Got lots to update on. First, they’re finally done with the fiber-optics upgrade. Thank God! I’ve had enough of the loud equipment and the loud trucks. Oh, I know it’s only a matter of days or weeks if I’m lucky before the next project be it by the park or by one of the neighbors, so I’m going to be sure to enjoy whatever time off I can get.

That fucking car, though! It’s been coming around more and more. Just because they don’t sleep here doesn’t mean they don’t live here. Seriously, they may as well sleep here, too. I don’t know if one of their parents is ill or they’re working for them or something, but they’re obviously jobless again. They don’t seem to have much of a life at all. No job, no significant other, no kids, nothing to keep them busy enough to take even one fucking day off from visiting. They’re here every day without fail, and again, broke or not, I can’t believe anyone that young wants to hang out with their parents that often. I keep hoping they’ll get a life but it seems that’s just not their thing and the parents aren’t exactly encouraging or persuasive in any way either.

I slept shitty and woke up exhausted, as usual. The internet simply isn’t reliable in the way electricity is and it can’t stream something for more than a few hours without interruptions and hiccups. Two hours after I crashed, Alexa came out and said, “I’m sorry. I’m having trouble playing music now. Try again later.”

When I couldn’t get the brown noise track I chose as my best bet for masking the more thunderous sounds restarted, I had no choice but to give up and let that fucking car wake me up. So did my bladder and food smells. Tom is pretty sure the smell wasn’t his food because he’s made macaroni and cheese while I’ve slept numerous times. These old windows aren’t sealed up very well and air gets circulated throughout the house when the AC is on.

Anyway, I’m hoping that today will be the day that I finally get caught up on my sleep. I now have the earbuds plugged into the laptop I got in Oregon after recording the brown noise to Audacity and then cutting any lag off the ends so that when it loops there won’t be any gaps.

Also, we ordered a basic $30 MP3 player with a 30-hour battery life which will be delivered today along with my Raspberry Royale tea. This will be great for taking to Hawaii and drowning out his snoring and doors slamming. It’s kind of sad that I have to resort to these kinds of things at home, but while I can’t get myself on a schedule and I can’t stop from waking up for other reasons, if I can at least get myself to sleep through noise, great!

Now for my 1 hour and 12-minute discussion with Tammy which I definitely have mixed emotions about.

As usual, it was mostly about her health. She didn’t ask much about Tom and I unless I steered the conversation in that direction.

The net is still cutting in and out which Tom says he thinks will happen for a couple of hours but I’m getting too tired to get into our discussion. Will get to it tomorrow, tired or not.

Or maybe not. My battery is down to 29% so maybe I’ll gab away until it hits 15% or so. I’m getting close to when I’m ready to sleep but not that close.

Okay, so about a week or so ago I made a post on Facebook about people obsessing over those that were gone, those that were abusive, and not appreciating what they do have as opposed to what they don’t. Becky and Sarah saw it and instead of talking to me about it, they went to Tammy, assuming it was aimed at them. They were offended particularly with the second anniversary of the death of their father coming up.

As I assured Tammy, the timing was strictly coincidental but where I fibbed a bit was when I said it had nothing to do with them. I didn’t want to lie but I didn’t want to needlessly offend anyone further either so I more or less softened the truth. It kind of did have to do with them but not just them. It was more about Facebook being so fake, negative and repetitious so much of the time.

I was a little upset that they didn’t come to me about it and Tammy said they didn’t want to say anything at all because they didn’t want to come between her and I, but as Tammy told them, if we can’t have a simple discussion about whatever, well, that has nothing to do with them. She’s right, but people should still go directly to the source, shouldn’t they? Still, I do understand them not wanting to make waves for Tammy and I and they didn’t, as I told them. Even so, I let them know they can come to me if they’re ever curious about anything. I don’t bite. I’m approachable, etc. The only thing that bugs me is that while I try my best to take other people’s feelings into consideration, I wish they’d do the same for me but they usually don’t. I don’t like feeling like I have to watch what I say to such degrees or like I can’t express myself while others can do so a lot more freely.

I have admitted to Tammy that I don’t follow most people’s profiles or the newsfeed regularly not just because I’m busy doing other things and prefer to hang out on other sites but because I do get tired of the same old, same old at times. It still bothers me to have to hear about Bill and she knows this.

