It’s been exactly 6 years since I quit smoking!

If we can ever get signed up at one of the casinos through Memolink without all the damn technical problems, I’ll be awarded 8000-9000 points. I already have 729. All I need is 8300 for a $50 Walmart certificate which is what I’ll get and have Tom turn into cash for me. That’s what I’m going to use, along with the money I’m now saving, for Haiku. It could take some serious time, though. It can take 6-12 weeks for me to receive the certificate, then 6-8 for Haiku to be made, so it might be as long as 5 months. I might receive Haiku and Becky around the same time cuz as soon as Tom picks up our holiday money, I plan to order Becky. Alexa will hopefully come via eBay sale money as I said earlier.

I know we paid a fortune for it, but I’m gonna give the Bowflex a break for a while. I figure why build muscle if you can’t lose the fat? All I’m gonna do is crunch every other day. If I don’t I’ll get a bad back. On non-crunch days I’ll jog/walk for 15 minutes. I really meant it when I said I was tired of trying to lose/maintain weight! I’m done with it. Totally done with it. I think I’ll end up as enormous as Tammy did. I’ll be able to wear the same shirts for a while, and socks, of course, but I’ll need new pants, shorts, bras and underwear. I’ll get clothes as I need them at Walmart since they’re usually cheap there and that’s where we’re doing our grocery shopping.

I gave it some thought and decided that I’m also sick of the really long hair. Just the weight, the work, the hassle and it always getting in the way. Besides, if they’re seriously going to send the dye, it’ll make it a lot easier if we cut it to the shoulders or maybe an inch below. I’m still going to dye it even if they don’t send it. I’ll put a hold on the trimmer for now, too.

Later…

We’re not sure at this point whether or not we’re going to even be able to get into any of the casinos through Memolink. The problem is that there are so many blocks on those residing in Arizona, because everything’s illegal here, including gambling from your own PC. We should know for sure in a few days. Tom’s researching other ways to get in.

My Swan Lake Barbie came today. It wasn’t quite what I had pictured. See, there are a few different versions of Barbie as Swan Queen from the Swan Lake ballet. I wanted the one with fully pointed toes versus partially pointed ones, but she’s still nice enough to keep. I considered turning around and selling her but decided not to. She wears white lace-up ballet slippers, shimmering tights, and a white tutu/bodice with light blue and white beading at the chest. The shoulders and head have clumps of feathers. She has rooted eyelashes and her dark brown hair is back in a sort of French twist with strings of pearls woven through it. She has a little silver crown, too.

I researched Melatonin and Benadryl to see if they said anything about it affecting the metabolism, but the results of my research were rather inconclusive. It’s like I always have questions and theories, but never any answers. Just what did impair my metabolism and is it forever damaged? What exactly killed my desire for sex with Tom? Was it just time and age?

I’m probably going to return the appetite suppressants and vitamins whenever they get here because there’s no point in suppressing my appetite if I can’t lose weight anyway. Also, over the last few days I’ve been out of vitamins and having nothing but my calcium supplement and have noticed I’ve had more energy. Maybe vitamins really do make you more sluggish. They do with Tom.

After Tom tinkered with the truck, we played ring toss for a while. The weather was nice today. Not so hot. Naturally, that meant the renters were out and about. They gagged me out on smoke as they were burning trash, but at least they’re burning it and not letting it blow over to us!

Tom brought up a good suggestion which I myself thought of, and that’s to see if I can sell my hair. Tomorrow he’s going to do online research and see if that will be a possibility, but he says he doubts it because people usually buy hair from people in other countries who are desperate for money that they’ll take anything they can get no matter how shitty it is, unlike Americans who expect more money. Just God’s Jodi’s-not-allowed-to-make-money rule that he’s had on me for the last decade is enough to tell me I’ll never sell it.

I don’t even know if I’ll be able to sell these dolls and plates. We set up a PayPal account in my name and the plan is to set a reserve price of $90 on Samantha and a starting bid of $50. I wanted to have only a buy-it-now option of $99, but you have to have at least 10 positive feedback messages and I only have two. After leaving positive feedback for the girl that sold me the Swan Lake Barbie, I urged her to do the same for me but I don’t know for sure that she will.

Anyway, with all the millions of eBay users, I’d think that somebody somewhere would see Samantha and realize that $90 is a good price for a dressed doll with her certificate. They won’t know I set the price at $90, though, because buyers are never told what the reserve is that’s been set. Still, I’d think someone somewhere would want her and the other things I want to sell.

