When the phone rang yesterday evening and I saw it was Tammy calling, I knew it had to be pretty important since she knows I hate live chats. Plus, she’s without a computer and phone at the moment so she couldn’t message me.

She told me she was to be admitted to the hospital in the morning. First, and as I told her, I haven’t had any bad dreams about her in a while now. The last dream I had that came true was about her losing a lot of weight. The worst thing to be coming true so far, even though she’s only been 62 for a few months, is the feeling I had for a few years about this being a bad year for her. I just didn’t know why, and apparently, neither does she or her doctors. Therefore, they’re going to be admitting her and a specialist is going to try to figure out what’s going on, which was why she called.

She’s got pleurisy and some kind of infection that just won’t quit and hasn’t responded to antibiotics. Of course, smoking and having no immune system doesn’t help either. I looked up pleurisy and it’s both common and treatable, so yeah, if it’s not going away then something else might be going on.

I looked up the causes of pleurisy and there are quite a few possibilities that range from RA to cancer to infections and other things.

Unfortunately, when it comes to vibes and dream premonitions, no one can control what they see/dream, and no matter what they see or don’t see, it doesn’t change the outcome of things. Tammy still would have lost weight, and this still would have been a bad year for her even if I hadn’t had any dreams or feelings about it. I’m also not going to have vibes and dreams every time something happens. That’s just not how it works. No idea why I only get so much info or how to control it, though. I wish I could control it because then if I could see or predict everything, I would be rich and so would everyone close to me. I guess it’s like with her and her prayers. Some happen, some don’t, and you never know why.

Besides letting me know they were admitting her in the morning for an undetermined amount of time, she wanted to give me the names of the hospitals so I can look up their numbers to call her for updates.

I know her diseases don’t help and that she’s really stressed out, but as usual, she was both a bit dramatic and even a little argumentative. She ended up having to try to convince me that Windows and Androids suck as if I were utterly insane for planning to get a Windows computer and sticking with Androids. She made her point once, so did she really have to do it over and over again? And bring up those fucking brats of hers? That’s part of why I can’t stand live chats with her because I know they’re always going to have to come up. I know she’s seen me mention several times how uncomfortable it makes me feel to hear about those I’m no longer in touch with. She could have just said she’s had trouble with androids as well as people she knows. She didn’t have to sit and list each bitch off one by one.

As I’ve said before, I know this may sound horribly selfish of me, but a part of me wishes something would kill her because I know she would never dump me and I just get tired of the drama at the same time my heart breaks for all she has to go through. If I had to choose between her dying and being dumped, of course I’d rather she just dump me. She doesn’t literally need to die. It’s just that she’s no fun to deal with. We’re just too different and I get sick of hearing about prayer, God and the brats. She’s emotional, she’s dramatic, she has memory issues, she gets pushy, she’s argumentative, and she’s not very bright. She could never get me the way Tom and Aly do.

I wrote the above last night but was too tired to go through it and post it. I have a lot of journal and story updating to do.

Decided to call Tammy tomorrow instead of today. She told me that between 1 and 4 her time would be best, but she’s only been admitted for a few hours as of now and that may not be enough time to get any real answers as to what’s going on with her.

I kind of feel guilty for wishing something would kill her. Instead, I wish her brats would just disappear. Tom once said he didn’t want people to die and have to deal with bodies all over the place but that he just wanted them gone because they’re so annoying. That’s kind of how I feel about Tammy and her brats. I sympathize with what she’s going through and I hate to see her suffer, but at the same time, I wish they would all just go away.

I don’t know what to think anymore. Is it really the beginning of the end for her or not? I just don’t know. Sometimes I think there’s no way she could live another 20 years or so with all she’s gone through, but I’m sure that’s what many people have thought about others with chronic diseases. So unless she has a deadly heart attack or stroke or comes out and tells me she has cancer they can’t kill, I assume I have many more years to deal with her and her mentioning those goddamn narcissistic brats who have shown me just how selfish they can be. We’re all naturally selfish in some ways, but come on. There’s selfish and then there’s selfish.

I have mentioned in journal entries that I know she’s seen that it makes me very uncomfortable to hear about those I’m no longer connected to whether it’s relatives or not and regardless of who dumped who. Some people really can’t take the hint no matter how much you spell it out for them, and I often wonder why. Are they that forgetful or do they just not give a shit? I think I can guess which one it usually is. She may be forgetful, but her pointing out how she’s been reading about all the stuff we’re doing and things were getting and then begging for electronics, saying she’s given me hand-me-downs shows she doesn’t forget everything. I think she’s just selfish. She’ll forget what’s not important to her, and she doesn’t care to honor other people’s wishes. She’s going to do what she’s going to do and that’s that. But again, why would I care about someone I’m no longer connected to? I don’t actively wish anything bad upon my nieces but I’m indifferent as to what happens to them and that’s on them. Meaning that I’ve become this way due to how they’ve treated me.

