Although only a third of the year has passed, I’m sure April 30th will always be the best day of 2003. Yes, I have some absolutely shocking, mind-boggling, unbelievably fantastic news – I’m off probation!!!!! This is it, it’s over! After 6 months in jail, 100 hours of community service, a slew of therapy appointments, God knows how much money, 47 reports and 11 home visits, my life now belongs to me! Me! As in never with them, never with me! Never ever again will anything we do have any connection to them! They don’t own me anymore! They really don’t! I wasn’t dreaming. That call I thought would never come really did come! It came just shy of 12 hours ago. I was too excited to write, although I was up several hours afterward, unable to sleep due to the excitement and shock. When I finally did fall asleep, I thought I’d sleep forever, but woke up just under 6 hours later. It’s all the excitement for sure.

It wasn’t even quite 6:30 this morning when I heard the phone ring from my office. Tom had gone to bed two hours earlier and I wanted to grab the phone before it woke him. At that hour I figured it had to be Paula calling to tell me the reason I hadn’t heard from her was that I was right about her ending up in jail. Instead, I walked up to the phone and saw Pinal County on the ID box. With my now quickened heartbeat, I picked up the phone.

It was Scot. “Have you heard the news?” he asked me.

Although I said, “No, what’s wrong?” my mind said, “What bullshit are they accusing me of now?” I mean, at that hour he could’ve been calling to tell me to expect to be arrested for all I knew, or even that threats were made against me. I just didn’t know. There wasn’t enough time between when I picked up the phone and when we started talking for all the possible horrible scenarios to play through my mind. Nonetheless, that was when he told me I was off probation as of the 23rd and that the judge designated it a misdemeanor. He said the state objected, but oh well, the judge signed me off anyway and I don’t have to come and see him. So I’ve been off probation for a week and didn’t even know it. Hell, the welfare bums probably knew it before I did!

All I could do was say, “Oh my God, oh my God!” Then I thanked him for the great news and told him to have a good life.

“Okay,” he said, and we hung up at which time Tom stumbled out of the bedroom. He was just as shocked and as happy as I was, but we both wondered why I didn’t get any kind of a letter about it. He thinks it may be because they have to update our new PO Box address. I guess the news was just faxed into Scot’s office, too.

This is what I mean when I say I couldn’t tell you if you were going to win the lottery, but I could probably tell you if you were going to be hurt or something. I can sense and do negative, but not positive. I can’t heal you if you’re sick, but could probably make you sick if you pissed me off enough. I had no idea that this was coming! I was totally caught off guard. Totally! I really expected no breaks or shortcuts with the sentence length whatsoever with this shit after seeing them play the jail part up to the max like they did and so much more. So now I’ll have all these meaningless numbers on my calendar for the next 6 months!

I had to laugh at how I wrote on the 16th that I woke up thinking I had 13 more reports when I really had 6. Well, I had even less than that now, didn’t I?!

Before he called I was sitting there thinking that it was 4 years ago since we lived with the welfare bums and how appalled and shocked I was to know that fate could be so determined to have it be that they were still with me in such a huge way. I swear, though, nobody will ever tell me what to do again! Nobody! I will be no one’s puppet, slave, scapegoat, opportunity, punching bag or source of money. I will be the adult that I am and never again be reduced to being made to feel like a child all over again. No one will ever have such a fierce hold on me again. I will not be used or abused by anyone like that again, and believe me, these people are runners-up to my parents who fucked me over the most in life, along with the Amy Ks, Donna As, Margaret Ms, and Barbara Ds of Valleyhead and Brattleboro.

I laughed upon remembering Scot telling me around last August or so that I’d be celebrating come Halloween of next year. Wrong, honey, I’m celebrating now! Right now. Oh yes, we’ll go to Red Lobster or do something real soon, but the main celebration is in my heart and mind. The relief and happiness of knowing I’m now, finally, after 7 long years, free of these sick fucks forever, is indescribable. I am a little worried about God sending me a new long-term problem and their reaction to the early release, though. I mean, they must know, right? And if they do, they gotta be fuming. Utterly furious out of their minds! The control they had for so long is now gone, and with people like that, there’s no saying what they may do. However, being the wonderful doom psychic that I am, I’m happy to report no bad vibes. Who knows, with all the spells I’ve been casting upon them they just may be too ill to be mad in the first place. We’ll still at least get the fences up ASAP, though I certainly don’t have to worry that Scot may wake me up tomorrow! There is no such thing as “prime time” anymore. No, 10 AM is just that – 10 AM. And so is 11 AM, noon, 1 PM, 2 PM, etc. The hours of 10 AM - 2:30 PM no longer have any special meaning of any kind and the only thing leftover from this horrid nightmare is a good thing and that’s Mary G. Mary G, who’s now going to send Teddy Bear her “piece of mind” letter which I’ve sent to her along with the wonderful news.

