! My husband is the heaviest sleeper and the most noise-tolerant guy I know yet the fucking motorcycles even woke him up on Saturday when he was taking a nap.

At that point I said, okay, we definitely have to seriously start thinking about moving. After 4.5 years of this shit, I’ve had enough! I’m too old for all these sleep disturbances. Damn the fucking park for allowing these things in here! But do they care that some of us have sleep disorders that cause us to sleep during the daytime? No, of course not. That’s not the whole point, though. Even if I were on days every day… daily motorcycles and landscaping is NO excuse and UNnecessary! It’s no place for a writer whose concentration is easily broken.

I wish to hell I had telekinetic powers! I swear I’d possess and send every single fucking motorcycle flying at 100 MPH right into the office that allows these damn things in here! Tom said he thinks it was a group of four or five motorcycles that came tearing through here and that it still would have been too loud and woken me up even if it had been a block away.

Okay, my sleep has been cursed basically all my life. I get that. That much was obvious decades ago. But, I have slept better in other places. Years ago, had you given me a list of all the places Tom and I would live in and asked me to guess which one I would sleep the worst in, a retirement community would be my absolute last guess. These places are almost not worth it. The only things you don’t have here are screaming kids and barking dogs.

Thinking back to other places I’ve lived in and the vehicles that would pass by the places, some sat there idling loudly for a while, some would be annoying because they would gun the engines, and then there were the car stereos, of course, but I honestly can’t think of any vehicles that were so damn loud that they stand out in my mind. Conveniently, the loud vehicle trend must have started right before we moved in here, almost as if something knew I would be sleeping barely 10 feet from the street and that this would be a great way to fuck with my sleep. I do remember that after Jesse got drunk and totaled a quiet pickup he had (although he claimed a deer ran out in front of him), he got a truck that was surprisingly loud. I was surprised because it didn’t seem that old. Plus he had a friend that visited and they also had a loud vehicle. So I guess that became a thing during our trailer years.

So we looked around at various options… apartments, condos, houses, manufactured homes, houseboats, and high-rises, even though those are more of an LA thing and not common in the West. The problem is that if we stay in the state there is very little we could afford because of the way it is so damn expensive here, yet we can’t afford to take off without a job lined up while he’s under 62. Your average 2-bedroom apartment here starts at $1,600. There’s a 2-bedroom, 1-bath house that’s only 784 square feet yet it’s $110,000. It’s just fucking ridiculous here. Your average home starts at a quarter million. Just because you may make more money here doesn’t mean it’s easy to afford to live here. Even something half this size that’s much older and dumpier in a scummy park would be more than we paid for this place because the economy isn’t as shitty as it was in 2013. Also, if they’re going to allow motorcycles to roar in and out of a luxury community, those that aren’t as nice are certainly going to have the same problem.

Anyway, we thought of staying here, going to Hawaii, going to Nebraska where Aly is, and going to Florida where I have family, and each place has its pros and cons. The only cons I can think of to Florida are that they too, have tons of loud motorcycles, and of course there’s the humidity. Nebraska is cold and snowy, California is expensive, and Hawaii is even more expensive. If money was no object and it came down to strictly climate, I would go to Hawaii. But the most feasible place with the best climate is Florida. Plus, there’s the fact that I not only have family there but also that Aly may very well end up there someday herself.

The thing is… If my sleep is going to be cursed anyway no matter where I go, let’s have it be cursed in a warmer climate, and perhaps not quite as cursed if we can get our bedroom out of the damn street.

