I gained 4 pounds in just two days of eating. Although I haven’t had sugar yet this year, the bulk of what I ate was starch, so that’s almost as bad. If I’d eaten the same quantity/calorie amount, but in meat or veggies, I may not have gained so much back.

I realize now that no, the bike doesn’t have anything to do with the weight loss. After all, I always said that only a good old-fashioned diet can cause weight loss. The water pills do help, though.

Once again I’m asking myself if I want to continue on only to achieve something that can be so easily lost. It’s just that I could end up gaining hundreds of pounds if I eat whenever I’m hungry. Most people reach a maximum weight and settle into whatever they’re going to be as long as they won’t diet, but with me, there is no max. I’d just keep gaining and gaining. I wouldn’t gain 30, 40, 50 pounds like most people, then just stop.

Maybe, with the aid of the water pills, I’ll get down to 105 as originally planned and bounce between that and 110. Meaning, I’ll take two days a week off, then spend the rest of the week working off whatever I gained from my days off. I can’t just get down to 105 and expect to stay there unless I diet every single day for the rest of my life and never take a day off which is simply not going to happen.

The truck’s both better and not better. It’s running much more smoothly now, but it’s smoking way too much. Tom’s not only worried it’ll flunk inspection, but that a pig will pull him over before he could even get there, and you know you can’t even go a block without running into a cruiser. It’s going to cost us another $300 for the parts needed to make it run more clearly. Tom insists it won’t keep costing us a few hundred every few weeks/months, saying that the thing has only so many parts anyway. He says we can probably use it for hauling things for many years to come.

I forgot to mention that Scot won the Probation Officer of 2001 award. When I saw the plaque on his office wall, I nearly laughed out loud. I mean, what did he win it for? For being so serious most of the time? For being overly by the book? For going bald and covering it with a baseball cap every day of his life?

I wonder if the black bitch ever fears me (for real) and wonders if I’m going to do anything after October, or if jail really got me off her ass for good? Then again, it doesn’t matter what she thinks. There’ll never be any justice in this case and we all know it. She and her cronies fucked me over, they got away with it, and so be it. They won, I lost, and there’s not a damn thing I can ever do about it. All I can do is use what I’ve learned and apply it to the batch of sickos that may move in and fuck with us from properties closest to us in the future, which means we’d move. There’d be nothing to say or do but move anyway, cuz nothing we said or did would help us or change anything.

The things that we went through in Phoenix versus out here tells me that although we were cursed in both places, we were cursed for different reasons. With the freeloaders, it was simply to punish us in a place we were stuck in. There was no way out at the time. We couldn’t simply up and move from there anytime we wanted to or else we’d have moved much sooner than we did. It wanted us to stay right where we were and to have to sit and listen to next door’s shit.

Here, though, it wants us out. It’s pissed we came here and the troubles we’ve had here seem to be mainly punishment for moving. Especially the part where I’m forced to leave here for half a year.

Our latest punishment for moving here is that the bank that deals with our loan/mortgage is demanding we pay a couple hundred more bucks each month. That puts it from $850 to $1,050. Although Tom says we could afford to pay as much as $1,100 a month, he’s fighting it because one, it’s not fair, and two, they’re breaking a legally binding contract.

To back up a bit, Tom had told me he was trying to get extra money from the bank and that they were ripping us off with the payments, and not to bother answering out-of-area calls, which I normally don’t anyway as 9 out of 10 times they’re sales calls.

Then, after Tom left for work yesterday afternoon, I went out to feed the prairie dogs (which really are ground squirrels, even though I still call them prairie dogs). When I turned around to go back in the house, I found a 2-page legal document taped to the door.

The document looked a little scary to me what with the paragraph that talked about auctioning off our house on March 26th. I paged Tom immediately, and he assured me that he’d have it all worked out in a couple of weeks and that there was no chance of us losing the house, not that I don’t have mixed emotions about moving anyway. Meaning, it wouldn’t be the end of the world as long as we stayed out of the city and never again lived in a 50-year-old 1400-square-foot dive.

When he got in this morning, he explained it to me in full, telling me of all the different options we have. As he said, he initiated this because he knew we were getting ripped off, and all they’re trying to do is bully him around a bit in hopes that he’ll cave in and just allow them to keep ripping us off, but he says he won’t, and that if it came down to it, we’ll take them to court. However, the reason he doubts it’ll come to that is that the bank wouldn’t want the bad publicity it’d bring over a couple of hundred bucks a month. As it is there’s a class-action suit against the bank for not paying their employees overtime like they did with Tom. He thinks they’ll be willing to settle out of court, though, and while they may not back the payments back to the $850 they’re legally supposed to be, he thinks he can get it down $100.

It all makes us all the more wish we could strike it rich, dump society altogether and just go live on the ocean for the rest of our lives, only docking every few months for supplies and to shop for fun stuff. Since that’s not likely, I find myself thinking more of a house in the woods somewhere. It’s not that I’m unhappy here. Not by a long shot. This isn’t Phoenix, we don’t have freeloading assholes next to us who can’t sit still and shut up, I do love this house; it’s just that the freeloaders know we live here, even if that probably doesn’t mean anything, and I don’t like the openness. As I told Tom, though, no place we could live could ever be as bad as Doe and Art’s, Brattleboro, Valleyhead or Estrella, and we’d always have each other. Also, I know each place we could live would have its pros and cons, so it kind of balances things out anyway.

Tom told me that on his way to work, before I discovered the papers on the door, some guy was outside with court papers, claiming it was about a foreclosure on someone else’s house.

“Then what would he be doing here?” I asked Tom this morning. “See, I think he was shitting you because he didn’t want to have to deal with handing you the papers personally and then have to deal with your reaction. Besides, I never heard a knock on the door. That alone tells me he saw you were leaving, watched the house from wherever then came back in when you were gone.”

I wonder if the old guy looking for this other guy was connected to this but at that hour?

Why, oh why, though, are we such a magnet for rip-offs?! I mean, I know everyone gets taken advantage of, but it seems we really are one of the extremes. When it comes to being ripped off, leaks, and things breaking, we’re way ahead of most people.

The question we’ve been asking ourselves is, should we get the fence or the kiln first? If I still had two or more years of probation, I’d definitely opt to do the fence first, but now I don’t know. Yes, I’d like to keep dogs off our property and make it a real nuisance for people to bug us, but I really want to get on with the dollmaking once and for all, too.

Mary sent me some book drafts and some sexual fantasies to type up, along with a quick note saying her book looks great, she’ll be sending stamps soon and that Suzanne secured an order for her to be allowed to be at Justin’s sentencing hearing. Then after that, there’ll be an extradition hearing. Why she needs to be at the sentencing hearing when someone can always tell her what the sentence was, and why there needs to be an extradition hearing, beats me.

Since putting air fresheners in the car doesn’t last long, I think I’ll take the remaining two Vanillaroma fresheners and stick one in here and one in the master bath.