Couldn’t fall asleep until after 4 in the morning and at 11, I awoke to this fierce rumbling sound. My sleep-fogged brain came up with nearly half a dozen possibilities before I finally realized exactly what was going on. My first thought was that the trash collectors were making their way through until I realized it wasn’t trash day.

My next thought, as I got up to pee, was that it was an incredibly loud car stereo.

Then I figured Lawrence or someone down the street was running a woodchipper.

Next, I walked out of the bedroom and looked out the dining room window and my first thought when I saw two guys with this big yellow thing was that they were tearing up the roads again.

Then I realized they were on our lot doing the cypress trees and my first thought was that the park just couldn’t fucking wait until Saturday, had come to get rid of them themselves, and would then hand us a bill much higher than $900.

Deciding I wanted to go out and kill them, I ran to Skype Tom before I went out and dealt with them which I preferred not to be done in my birthday suit anyway.

I was then tremendously relieved to see a message from him saying they called saying they were here and ready to work. The Mexican guys we hired last week. He let them know he was at work so he couldn’t pay them and they said they’d come back for their money later. That’s some seriously trusting people even though they know exactly where we live.

Anyway, I slept through the cutting of the cypresses which they didn’t run through a woodchipper. They just put them in the back of the trailer. That would be the easy part. We could have done that ourselves but we don’t have a place to put twelve trees. When I peeked out, I saw someone pushing what looked like a large yellow lawnmower and another person holding a piece of plywood to keep debris from getting kicked up and spit at the house. That’s when I realized they were grinding down the stumps. They did a beautiful job and you’d never know they’d been there! Guessing the job took about 3 hours.

The weird thing is the strange smell. It’s almost a mix of a rubbery and poisonous scent. I don’t know if it came from their machinery or what but I’m sure it will fade.

Love how I can just walk through to the street without having to squeeze through webs and wasp nests embedded in the trees, but it seems so open and exposed now. Gonna probably get a lattice fence as well as fake grass.

As tired as I was and still am, I’m glad to have it done and over with since I’m probably not going to sleep well tomorrow either with the trash and recycle trucks coming around for sure. You know they don’t just come and go here. Gotta make a big 2 to 4-hour production out of it. And if the damn earbuds slip just a little and I don’t have a good seal, loud vehicles are free to wake me up.

Damn, do I hope the next place is a lot further from the street and that it’s a dead street compared to this one! We’re nowhere near done with our research and there isn’t much we can really do until we’re actually ready to make the move, but right now it’s looking like we’re going to end up in a park instead of rural because we just don’t have that much money. Unless his app takes off better than expected (it would be nice if he had more time to work on it), I don’t know if we can really afford much more than a basic setup. I would have loved to be able to pick out a brand new place and have two floors, but that’s not looking likely at the moment. We might be able to get something new after replacing an old dump in some park but it likely would have to be one story.

I still can’t believe Tammy’s moving to Ohio. LOL, I’d never have guessed it any more than I’d have guessed I’d spend a few years in Oregon.

The thing I notice most when I talk to her is just how “foreign” she sounds since she still has a distinct Northeastern accent and I’ve lost most of mine due to now living in the West longer than I have in the East, and deliberate practice for using Speech-to-Text and being better understood by the people here. My accent is getting more and more generic, you could say. There are some words that are tough to change but I “tawk” a lot more than I “tahk” these days. Don’t know what annoys me more, accents I’m not used to or those that jumble their words together and don’t speak clearly. I still understand big sis well. I did grow up talking the same way, after all. ;)

Anyway, the fucking park is turning off the water again for a couple of hours in the morning but hopefully, I won’t be up yet. And if Joy knows what’s good for her, she won’t pull any more shit with us! We wanted to do this anyway so if she thinks we did it on account of her, she’s kidding herself. She just gave us the inspiration. :) But if there’s any more shit, we WILL definitely put our foot down. First of all, she’s not our mother and we’re not children. Secondly, if we keep giving in, she’ll keep taking advantage of us.

Once we go to Sam’s this weekend, I’m going to change up my smoothie fruits and take a break from bananas and strawberries. I like variety so I’m going to get apples, peaches and plums. Today I made a smoothie with blueberries and strawberries in what wasn’t quite enough coconut milk since it came out a bit thick. Tomorrow’s a banana and peanut butter smoothie day with a boost of granola. I really should give the rest of the granola to the rats. It isn’t LS-friendly.

I rarely eat bread but every now and then I get a loaf of Jewish rye. The mayo just expired so I spread hummus on the bread before adding turkey and lettuce and it was pretty good.

Got some Kettle Corn popcorning seasoning and butter spray on Amazon, along with a day and night set of facial cleansers.

Love the bright colorful sink strainer I got from Walmart that has neon yellow and green. Should’ve gotten one for each side of the sink. Makes keeping the drain clear much easier.

I was super cold yesterday but okay today. Trimmed a bit less off of my pill this morning to make it closer to 60mcg rather than 50. Don’t want to go back to 75 just yet as I really want to stick this experiment out. I’ll go back when the anxiety returns, and since all my past experiments were a bust, there’s no reason not to think this one will be too.

Finished reading The Girl in Red by John Nicholl. Great book! Definitely gotta check out more of his stuff. I’m reading a Ben Cheetham mystery right now.

One funny thing before I go relax after doing everything I needed to get done - change the pigs’ liner, change the rats’ upper-level liner, wash them, load the dishwasher, gather the trash - although I’m not so sure the pigs found it funny. Rats love to chase anything and everything they can… People, cats, each other, whatever. The rats never hurt the pigs and the pigs don’t mind them when they’re just sitting there with them but when the rats get playful, the pigs get a bit nervous. Well, Fuzzy sure started trolling them today! He started chasing the pigs round and round the pen and while it was funny as hell to watch what’s a game to him, I don’t know if the pigs, being prey animals, got off on it very much. But they didn’t seem shaken up once I pulled Fuzzy out of the pen. I expected the teeth to be chattering a mile a minute but they weren’t. Yeah, the little bully can be funny with his chase games.

No longer babies and now full-grown adults, the rats are now on blocks. I filled their bowl with some and they hid them. Figured they would, LOL.