So we decided that he’s going to retire when he’s 62 and we’re going to get the fuck out of here probably in 2020. Here’s the catch, though I can assure you it’s totally worth it. We would struggle financially and he would have to get a part-time job once we got to what I’m guessing right now is going to be Fort Lauderdale. I don’t think we’re going to be able to afford Tammy’s area, but after all the shit I’ve been through, money isn’t anywhere near as important as it used to be to me. I’d rather be poor and live well than have money and not be able to sleep so much of the time. As long as we’re healthy and I’m not suffering from the severe anxiety I was suffering from, I’ve had my “rich” days, I’ve gone on my shopping sprees, I’ve had my vacations, and basically, I’ve collected a whole lot of junk I would rather not have to dust. So as long as we can pay for the necessities, I don’t care if we don’t have extra money. As long as we’ve got each other, our health, and I can get some decent sleep most of the time, I don’t need to have the fancy wind chime I might spot in the store or the beautiful dress I may see online or anything like that. The most important thing is being healthy and able to sleep. Being woken up two to three times a week is very hard on the body and it can take its toll on a person after a while, especially if they’re older.

I don’t want anyone reading this to get their hopes up. This is not a definite, 100%-for-sure plan. It’s just something we’re seriously considering right now because the thought of staying here another 5 to 10 years makes me want to beat my head into the wall. If the sounds were more consistent, I would probably be able to adapt to sleeping through them. If I knew that something was going to come blasting through every half hour or so that may actually make it easier than when it’s at random times, with weekends being worse.

I know it won’t do me any good or change the rules, but I do intend to give the office a piece of my mind. The noise levels here are just way out of control. Never have I lived where there was such loud landscaping equipment that could be heard nearly every day, and I’ve lived in plenty of other places where there were trees, shrubs, grass and similar vegetation. There’s just no need, reason or excuse for this shit. I never expected to live in complete silence but it really is too bad that retirement communities aren’t about what I thought they’d be about. I really thought they were for having a quiet, peaceful place to live but apparently, they’re more about being with others your own age. At least here it is.

I know Bob, Virginia and the Twenties aren’t going to be happy about us leaving in a couple of years, but hopefully, we’ll have neighbors as nice as them wherever we end up. Since I’m not expecting that we can go straight to a home, I’m hoping we can find a rental in a high-rise so I can at least enjoy the view while we’re waiting. I think Fort Lauderdale will be the closest we can get to the coast that we can afford. I don’t want to go to Miami because it’s further from Tammy and I’ve heard bad things about the place. I think Fort Lauderdale would be a little safer. Tammy will no doubt be happy to guide us when the time comes, though I don’t know how familiar she is with Fort Lauderdale.

Another thing that makes Fort Lauderdale appealing is that I still hesitate to get that close to Tammy and the girls. Not just because of a potential fallout but because I don’t know that I could trust Tammy enough not to come barging in on us unannounced. She may find it easier to pressure us to do more things with her if we were that close, and while it will certainly be nice to be closer to family, we don’t want to be pestered either. I could be totally wrong about her. Maybe she wouldn’t do any of these things. I just don’t want to have to find out the hard way. It’s kind of too bad, though, because I really liked Stuart and there would be fewer people there, even if it wouldn’t be quite as warm. There are only 15,000 people in Stuart and the median age is 45. There are 83,000 people here and the median age is 35. It’s a few years older in Fort Lauderdale but with a population of 173,000. Springfield now has 153,000 people, and of course, there are over 1 million in Phoenix and over 3 million in Los Angeles. Ugh, I can just imagine the plane activity over LA, since the bigger the city, the more they tend to fly. Hopefully, they wouldn’t be as bad in Fort Lauderdale being on the coast which would mean that half of the place would be water and therefore nothing to fly over. This may actually prevent them from circling round and round as much, and I think “them” are pigs.

I swear it’s almost as noisy here as in Phoenix! I was only able to sleep better there because the bedroom was farther from the road and the place had brick walls and a concrete foundation. But instead of kids and dogs, you hear landscaping and vehicles here. Both places have loud car stereos but that was definitely more of an issue in other places. Sometimes a part of me wishes we were still crammed into Jesse’s tiny trailer even though his mutts would bark for hours and hours at a time. At least they could be drowned out by sound machines. No matter how loud I blast the sound machine when I go to sleep, the loud engines still manage to override it. I was able to get caught up on my sleep, however, because we’re having a cool spell. Tom said there were no motorcycles but just one loud truck that kind of crashed into the speed bump.

