Today I’m rather tired. I just can’t seem to get to bed earlier. This is my third or fourth day with under 8 hours of sleep. It seems my body would rather catch up by sleeping later than by going to bed earlier, but I’m not ready to let it do that just yet. In fact, I really want to stay on this schedule until after we’ve moved. It’ll make things a lot easier. I’d like to give myself a day off, but if I do that I’ll end up sleeping till around 10:00, which would mean not being able to fall asleep till 2:00 the next night, and only getting 4 hours of sleep.

I’m down to 129, and even though I know I’ll stop losing after another pound or two, I’m going to continue with the diet because it makes me feel better. I get up at 6:00 and my 4 eating times are 9:00, noon, 3:00 and 6:00. I’m a little hungrier today than I have been, but that’s only because my weight’s dropped and it’s my body’s way of demanding it be put back. It will be put back during the move since we’ll no doubt be eating million-calorie meals at places like Denny’s and Burger King.

Hunting season is officially over, so that’s one less thing I gotta listen to.

Meanwhile, the well is scaring the shit out of me. Just totally teasing me. We’ve been having a lot of pressure problems lately, but Tom keeps checking the well and everything’s ok. It’s the filter that keeps clogging up. I still feel like we’re in a race against time. I hope to hell we get out of here before it breaks again or we have worse problems with the renters than we have!

In fact, I think we should just get the people who pay cash for houses and get out. We don’t have the 6 months to a year it’d take to get this place current and us a decent deal. Tom would have to find a job that paid as well as his last job like right now in order to do that, but even if he did, we don’t want to be here that much longer. I know I don’t. I’m totally ready to move on. At the same time, my life has been better here overall, it’s been worse and I was never really happy in this place, so why stick around until the heat pummels up our electric bill higher than we can afford? We’re not going to get a decent offer from an investor, and as Tom said, we can make the move on a few grand, so I think we ought to get out now. Mr. Optimist, though, is going to be stubborn a while longer. I know him. He’s still hoping for a better deal.

I saw that they’re still cutting across our land in back yesterday. See, I say it’s a total waste of time calling George. All it’s going to do is start trouble for us for however long we are here. Arizonans are too sensitive and too defiant for him to go complaining to, and we know George isn’t going to have the money for this place. If he did, then why isn’t the fourth rental in yet? Meanwhile, you can’t go complaining to people here and expect them to do what you want. They simply can’t handle it. Even if you’re in the right, people are like children. Meaning, the more they know something bothers you, the more they’ll do it. I personally don’t care if they cut across the damn corner anyway. It’s potential buyers who may care that I worry about. The only way to stop them is to fence the area, but God help whoever does if they do. Again, something like that will be taken personally by the renters and they’ll only do something else. Something that’s likely to be worse. I know it’s rude of them to use any parts of our land for anything, but I don’t care. We’re never anywhere near that area and we’re moving, so I don’t care. I just hope no one else does either. All I know is that I’m not going to jail or getting shot because the realtors mentioned the driveway to them.

When I think of the things we never did with the Phoenix house because of the way we were terrorized out of there (I wouldn’t have wanted to stay in such a small old house in the city anyway), and the mural that never got replaced here, the porches that never got built, the fences that never got installed, it makes me wonder if we’ll ever get to do the things we plan to do in any house we may live in. I mean, I’m glad we didn’t do these things after all since we’re only going to be here just over 4 years, but will we really get to do things with the new place, extra money or not? Tom thinks we will, but that’s just his optimism for you. Me? I’ll believe the fences and whatever else when I see them. It’s logical to say that fewer acres and more money means we should have no problem fencing, but I’d still like to see it before I go assuming it’ll happen.

Tom just came in to tell me he found a gold mine underneath the house. He forgot that he put boxes of old junk under there. There was also carpet, padding and some of that acoustic tile we threw in the bedroom windows to muffle next door’s antics in the old house.

The guitar’s now up to $56. They sure have been asking a lot of questions about it, too.

If Barbie doesn’t get more bids today, I’m going to be both surprised and disappointed.

Tom’s getting ready to go to the dump. It’s free today. He’s also going to look for whatever’s eBayable, too.

We haven’t seen Shiny in weeks. It seems shiny black cats like to disappear right before we move. I’ll bet anything that the dogs got him. We wouldn’t have been able to take him anyway, and I’m glad we never got a dog. I doubt I ever will, too. I’ve spent the last dozen years listening to other people’s dogs and I’m sure I’ll be doing that again at some point in Oregon, so I don’t need one of our own barking as well.

I’m about three-quarters of the way through with Kiss the Girls. The only thing I don’t like about it is the many references to slavery and racism connected to the black characters. Why can’t they just be black characters, period? Why is it that every time there are black characters there must be mention of slavery and racism? See, that’s what I mean when I bitch about how they don’t seem to want to move on. You don’t hear me mentioning the holocaust from time to time. I don’t expect the world to kiss my ass because I have relatives who were killed in concentration camps. Nor do I think I’m obligated to remind people of it on a regular basis. What’s done is done and that’s in the past.

Later…

I’m not going to be too happy if the Barbies don’t get any action tonight, though I won’t be surprised because we just won $8 on a ticket, and life has a way of balancing things out like that.

My feeling of sitting on a ticking time bomb proved legit just a little while ago, but thankfully, it wasn’t a multi-hundred or thousand-dollar problem!

Like I said, we’ve been having problems with the water pressure. The well kept telling us everything was ok, but I knew something was wrong. Never have we had problems with our filter clogging up like this before, so I knew somewhere, somehow, something wasn’t kosher. Tom went out to check yet again, but he didn’t have to walk all the way out to the well to find the problem. He could hear the water leaking before he even rounded the corner of the house. It was the hot water tank leaking. Tom’s first thought was that it ruptured since they do that over time. That’s what happened with the one we had in Phoenix. I knew, though, that a barely 5-year-old water tank shouldn’t be rupturing anytime soon. His next thought was that mice chewed through it. Especially since there were droppings in the insulation. He even suspected there may be mice in the walls. A few days ago I thought I heard one in the vents, so I figured he was probably right. But then when he went to investigate further, he found that the problem was just another one of the Mexican’s fuck-ups. I swear we could be here 20 more years and still be correcting their mistakes. The Mexie didn’t tighten the connection in the pipes that are right under the tank and it loosened up over time, causing poor Tom to have to crawl just under the filthy, spider and scorpion-infested edge of the house and do their damn work for them for the millionth time that should’ve been done years ago and that we paid them to do. Hopefully, though, we’ll be able to end our careers of fixing other people’s mistakes in Oregon, though I know the breakage curse will follow us there. That was on us in Phoenix too, and if it followed us here, I don’t see why it wouldn’t follow us there.

Anyway, we’re now pretty sure there aren’t any mice in the walls and that they were just hopping up there for drinks. If there were they’d be waking me up like crazy, no doubt. I’m just glad the problem was fixed quickly and didn’t need anything more than a metal hose clamp. Now, if things could just not break between now and when we get out of here it’d be wonderful!