I keep forgetting to mention that the PR cock Paula’s dealing with is so damn jealous and paranoid that he asked Paula if she was getting it on with Tom. I was like, yeah, right! All the way across the country she’s getting it on with my asexual husband! Hasn’t she told him that Tom’s white, not her cup of tea anyway?

She and I were talking about whether or not God favors man over a woman. Well, it’s rather obvious that he does. Look what we women go through with periods and what some go through carrying/delivering kids, not to mention the abuse most of us take from men. They say this has to do with Eve disobeying him. But what’s that got to do with us women now centuries later? See, if this story’s true, it goes to prove that God really would make a person pay for another’s sins, like Tom and I.

Tom fixed the squeak in my computer by tightening up screws, so now there’ll be a new problem any sec.

I love this Webshots site. I still have their software so I can download and export pictures, but I use a different wallpaper program. They have two new pictures a day. I wish it were more like 20 or 30, but at least they’re getting new ones regularly. All the other wallpaper sites hardly ever update their pictures.

I decided that so I could keep things in better order, I’d divide Mary’s stuff into 3 files. One for her clips from her preteen years, one for her teen years, and one for her adult years.

It’s amazing how we lived together in a tiny room for 9 days, barely knowing a thing about each other. Now, though, we haven’t seen each other in over a year yet we know each other rather well.

Here’s what I’ve learned about her through her book and letters: She’s a very sweet, compassionate person, yet she’s naïve and too trusting. Not so shocking, though, seeing that she’s only 24. I don’t think she’s attracted to abusive men in the way Paula and Tammy are, but she’s definitely cursed. Her parents were even worse than mine were, in a sense, and as you know, mine were quite terrible. Her father became your typical deadbeat dad and her mother abused her and her only sibling, Adam, 4 years older, verbally, physically and emotionally. The two were eventually sent away to boarding schools that I’m sure weren’t much better than Valleyhead. Then Mary’s had one abusive relationship after another with her mental and intellectual growth stunted by motherhood at just 15 years of age.

I can see where Mary’s being too nice, so to speak, as well as too trusting has gotten her in trouble. An example of that is that she handed her baby to an old lady to hold while she folded up the stroller to put in a waiting taxicab. Well, anyone with sense knows and would agree that even if it’s a frail, seemingly harmless old lady, you do not give your baby to a stranger.

Mary seems to be a very honest, non-contradicting person who keeps her word, yet she obviously has a poor sense of judgment at times. How she could have left her daughter home while she was at work to be killed by a man who had proven time and time again to be abusive towards her and her daughter, is totally beyond me. Even more beyond me is how she could’ve run off with him from Florida to Seattle after he killed her. She had already run with him from Arizona to Florida after he abused her son James, who was adopted, along with another son of hers named Andrew.

Other than leaving her daughter in the hands of a monster, Mary seems to have been very in tune with her daughter’s needs and a very loving mother. She also seems rather intelligent for her age, despite her hardships and becoming a mom so young.

Mary and Adam bonded in their 20s after all they’d been through. Except for their aunt Carolyn, it seems the whole family was crazy. Her firstborn, Murphy, lives with her aunt in Arizona. Mary has a boyfriend, Todd, whom she has told me is the opposite of her past boyfriends and her ex-husband Justin. He is said to be a very caring, supportive young man.

To my knowledge, Mary has never been sexually abused. At least not in the form of rape or molestation.

I will say that Mary has up and removed herself and her daughter Gretchen from abusive men a few times, but sadly, she’d always go back till one day it was too late.

She’s both a good and a not-so-good writer. She’s certainly better than I was at her age with her vocabulary and her descriptions, but she’s a little too descriptive. She spends an awful lot of time telling one quick event with lots of detail.

I restructure or reword sentences if I think they’ll sound better. I also correct any grammatical mistakes. Her punctuation is the worst. She never uses it. Occasionally she uses question marks, but all she uses for periods are commas. She never uses caps or paragraphs and she never uses quotes when people are speaking, either.

She also uses names too often and breaks people’s conversations up too much with descriptive stuff. Other than that, she’s doing alright and will improve with time.

She’s writing the story first-person, saying that she felt it was too impersonal to use an anonymous narrator. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think first-person is especially better when it’s a true story cuz it’s more like a journal, only you’re telling the story after the fact rather than as it unfolds.

Unless she’s making it up to make the book sound better, I’m amazed at how detailed her memory is pertaining to events from her preteen years.

Later…

Tom brought home a manila envelope with a letter sheet, plus 49 pages of drafts. Guess I’ll go get working on that now.

Another few hours and my life belongs to me for a good 72 hours. It’s all mine! Mine and Tom’s.

Later…

Scot came at 1:10, and as usual, he was in and out like a flash like I wish I could be when I see him on his turf. I spotted his SUV, which fortunately, comes from a direction I can see from my office window without having to be right up to it as I would if he came the way he leaves. I ran out front before he could knock and wake up Tom, who’d gone to bed an hour before.

I feel a lot more relaxed after he leaves from a home visit, cuz then I know I can count on him not bugging me here at least for a while. So we went 6 weeks and 3 days between visits time around. Maybe next time it’ll be 6 weeks and 6 days! He skipped June, but I doubt he’ll skip September cuz he came so early in the month. It’s only the 8th, but when he came in May it was the 24th. He’d have to not come by for at least 7½ weeks in order to skip September. If his visits really ever do start slowing down to where there are usually 8 or more weeks between visits, it probably won’t be till after I get down to one year left of this shit. I don’t know, though. Arizona is such a serious state. He may play this up right on to the end. He’s gonna play up the seeing him twice a month part of it, but I know that for the most part, he’s just a PO. He doesn’t have much control, power or authority when it comes to the laws. He’s just doing what he’s told to do whether he wants to or not and regardless of whether or not he thinks it’s necessary. As Tom says, it’s a matter of his having a quota he has to meet, as well as if there’s someone new in the area on probation, making it convenient to stop here. I don’t see how there can be that many people in the area, though, whether or not they’re on probation. Remember, this isn’t the city!

He’s a bit rude, though, and not very bright when I think about it. I know Tom’s a heavy sleeper who can easily fall back asleep and that he isn’t leaving tonight till midnight, but he knew I was standing out there to keep him from waking up. Yet as soon as we stepped inside his walkie-talkie squawked really loud before he turned it down. Couldn’t he have turned it down before he got inside?

When I went out front to pick up a couple of aluminum cans the slobs of Maricopa let blow in, I noticed a car parked in front of the shack that I couldn’t see from the house. I’ve seen them move stuff in and out of the shacks a couple of times, but this was just sitting there. To my knowledge, all they use the shacks for is storage, so maybe they’re storing this old car there, too. I mean, why not? They have an old ugly trailer on the other corner. The front of their property is definitely neater and nicer looking than the back. I want to landscape the side they’re on, but not as much as I want to in back and in front. Especially when there’s a house in front.