If something is cursing my sleep, how convenient that it happens to hit 70° on a Saturday when the motorcycles are more likely to be an issue, huh?

So now we have some thinking to do. Do we do the roof before we go? Do we get a new oven? I’m thinking we’ll probably get the oven but we’re not sure about the roof. We’ve got a couple of months to decide because we’re still in the rainy season. It’s almost over, though. I wish I knew if I was right about suspecting that the drought is going to continue for many years to come. If it is, then it’s not worth doing the roof. But all it takes is one wet and windy winter like what we had last winter and we could have a problem.

The next two years may be the last two years that we have decent money, so we need to spend it wisely. I’m thinking we might still go ahead and add two of the murals we wanted to add because we’ll still be here long enough to enjoy them. Besides, this way I get to experiment with a few different types of scenes so I have a better idea of what to get in our next home.

Again, I could be totally wrong, so please don’t take this literally or get your hopes up too high, but yes, I am officially considering this the beginning of the end and now looking at this house as a place we’re staying temporarily and no longer a “home” in the traditional sense. To be honest, I knew we were making a mistake when we moved in here as soon as I looked at the map and saw the streets wrapping around it and so closely, but we were desperate to get out of the trailer. We wanted more space, we wanted something newer, and I wanted to get away from the dogs. We knew the economy wasn’t going to stay shitty forever so we wanted to take advantage of it while we could and the deal we got on this place. But less than a week or two in this place I knew we’d made a mistake and that we wouldn’t be here forever. It’s just way too noisy for what it is. We would eventually move even if it was quiet here because tropical is one climate we haven’t lived in yet and that I would definitely like to be in, but in that case, we may have waited for another 5 to 10 years.

In other news, I was a little surprised but definitely pleased to hear from Stacey on Facebook. She thanked me for letting her know what’s been going on in my life and said she wasn’t sure if I got her previous message and wished me the best. Has she sent other messages that I didn’t get? It wouldn’t surprise me if she had. There have been many times when I’ve wondered if people have gotten my messages and if they’ve sent anything I didn’t get because I know how screwed up Facebook can be at times. I replied letting her know that that was the only message I’ve gotten from her, that I was glad she got my message, and wished her the best as well.

Writers Cafe has proven to be rather dead and inactive, so I will be publishing with the UK Authors site again so people can look for any errors or discrepancies that need fixing before my stories are submitted for publication on Amazon. I broke Campus Games into 4 parts and 2 just published. On Friday, the other 2 parts will be published. They only publish on Mondays and Fridays.

Tom went out yesterday morning and tightened some circuit breakers and that seems to have helped the flickering a lot. It’s not perfect but it’s much better than it was.

A couple of nights ago I had hip pain that was bad enough to need ibuprofen, but that seems to be doing better. My upper stomach pain comes and goes and I still have rashes here and there but nothing critical.

Having fun exchanging messages with Aly who went on a weekend trip to Boone, Iowa. We don’t know why, but Kim’s lying to her by saying she’s not on Prosebox. I think Kim is just a born liar. Anyway, Aly wants to join again and do some writing projects. Hopefully, it won’t be all about food as she seems almost as obsessed with it as Andy was.

Curious Cat is pretty dead. Oh, they have no problem whatsoever with answering questions, alright, but they sure don’t want to have to ask any in return.

I’m way behind on Bubbly so I will catch up with tons of posts ranting about this and that sometime soon.

The night before last I dreamed of Jesse who was talking to some other guy. Missing the seclusion of country living (but not the hassles, inconveniences, and sluggish internet), I’m not surprised he showed up in my dreams.

Then I was riding in a car with three other people. I was in the back seat behind the driver when the entire side of the car suddenly disappeared and we were driving through some entrance in which I could reach out and touch the wall. Then I was suddenly on a gurney and being wheeled into a place that had indoor “homes” that were set up side by side inside this giant room. I was placed in a section of the room that had a row of gurneys, all empty at the moment. I sat up, hopped off of the gurney, and began to walk through the place before I realized I had left my hot pink purse on the gurney and doubled back for it.