There I was telling Mary not to count on any breaks from judges, but who knows now? Maybe a miracle will come her way, too. She can use this to hopefully encourage her.

The thing I’m dying to know is which judge signed me off. Could it be the same hateful, monstrous, ruthless Judge H? That’d be hard to believe. I mean, it’d take a major personality change on his part to have an ounce of compassion for me, a Jew. I wasn’t only a Jew, I was a Jew with a black against her in a state where they’re as adored as they are loathed in a place like Texas. If I don’t receive anything in the mail, we’ll get a copy of the fax from Scot. In fact, I’ll leave a message on his answering machine because I’m really curious to see who was present when this went before the judge. I’d pretty much bet that everyone who was at the sentencing was there except for the public defender. If it was Judge H that set me free, I still resent him greatly. I mean, yes it’s great that he finally did the right thing, but he’s two years too late. He could’ve stopped it right there on October 30th of ‘00 and he had every right to do so, but he didn’t, so he hasn’t won any gratitude or admiration from me, that’s for sure. Nothing can change what’s been done to me. Things have been done to help along the way and now I’ve been given a break, but it can’t undo the past 2½ years. I will never forget. I will never forgive. Forgiving has been my downfall in the past. Something I’ll never again be suckered into doing so as not to be fucked with all over again, but they can’t fuck with me all over again. Not legally anyway. There’s no way they could appeal and reinstate the probation as far as I know. The judge is God from start to finish. What he says goes, like it or not, and once again, I know those assholes do not like it. Not one bit. Tough shit, though. Yeah, you lose, you mother-fucking, scum-sucking welfare bums, you lose! Your days of victimizing me are forever over!

Speaking of God, do I have any gratitude for him now? Nope. Once again, he never should’ve let this happen in the first place. He could’ve protected me and spared me the hell I’ve been through, but he didn’t.

Tom thinks that Scot might’ve known something was going to happen and that that’s why he cut my reports. Well, he didn’t act like he knew anything was up, though I was shocked as hell that he cut my reports. I wonder, though, would this have happened anyway? Or was it because of Scot’s recommendation?

It wouldn’t surprise me if I made the papers again with the media crying out about how the poor, poor welfare bums got such a raw deal in life, screwed over once again by the “white man.” Wouldn’t that be funny? Yeah, Channel 3, wanna come ask me if I’m a racist now? Hey, I don’t discriminate, I hate everyone equally!

After Tom went back to bed, I paced throughout the house grinning like a mad idiot. I laughed and cried tears of joy and relief for hours.

The welfare bums’ money that wasn’t supposed to go to us till November will go to us in May and instead of $40 a month for each of us, we’ll have $60, plus grocery savings. Now’s when they might try to sucker a few extra bucks out of us, but we’ve got receipts to protect ourselves from this greedy, fraudulent state.

I hope I don’t get a letter saying I can do jury duty now that I’m not a little “felon” anymore, but that’s the least of my worries. I’ll still get out of it if I do. I just want to go one full year without hearing from these welfare bums and from Teddy Bear (I never thought I’d say that!), but I’ll settle for not hearing from them for just the rest of the year. I think that may be enough to reassure and console me.

We’re down to watering the plants every other day now to let their roots get established. Tom says that about 4 of the elms are finally starting to sprout leaves. I just hope the sister olies don’t take forever to grow so we can back up anything that dies with those. Once there’s a house to the north of us, it shouldn’t cost any more privacy than next door does, but we’ll lose a hell of a lot of it once there’s a house in front, so we’ll know just what to plant then. I doubt the Sharons will get high enough to give us whatever privacy they do steal.