Mary’s continuing to drive me crazy with the changes and shuffling. Why doesn’t she listen to me when I tell her over and over and over again I’m her typist only, not her editor? Why won’t she just wait till she’s out of there? She can’t have any money till she’s out anyway. Sometimes I wonder if she really reads my letters or if some of them don’t make it to her. She can’t seem to handle the simplest of requests like editing, her using little to no punctuation, etc. I have to fight tooth and nail to get answers from her to questions I ask like what letter number she’s up to. It’s like we have more of a business relationship than a friendship. Especially since she sends way more drafts than letters and ignores my questions like how her life is, what her cellies are like, the officers, the food, etc.

Finally, I realized that while I still want to be her friend, maybe I’m just not cut out to work for her. Maybe she needs to find a typist who will also act as editor because I just don’t always understand the changes she asks me to make.

Although I begged her not to, I’m sure the latest copy of her book will find its way back to me with shuffling requests, and like I told her, while she may’ve given me a generous supply of stamps, I don’t have an endless supply of paper and ink.

Meanwhile, I told her to think about how important having an editor and not waiting is to her and to let me know what she decides.

As I told her, I also question Scot’s credibility. It just doesn’t seem right for a lawyer to be promising to help her find a publisher when he should know that that’s illegal because she’s in jail. I’m afraid that like most people like to do, he’s just getting her hopes up for no reason and making false promises.

I’m afraid Mary’s just too hopeful and too naïve. Tom said he thinks quitting on Mary is a bad idea because he thinks I can get a good chunk of money if she does sell her story, but I know better than to get my hopes up, and I still say I’m never going to be allowed to make money. Do you know how many times I’ve been so sure that I was going to succeed with this or succeed with that? Or believed that one thing would lead to another thing and so on and so forth? Too many times! Life really is full of many disappointments if you even think for a second that life is what you plan it because it’s not. We’re all leaves blowing in the wind, destined to end up wherever we’re fated to go, not where we say we’re going. Those who say we’re in the driver’s seat of our destinies are dreaming. Some have more control than others, but for the most part, I really believe we’re like puppets in a play and that God’s written all our scripts out before humans even existed. We’re each assigned our own individual roles from there on out till the day we die.

As anyone who knows me already knows, one of God’s “themes” for me is to be an underdog stuck in bad places. Well, I keep having these disturbing dreams. In last night’s nightmare, I was thrown in jail for murdering someone I never heard of. I woke up fearing that this was a sign saying I’d one day be framed for murder and I hope not! I sure hope not. I hope it’s nothing more than paranoia that spawns these dreams. I would never and could never kill anyone for the hell of it that wasn’t trying to kill me, and last I knew, self-defense was legal even in Arizona. I could and would kick the shit out of someone who wasn’t trying to harm me, but kill? No way. I could beat up someone who either threatened me or Tom, destroyed our property or whatever. Like with most people, there are numerous things that could cause me to attack someone like if someone were suddenly here and trying to hurt the rats, smash the dolls, whatever. Everybody’s different. The quickest way to get me after you would be to threaten me, but anyway, I just hope these dreams are just dreams because when I think about it, being framed for murder and stuck in jail is totally something God would see fit to happen to me.

I guess Tom’s going to be stuck where he’s at for a while and we’re just going to have to make do with what he’s making there and hope we don’t encounter any financial crises. He just doesn’t have time to do daytime interviews when he’s working days. Somehow, I also get the feeling he’s not meant to have a good-paying job for a while anyway. It’s like we’re being compensated for doing well like we were for a while. Same with the scratch tickets. We’ve been losing horribly as compensation for that $100 winner he had. I’m not even going to bother getting tickets for a month or so.

Anyway, the people at work are back to making their bullshit promises, promising him his own computer and shit like that. As I told him, low-paying jobs are always going to promise this and promise that. That’s how they hang onto their employees.

I suggested that since I’m not going to bother with the water pills, I have a lifetime supply of snot spray, I can get inhalers over the counter, and he ought to jump back on unemployment if he can and aggressively hunt for a new job. While he’s at it, we’ll just hope to hell neither of us gets any serious illness or injuries.

The good thing about it is that they no longer ask why you left your old job, so that’s good. Back east when I was in my late teens/early twenties, you had to list your last few jobs and why you left.

We talked about how we hope to one day have the money to buy a small Bobcat tractor. We could rent one for a weekend for $200, but since we’d need it for longer than that, we’d be better off buying an old used junky one for $600. We could dig a pool with it, build hills out of dirt and who knows what else?

Using the best software he can find, we’re going to do a landscaping layout of what we want to plant where.

I just hope we can carry out these plans, but like I said, life often isn’t what you plan it.

Again I got woken up by God knows what for a few minutes, and it was exactly 4 hours after I first fell asleep.

I think it’s sad, but safe to say that whoever got my letter in Mexico was not Rosa. Guess I’m not as good of a stalker as I thought I was! I’m not sure what, if anything, I’m going to do from here.