“What if you were raped,” I asked her, “and you and that rapist had a mutual friend and that friend was constantly praising your rapist? She said she wouldn’t mind it at all.”

Wow! That’s great that she can do that but I’m not her. I can’t make myself feel or not feel whatever it is I feel or don’t feel for various people who have screwed me in the past. Sure wish I could, though!

I understand that they have a right to post what they want but I think it would be nice if people took the time and consideration to block people from posts they don’t think they would care to see. I do this for them.

I agree with Tammy that if they want to post memes about him if they find it therapeutic and helpful in grieving and getting through the tough times and all that, more power to them. It’s certainly better than doing drugs or alcohol. Where I get a little irritated is when people expect me to consider their feelings without any regard for mine, as I said.

This whole incident, or whatever you can call it, has been a real eye-opener for me. All those years ago, even though I didn’t do it in a very legal way, I really was out of line for defending Tammy. I can kind of see now why so many people are hesitant to defend others for various reasons. Sometimes it really isn’t our place to defend them and they really do need to work things out on their own. Like Tammy herself said, it was between her and Bill. She never asked me to say anything, and as she taught me, defending someone, regardless of how you go about it, has a way of backfiring. I don’t think I could just stand back in silence and not defend Tom if someone was messing with him, but Tammy wasn’t a spouse or a child and I really should have kept my mouth shut and stayed out of it. In the past, had I walked down the street and saw some guy attacking a woman, I would’ve done my best to pull him off of her and probably even beat the crap out of him. Not anymore! I may call the cops but that’s as far as I go. Should I say anything if I was present if someone was verbally or emotionally abusing Tom, for example? Probably not. I probably shouldn’t butt in and I should just let him deal with it himself as he’s a big boy and plenty capable of taking care of himself. But that particular type of scenario may be easier said than done.

I also realize that while I shouldn’t have to be responsible for how people take things that I post, sometimes sharing some thoughts or ideas can come across as cryptic or suspicious to others. I’ll be more choosy about what I say but again, there’s only so far I’m willing to go with that because people have to take responsibility for their own reactions as well and I can’t possibly always know upfront who might take what the wrong way or read something into it that isn’t there. Sometimes we gotta do what we gotta do within reason and accept that the way people take it is on them. Not us, even though society likes to think otherwise too much of the time.

I still have mixed emotions about living near such dramatic, sensitive, and sometimes very emotional people with aggressive streaks such as Tammy and the girls have. I can’t stress it enough when I say I don’t need or want any drama. I don’t want to hear about Bill, Lisa, God (she left God out of the last conversation) and I don’t want to think I’m saying the most innocent of things just to find out it pissed everyone off. I’m getting much too old to play that game and the whole she said, he said bullshit.

Another thing that frustrates me about Tammy is that she’s not very bright. It’s very hard to have a conversation with her because she’s always rambling and butting in and I often have to explain things several times because she either has memory loss worse than mine or she just doesn’t get it. This doesn’t mean I don’t understand that she is how she is or that I don’t care for her. She just really irritates me at times.

Speaking of living near them, Tammy shocked me by saying she and Mark may actually move to some Island where the cost of living is really cheap just for a change of pace and I guess so Mark doesn’t have to spend so much time working. I was surprised because I just didn’t think she would ever move. I thought this was it for her. It would be funny if we ended up moving to Florida while she left Florida. I told her we too, would eventually consider other countries as well. I definitely like the idea of low-cost and Universal Health Care, but I don’t know if there are any countries that have both, including a warm climate.

She’s still really worried she may have sarcoidosis and mentioned that it could kill you within 7 years and that they first thought she might have it in Connecticut and all that. That may be a good sign, though, as I told her, saying that it won’t kill her if that’s what it is. I came up with contradicting info in my search on that. On one hand, it says that most people can live normal lives with it and that it usually goes away but then some sites said you have up to 7 years. Let’s just wait and see if that’s what she really has, though, because not all her test results are back yet.

We were talking about aging and laughing about how much longer it takes to pee when you’re older and just when you think you’re done, you’re not, lol.