I better be a little less expressive in public lest I worry my dear sis, LOL. For the second day in a row, the park turned our water off, this time for longer, and I vented about it on Facebook. Had to laugh when she said she worried I was putting too much stress on myself that would affect my health and mind, but as I told her, I was just annoyed as hell. Stress is wondering if you’ll be able to pay the rent like we had to worry about for years during the recession. This is nothing compared to other things I’ve gone through in life, but still annoying. It’s just ridiculous that they don’t have a better way of dealing with pipe issues without turning the entire park off. If they just added more valves, maybe then they’d only have to turn off sections at a time, and not everybody. Still, I appreciate her concern. But the water was off for just over eight hours. So yeah, I was a little ticked off. Even Tom was frustrated, and it takes a lot to get him worked up in any way being as easygoing as he is.

As for expressing myself and venting, that actually makes me feel better and alleviates any stress I may feel. That’s part of why I’ve kept a journal for so long.

It wasn’t just the water outage that was pissing me off, but the constant projects. I’ve never lived anywhere before in my life where you couldn’t even go a week without someone doing something. Looks like Lawrence is remodeling his kitchen, from what I could see and hear with the damn circular saws. What sucks is that for things like this they do most of the sawing and hammering outdoors where everyone can hear it. Really hope he’s not prepping to sell since he’s been here for so long. That would be the second-worst house to have to deal with a turnover being right across the street and by the bedroom.

A shitload of dirt came spilling out of the faucets once we finally got our water turned back on and I had just cleaned the bathrooms too, so that frustrated me as well.

Then I teased Tammy about her grammar and how she puts my name in front of the comments she makes on my posts. Like I wouldn’t know she was talking to me? ;)

We exchanged voice clips this morning. Her kidneys are the same. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. Obviously, it would be better if they had improved but I don’t know if bad kidneys automatically worsen with time or not. she would know more about that than I would.

Then she said something about a test to see if what she’s been through the last couple of months has worsened her sarcoidosis. I wonder why you would need a test for that. Wouldn’t she know just by whether or not she’s struggling more to breathe? I guess there must be something that shows up in the test that gives him a better idea than just how she’s feeling. Struggling to breathe is one of the worst things you can go through. I remember that well back when I was a smoker and had all kinds of asthma attacks, breathing treatments, inhalers, pills, x-rays, and this thing you breathe into as hard as you can to measure the force of your lung capacity or something like that. It was this tube and there was this thing in it that would climb higher up the tube the harder you blew into it.

She has so many aches and pains (and very long nails) that it was hard for her to even hold the button for the microphone to leave voice clips and asked me how to add speech to text to her phone. She has a good enough voice for it. She doesn’t talk too fast, mumble, run her words together and she does articulate well but get rid of that damned accent, I told her! LOL, but then I’m nearly 30 years out of New England where she’s just a few years. There are exercises she can do to help make it more generic, so she says “story” instead of “starry.” There’s a lot of “ah” in the northeastern accent. Even I still have traces of it in some words and speech-to-text will sometimes write “water” when I say “quarter.”

Anyway, I’m not sure how to add that to her kind of phone. Tom added that to our ‘droids and I’m not sure how he did it. I’ll see if I can find out once I know exactly what phone she has.

She’s looking for old electronics like Roomba, Alexa, and whatever after I mentioned wanting to upgrade things. Yeah, me and my big mouth. She was whining, saying they’ve given me hand-me-downs, blah blah blah…

I don’t mind helping her out when we can, and yes, she has helped me. We don’t plan to upgrade Roomba until we move, so she’ll have to wait on that. But she can have the last Alexa we got that’s too bassy since we’re going to get one with a digital clock in it that’s not nearly as blinding as the clock radio which I no longer need since I can have Alexa set alarms when I need them. She can’t have my MacBook Air, as I told her, because I’m going to use it to do puzzles when I’m on the treadmill.

