For $20 I got a VR painting app called Vermillion. Facebook more than paid for it, since they're giving me more and more jobs to do. I think I'm now making over 100 bucks a month doing their surveys and studies.

I haven't checked it out entirely yet, but so far it seems pretty realistic. I've chosen the bright sunny loft with its large plants to be my studio environment. The old-fashioned Victorian-looking room was okay but not as bright. Didn't care for the passthrough at all, especially since the cameras on these headsets produce a grainy, black-and-white picture of our real-life surroundings when we step outside our guardians. The cameras on the newer headsets are supposed to be better and in color as well.
 
Had this really weird dream that my parents were still alive and I went to visit them at their house. The weird thing was that I never saw them because they were off mingling with their neighbors. I was looking forward to chatting and catching up on things because it had been so long. But instead, I was left alone to wander through their place. As I gazed around at the square-shaped, small two-bedroom house, I realized I didn't find it as nice as I used to. I liked our newer home better even if it was too small. I could see how I liked it a lot when they first moved into it and I was much younger.

Knowing my mother recently had surgery for something, I spotted a letter lying open on their kitchen table. Only the letter was written in a language that doesn't exist. There were gray circles throughout the letter with different symbols in them, each representing a word that I seemed to understand perfectly well. The only line I remember reading was, "I'm sorry your surgery bankrupted you."

Then I woke up, got up to use the bathroom, fell back asleep, and the dream actually continued! Only this time, Tom was with me. Same thing, though, with my parents out and about somewhere. We slowly walked through the house and I asked Tom what something I spotted in the corner of a room was before my eyes could focus on it and he said, "That's a bathroom," even though it was really a microwave. LOL.

Then I told him I didn't remember things correctly because I thought they had a slider in back of their house with the beach just beyond it. But there was actually a door with a little hallway leading to an outer door. Plus, the beach was across the street in front of their place.

Suddenly worried for our own future as I realized things weren't as well with them as I thought, I turned to Tom and asked if he thought we would be able to move into a bigger house, but most importantly, survive financially for the rest of our lives. He said he couldn't guarantee things.

Later...

Got a great shot of this cute little egret that jumped onto some bushes outside the window of Burger King to beg this lady for food a couple of booths down from us.

So Helen and I started breaking down the most traumatic and tough events of my life. I forget what it’s called, but she’s doing this thing that helps change the way I perceive and feel about past events in order to help me in the present and the future. Then she’s going to be doing a form of EMDR on me. Today, after filling her in on my many upcoming appointments, we discussed the worst memory I have of my mother. Oddly enough but gratefully enough, despite the stress and the not-so-fun trip down Memory Lane, I have continued to feel good both physically and emotionally.

When we went out in the 75-degree temperatures, I felt fine. I felt nice and comfortable instead of like I was on fire despite 75 degrees not being that hot. My heart hasn’t raced either. I wish I could always feel this way. I hate to think it’s because my thyroid numbers are way off, but I would rather that and feel good than the other way around. The lower that TSH goes, the faster my heart races and the more I feel like I’m burning up no matter what the temp is not to mention the anxiety and depression that comes on. I should get a better sense of where my thyroid is somewhere between the middle and end of this month and then it will be lab time again. My calculations put me at 6. If I’m under 10, I’m not changing a damn thing. Whenever I make changes is when the trouble starts.

I’ll be meeting with Helen again in a couple of weeks. Between my schedule, her schedule, and all my other appointments, that’s the soonest I can meet with her. In another week or so, we’ve got to call to schedule the appointment with the surgeon.

I also gave Helen the main highlights of my childhood, including the time I was a ward of the state. At the end of our session, she had me bring me back to my safe place I call Rainbow Beach. She also had me visualize putting the shitty memories of my mother in a locked box to save for when we meet again. So while the bitch got to toss me to the state, I get to place her in a nice, bright hot pink (my fave color) steel box with chains wrapped around it…until I give her permission to come out. *grins wickedly*

For the first time, I actually laughed at the Devil Dog part of it. When I was explaining to Helen that I grabbed whatever I could from the cabinet because I had so little strength that day and ended up with a pack of Devil Dogs, she didn’t know what I was talking about at first. The funny part was when I said, “I haven’t had the damn things ever since and I never will.” So we both laughed at that one.

It was nice how she thanked me for trusting her with this before we signed off.

Tom seems to be tired more often lately. I wonder if it’s age or his own TSH. He’ll be seeing a doctor this summer when he needs more blood pressure pills and they’ll probably do a blood panel on him and find out what’s going on. Maybe it’s just age. Besides, naps and retirement kind of go hand in hand. He doesn’t nap every day, though.

Andy’s been fighting depression for the last few weeks so he started working out again. That will definitely help, and as I told him, more isn’t necessarily better. Even 15 minutes is better than nothing at all.

I returned Vermillion and requested a refund because it was too complicated to use. The graphics were great, but the navigation got confusing as hell.

Then my headset lost its mind for a while. It kept telling me to create a new Guardian and would lose tracking. It was also placing me in the wrong position within apps. Instead of appearing to be standing by the tray that holds all the different golf balls in the Walkabout app, I’m floating above it one minute, then I’m embedded in it the next. So I cleaned the camera lenses and when Tom was looking at it, he found that the edges of the stickers I had on it were lifting and creating shadows which were confusing it. No wonder the damn thing has been telling me to turn the lights on lately when the lights were already on.

The only funny thing was that we swapped heights and he appeared shorter than me when we were golfing earlier. Before we figured out what the problem was, he created a new guardian and when you do that, it calibrates your height.