Still 129 pounds. I’ve been stuck again for a couple of days as I figured I would be, but as long as I keep playing catch-up in the end, I’ll be ok. I still have till Wednesday to get to 127 and still make my limit of 3 pounds per week. Tom thinks my pedaling a half hour a day will speed up the process, but I doubt it. Not at my age and height. But it will help keep the lost weight off and will give me increased strength and stamina. It’s good for the heart too, and as you know, heart disease runs rampant in my family.

Tom said that in light of our lovely PO who likes to send half of our packages back, he emailed the HSC and asked them to please not give our pedals away should they be returned for any reason. They replied saying they wouldn’t give them away, and in fact, their records show it was delivered to our PO this morning, but since it’s Saturday, we won’t be able to get them till Monday. You can’t get packages on weekends at this place. You can’t even get into your PO Box before 6 AM. In Tempe, we have 24-hour access, though we’re not going to renew that box once it expires in March.

So, the Tempe PO throws packages on their shelves and forgets about them, and this one returns them. At least they’re right on with regular mail.

I can’t believe how well we’ve both been sticking to our diets! It’s almost been too easy. He’s lost more, though. Like 7 pounds. He says it’s because he has more fat and that he has more fat in his belly alone than I have in my entire body.

Since he hasn’t done so in ages, he played hooky the last two nights, claiming to get the cold he never did end up getting like he thought he would. He’d still be getting 3-4 colds a year for real if I hadn’t insisted he take vitamin C tablets every day.

He’s taken the time off to work on the truck and install new faucets in the bathroom sinks. The single-lever faucets I told the deaf, dumb, and illiterate Mexican to install in the first place.

They look like the one we got in Phoenix with the clear round handle. It’s not perfectly round, though. I don’t know how you’d describe it. It’s sort of angled all around.

When he installed the one in the master bath it really stunk like hell! That’s because of that one’s closer to the septic tank with fewer turns and kinks.

In my bathroom, he also installed a really cool toilet paper holder. It’s just a bar with a catch at the end that’s angled slightly upwards. It makes changing toilet paper a cinch.

He also got a ready-keyed new handle/lock for the side door. Yeah, all 3 doors in this house were definitely damned from the get-go. It was getting stuck and to the point where it couldn’t be locked from the inside.

To my surprise, I finally caught the mouse in the late afternoon yesterday, and rather than killing it, we opted to walk it on down just past our property to the north. How amazing it is, I thought as I watched Tom walk down there, to have been here just over 3 years and still, there’s no one towards the north or the east. Not close, anyway, although there might be a couple of properties away in those directions.

We never did receive a tracking link from UPS which leads us to believe that the doll people never gave them our email address, but I think it’s safe to assume she’ll be here Monday or Tuesday.

Got 4 letters from Mary yesterday which were obviously sent right before I spoke with her aunt. She says she’ll be there another 30 days. Guess that means that by February 7th she’ll be gone.

She enclosed a book of stamps which was very nice of her and which will help a lot since she’s got a ton of stuff for me to send to her, and there’s even more on its way, too. She asked if I could give Michelle my email address so Todd could send me pictures he has that she wants. She answered my question of “Why me?” by saying that if she sent them to her family they wouldn’t mail them to her, and come to think of it, I think she told me that before. I asked for more pictures of her shortly after I got out and she said something about having a hard time getting any from her family.

Anyway, I emailed her note and my address to Michelle, wrote her another letter since she’s going to be sticking around a while longer, and enclosed her friend Brandi’s copy of that psychologist’s and philosopher’s words. I wonder if this is the same Brandi who’s in for killing this guy she was going to get it on with in some hotel. According to her, though, she only ripped the guy off and it was her boyfriend that killed him, so who knows for sure what really happened? I wasn’t there and I don’t know them. Guess I just don’t care, either.

I had to scan the astrology pages she tore out of a book cuz that’s the only way they’ll accept them unless they come straight from the publisher themselves, which was the case when I tried to send Bob word find puzzles. It was a huge job, too. There were about 30 pages and each one took about 4 minutes just to queue up. It took hours to do and I hope it’ll be a long, long time before I have another scanning job that big.