Although I’m polite and not friendly when it comes to Apple Cheeks, we ended up making a little bit of small talk yesterday, anyway. He was asking Tom about his job and telling me, “Well, your community service is almost done, you’re almost done with the anger management, you got the screening done, so all you have to do is stay out of trouble and report.”

This was good to hear. Meaning, I took it as a good sign saying he won’t harass me about the job. Tom says that unless I can find a job working for someone, I shouldn’t even bother to tell him. Meaning that if I end up being an independent contractor, I should never divulge my edges, so to speak, and not use them unless I need to. However, he did ask me what medications I was on. For him to ask this out of the blue and for the first time in a while, makes me think I’m in for a drug test next time around.

Jack and Jill turned out to be Jack and Zach, so I set them free yesterday about a mile from the house. I didn’t want them anyway, because they chewed so fiercely that there’d have been no way I could keep them in any of the cages for too long. They just weren’t happy here, either.

Tom picked up bottles this morning and told Gina that I didn’t come along so he could fit more in. As we figured, this was no problem.

Later...

Tom downloaded me a few programs to try out that encrypt files. Any kind of file. Not just doc files. The first one was risky because you only got one shot at typing in your code. If you made a typo, and couldn’t figure out what that typo was, you could never get into the file again, so that one wasn’t good. The next one let you confirm your password, allowing you to type it twice to make sure it matched up with the first one you typed, but it created other files I didn’t want that sort of defeated the purpose. The one I settled on allows me to confirm, use the same code for each file, and choose whether or not I encrypted a few files or my whole directory. First I encrypted my whole directory and then I decrypted the files I didn’t feel were necessary to be encrypted, like my doll and pet charts and petty shit like that. It’s the journal files I wanted to be encrypted.

It’s not as convenient, because now, each time I go to use the computer, I have to first decrypt the files I want to use, then encrypt them when I shut down. I think it’s worth the time and effort, though. Not that I’ve got anything to hide, but because I fear my stuff being stolen by the pigs and I don’t want to make things easier on them. If you did not receive my permission to read my journals or any parts of them, then you will not read them! Period. Any unauthorized people will get garbage; a bunch of meaningless letters, numbers and symbols.

I backed up all my stuff again too, so the stuff on floppies is now encrypted as well. I have a floppy on a couple of dolls that contain my current stuff. Then I have a backup that I keep right here on my desk and a set in the vent. Tom will take care of backing me up on CD and putting that in the ground.

I’m not even going to say what my code is in this journal because they could come and seize this while I was in the middle of working on it. I know it’s being overly cautious and paranoid, but after all I’ve been through, I could never be too cautious/paranoid. Logically looking at it, it seems so unlikely that they’d seize my computer, but we never thought they’d throw me in jail for 6 months over a letter, either. In this state, with the way the system is, one can never be sure of anything.

I’m on a roll vibe-wise. First I vibed that something significant would happen on the 8th, then I vibed the August car trouble, and the last time we got tickets, I vibed we’d win. We did. His ticket won twice on Bingo. A total of $5.

We’re trying out a different mice arrangement. I wanted to just throw them all together and dump the ones I didn’t want to keep the population at a steady 30 or so mice, but he suggested we separate the adult females. Then as the younger females get pregnant, pull them out and put them with the other ladies, and basically keep doing that till we get all the mice we want. It’s just a bitch sexing them! Until they’re older, after they’ve started breeding, it’s not that easy to tell them apart.

When I was changing the rat’s cage, I set the bars on the floor with them inside it. I noticed Little Buddy seemed to be having trouble getting out through the part that’s wider and sits down inside the base, so I put the wire roof back on. Sure enough, though, he came to visit me in the bathroom as I was working on bottles. So, the plastic shelves were put back on.

I wonder just what in the world is up with Paula? I’ve only gotten one letter from her since I’ve been home. Maybe I should quit writing to her till I hear from her. You never know if she’s stuck in jail! I want to make sure she’s OK and getting my mail before I keep writing. I wish she’d write at least once a month! Like the first of every month. It doesn’t have to be a novel. Just the basic highlights of her life would do.

I take that back. Maybe I will have something to hide but from Tom and not the pigs. I still doubt Tom snoops into these journals, but once again, you can’t be too sure about anything in this world. If anything happens between Teddy Bear and I, it could hurt his feelings if he read up on it, although I say that if you’re going to stick your nose where it doesn’t belong, you ask for and deserve what you might get from it.