I can imagine how pissed she would be if she knew that if Aly remains in my life as I hope she will, she’s probably the one that’s going to get everything we own. Not her brats. LOL. I’ve also told Tom that if there’s anything he can’t use if I die first and doesn’t donate, pack it all up and send it to Aly…clothes, electronics, collectibles, jewelry… Whatever I have that he doesn’t want and doesn’t mind shipping.

Because of her diseases, she can’t even vacuum well. And her selfish, narcissistic brats can’t help? I realize, though, that she’s not doing nearly as well as I thought she was financially. She’s looking to replace everything, including phones and computers. She did say there were a lot of expenditures when Mark was in Ohio and with her being so sick. Well, we’re not broke but we’re not rich either. We still owe hundreds to my dermatologist.

Later…

Went to visit Dixie and if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t know that the motherfuckers were turning our water off for the third day in a row, again for about 6-8 hours. She called the office upset that they didn’t notify us yesterday and that’s how she learned that the water would be off today. I know I’ve said it a thousand times, but damn, I can’t wait to get the hell out of here! No place is perfect, I’ve never lived in a quiet place, and I never will live in a quiet place that’s perfect. But we can definitely get a place where we can have water full-time and that’s at least somewhat quieter than this. My entire visit with Dixie was filled with planes and circular saws, this time coming from someplace close to her place. I wouldn’t have heard it in our place, and I don’t think Lawrence is having any work done today. She doesn’t have any sound machines running like I do and says she’s able to tune it out. Some things I can tune out, but I’m easily distracted in general and a very observant person, so it’s harder for me. I notice things. I’m completely mystified by the fact that no one else here seems to be bothered by this shit that I know of. I realize that my hearing is better than a lot of these people, but still. I’m just baffled as to how people can be okay with loud landscaping noise every day, sometimes on and off for hours, regular projects, loud traffic, and tons of planes. Sorry, but I just don’t get it.

Dixie is definitely kind of out of it and she seems to know it, too. Every time I see her, she complains about memory issues. She definitely seems to have trouble remembering things and seems to have an even harder time focusing than I do. She’ll get up out of her chair and say she’s ready to do the closets but then she’ll stop to tell me or show me something else along the way and it’s quite a while before we make it to the closet. She seems to be erratic in a lot of ways too, going back and forth with her feelings about whoever and whatever. She wasn’t too thrilled with a black lady next to her but now she considers her a friend for life. She just loved Santa, who she swears she saw taking a leak outside in the middle of the daytime, and now she doesn’t like him very much anymore.

Anyway, it took no time at all to help with the closet. I just shuffled some clothes around for her. Well, for Diane. That’s whose room we were working in. She pointed out some safety pins she put in several of her shirts and said that she did it because Diane likes to pull down her shirt and she finds it disgusting that women would let their boobs show. I guess she sees it on TV and mimics what she sees. Dixie doesn’t mind swearing and sometimes she swears as well, but she is a definite prude, LOL.

I totally loved the 2 little skylights in her hallway that look like real lights. I was surprised to learn they were skylights, too. I really thought they were bright lights and I had wondered why she always had them on during bright sunny days.

I was with her for a couple of hours and she really seems to love having me around, asking when I would be back and all that. I usually visit every other week or so.

When I got back I was so fucking hungry but I didn’t want to bake anything and warm the house up so we would need the AC. Contrary to popular belief, not all Californians are rich, and we still have a lot of medical debt, so I like to save money whenever I can.

Finally got the body markers which took forever to get here since they came from China. There was a dozen of them, and the damned things had broken out of their container and were loose in the envelope. Then I found that my favorite color was broken and another was dried up. At least the ink seems to be pretty good quality and like it won’t rub off too easily. I found that the stencil stickers are easy to use but you really have to let the ink dry and pull them off slowly otherwise the ink will run.

Aly is back with Cam, so we’ll see how long it lasts this time around.

Decided to make my Alyce boy shorts backups because they’re too high-waisted and too low in the legs as well. I found that Fruit of the Loom boy shorts fit me the best in size 7. I also saved a couple of pairs of their size eights that aren’t 100% cotton but 60% cotton and 40% polyester.

My royalties are now estimated to be $9.23. Wonder when I’m going to get two borrows on the same day?