We sat down together earlier and mapped out some plans for the upcoming weeks. Although slim, there’s still the slight chance we may get a small old beat-up manufactured home instead of an RV and a room we build because some places don’t allow you to live in RVs and you have to have a building permit for the room. We’ll need to get that anyway, though, at some point. If we went this route, then that’d mean hauling our stuff up in a U-Haul, but I still think we’ll do the RV and room deal. We can’t live in a tent either because this is residential land and not recreational land. That’s the only thing I don’t like about it so far; that you can’t live in tents or trailers or have more than one house, but that’s also a good thing. If they could have one house per acre like they can here, that’d mean more houses in the end.

As Tom said, though, you never know if someone will complain against us if they see us living in the RV like we will half the time, but hopefully there’ll be too many trees for anyone to notice in the first place, and hopefully they see the idea of complaining like most Arizonans do – a mortal sin. I have mixed emotions about the people there being like they are here. No one wants to be complained on even if they know they deserve it, but Arizona has some of the most cold-blooded, callused people I’ve ever met. Hopefully, good or bad, I won’t have to deal with them as much as I’ve had to here. I know I’m going to love the fact that there’ll be fewer blacks there and way fewer Hispanics. According to these statistics, Arizona has a 3.1% black population and a 25% Hispanic population. Oregon has only 1.6% for blacks and 8% for Hispanics. I’m not blind to patterns of curses, though. Meaning, regardless of color or race, I know that Oregon could have one small rotten bunch in it, just one small rotten bunch, and God will see to it that they go next to us.

Anyway, the basic plan is to start auctioning off everything we think we can sell that’ll be easy enough to ship. When the house closes on the 7th and we get our money, we can bid on land so long as they’ll agree to let us exchange it if we don’t like it once we get there. The 30-day store listings end on May 13th, so we won’t list anything new after that. We’ll also end the auctions on May 23rd.

This one I’m not looking forward to as hot as I’m sure it’ll be and that’s the swap meet. We’re going to do that on May 22nd and possibly the 23rd as well. We hope to get the RV the week before the swap meet so we’ll have time to spruce it up. We’ll use it to go to the swap meet so Tom can get used to driving it.

Around the 28th of May, we’ll get a camper shell for the back of the pickup. In the midst of all this, we’ll be stripping and selling the car and the other truck.

On the 29th is when we’ll get moving boxes to pack up the last of our stuff which we plan to take with us. That should be a fraction of what we moved here with!

June 5th and 6th are when we’ll have the moving sale. Hopefully, the heat won’t deter people.

Monday, June 7th is when we hope to leave Arizona and arrive in Oregon 4 or 5 days later. If we really do leave on the 7th, then we should have just 38 days left here!

Just in case there’s a delay in anything Mary sends, I’ll tell her to stop mailing things to me on May 25th if she doesn’t want to be mailing things during the move.

Still have no idea when the surveyors will be out. I’m sure they’ll come when I’m asleep. The intense winds woke me up today. I knew I was going to get woken up any day now too, as it had been a while. I don’t expect to get much sleep in the next few months, that’s for sure!

I’m just glad we finally know some things. We know when the house will close, we know when we’ll leave, give or take a few days. All those months of wondering and not knowing were getting quite old. I don’t know what our land will be like or what our lives will be like in Oregon, but we’ll soon find out. I think it’ll be better than here. Either way, I’m getting settled and staying put this time around. I haven’t lived in any place for longer than 6 years since I was 12. I’m sick of moving. Moving to an apartment that already has plumbing and electricity is easy, but moving to raw land is hard. We’re going to have a lot of thorns to go through before we get to the roses and will be put out a lot. We’ve been there before, though, so we’ll do it again and live as college kids or poor people do without extras like dishwashers till we can one day reap the rewards from being put out like this. It’ll be worth it. I’ll just be damned if I’ll let anyone take it away from us!

It’d be nice to hear from Mary regarding not only what’s going on with us, but with her, too. She never did tell me what she thought of my last story. She wasn’t through with it when she last wrote. I noticed I don’t hear from her for a while after sending my stories. She must take her time reading them. I thought she’d just zip right through them, but it seems she likes them to last a while. It’s been a few weeks since she wrote, but she doesn’t typically go longer than a month. She’s probably just not in a writing mood lately and may be a little hesitant, like I said before, to send stuff now. By now she should know what’s going on, so she’ll probably write soon.

I haven’t sent any mail to Bob. I don’t know if the old man’s dead or laid up in the hospital, but I don’t write to people who don’t write back after a while. If he’s dead, no one’s going to tell me and there’d be nothing I could do about it anyway. If he’s in the hospital, I’ll just have to wait and see if he ever recuperates enough to write.

Paula, I don’t care to hear from. Tom said it’s human nature for those who don’t have anything that are given things not to be appreciative, yet I’d be all the more appreciative if someone cared enough to give me something when I didn’t have shit, but human nature is pretty warped. Always has been, always will be. Nonetheless, she hasn’t written for months so I stopped writing her.