Anyway, I’m not the least bit surprised she hasn’t taken the hint. Every time she mentions them, which is part of why I hate live chats, I want to scream at her never to mention them again but I know she would feel very hurt and angry if I did that and I don’t want to offend her. I would feel the same way too, if I had brats and a friend or family member told me they didn’t want to hear about them after they were dumped by them. I don’t want to hurt her unnecessarily which is why I haven’t given her brats a piece of my mind.

Unless you’re like our mother was, she’s always going to side with her kids and no one else. Sarah’s other aunt that threw her out; I would be willing to bet anything that it was with total just cause. But no matter what, Tammy isn’t going to see it that way. She’ll go so far as to admit she doesn’t agree with everything her girls do, but for the most part, she’s always going to defend her kids whether they deserve it or not. I think it’s pretty safe to say, however, that with one aunt throwing them out and another not wanting anything to do with them that the problem is them.

Yesterday was noisy as hell. On top of the usual sounds, they fucking cut more of the trees between Santa and the newest people on the street and worked till just after 5. I was so fucking frustrated and annoyed! Sometimes I wonder how I’m going to survive four more years of this place. It’s not even quiet at night here, just quieter.

I also don’t see how I’m going to survive four more years with this dented, lumpy mattress. After the computer, I’ve got to make a new mattress a priority. Even if it’s something cheap that will only last for the rest of our time here. Even when exercising my core regularly, I still wake up with backaches at times.

Tom was able to fix the pink marker and I had fun drawing a flower and some branches on the tops of my feet, a Star of David on my hand, plus a long abstract design that sort of made a “bracelet” around my wrist. The Jewish star is gone and everything else has faded. The tats on the top of my feet are still visible though. They wash off in the shower, some places quicker than others depending on where you put them. I learned it’s best to wait a minute for the ink to dry and pull the sticker stencil off slowly or else the ink will run. They’re still way better than temporary tats because you don’t feel like you have anything sticking to you this way. They’re just very short-lived. They’d be good to do right before you go out somewhere.

My historical royalties are $38.57. This is counting the time I had books listed back in 2013. Then I took a long break when they were ripping some authors off.

My total royalties right now for November are $15.97, so I’m averaging about a buck a day. Renting Ginny has been downloaded every day since the 1st when it was published with the exception of three days.

I also learned what happens when you get more than one borrower in a day. They simply add everybody’s pages together. So, if you have 3 borrowers that have each read 100 pages, it will show as 300 pages read and that’s what you’d get credit for. When the page count climbed to 950 yesterday, I knew there had to be more than one reader because the story is only something like 55k words long.

To have gone from earning around 5 bucks in a few years to 15 in a couple of weeks is definitely making progress, even though I don’t ever expect to be able to survive off of my book sales.

We’re going to open a PayPal account in my name this weekend and I’m going to see if Smashwords will publish me. Had a book with them nearly a decade ago, but things have changed a lot since then as far as how they operate. They don’t withhold taxes as Amazon does, but Mitch really has good things to say about them and he makes $900 a year with fewer books than I have. So I was thinking I would give it a try, even if he’s a better writer and his books are longer. Smashwords may not get as much traffic as Amazon does, but they push your books to their front page when they’re newly published. Amazon does not.

I went and tweaked some keywords and pricing on Rainstorm to see if that would cause it to get some borrows, but so far nothing. Something’s got to be drawing people to Renting Ginny, and if it isn’t the keywords, maybe it’s the suggestive cover? I just don’t know.

Slept better last night and woke up less often. Going to have to add the stereo’s white noise and switch Alexa from pink noise to brown noise so I have a wider range of frequencies to mask the sounds around here as I start sleeping in. Last night I just had the air cleaner running and the fan, since it got a little warm in here. Plus, Alexa playing pink noise. I found that the pink noise is similar to the white noise the stereo generates. But brown noise has a deeper “roar” to it that helps with loud vehicles.

The only other dream I remember recently was living in our old house again in Maricopa, which grew in size and became a jail. Yeah, that pretty much sums up my life there. Instead of living out our dreams there, it turned into one big prison.

Been on the treadmill for 19 minutes so I think I’ll stop and do some more later.