I got up at 4 AM and must’ve lain in bed for 45 minutes slowly sipping my coffee. During the entire time, tons and tons of dogs all around me, but mostly in back, barked non-stop. Not once did they pause for air.

If a pessimist like me can have such good feelings about Oregon, then surely we’re doing the right thing, though I still worry the neighbor curse will follow us. All it takes is one rowdy household to disturb the peace and take away our sense of seclusion. Either way, we’re going and we’re going to just deal with whatever happens there because 13 moves in 18 years are enough!

I’m pissed off because our camera’s broken at a time when we need it more than ever before. We don’t have money to get a new one, plus an additional one as a backup for when it breaks.

Mary sent me the second chapter of that book. This one mainly says that God’s gift of eternal life is free and that we don’t have to worry about being good enough to qualify for it. I don’t know if I believe there’s an afterlife, and if so, what kind of an afterlife. Is there really a heaven? A hell? Reincarnation? Or simply nada? I don’t know what to believe. All the possibilities out there make it hard for me to settle on one belief, but I decided long ago like this chapter seems to suggest we should, to just try to do my best in life without worrying if I’m “good enough” in the end. I already resigned myself to the fact that if for some reason God really does hate gays and sees us as evil sinners and plans to have us rot in hell, so be it because I gotta be me. I don’t think he does hate us, though, or else why would we be here? If I was God and I was creating a world, I wouldn’t put anything in it I didn’t like. I wouldn’t give people the brains to figure out how to do things like heart transplants, abortions, and breast enlargements either if I thought it was wrong. I don’t think he even hates murderers like Monster, though most of us people certainly do! I could never love or forgive my enemies like it also says we should, but once again, I know and accept that I can’t be perfect, so if not being very forgiving and hating my enemies makes me less than perfect, then less than perfect I shall be.

Anyway, I believe some of the things I read, but other things are harder to believe. I accept God for what he is, but I still have a hard time trusting him when so many bad and unfair things happen.

I told her she can send whatever she wants as long as it’s not about bashing gays and women, or suggesting we should all be the same. The biggest thing that turns me off of religion, separate from whatever my feelings may be towards God, is that it’s too structured. To tell everyone it’s a sin to use birth control or to get abortions really irks me. I believe everyone is an individual and should decide these things for themselves without pushing their ways on others and trying to get them to be like them because they believe their way is the right way. We all believe our way is the right way and I think we all should follow our hearts/heads and not some book or what someone else says. I’ve always hated dictatorship.

Mary says to give God my problems and while that may sound like a simple solution, I don’t think it would be effective. We can’t just throw our problems at others. We have to face them and work them out ourselves. No one else can fix them for us, nor do they just vanish into thin air. Not usually anyway. Although Tom doesn’t believe in it either, he explained to me the types of problems you give to him are mostly decision-making dilemmas, and believe me, I could use help with that. I don’t know whether or not I should force myself to try to adapt to sleeping with him or just keep our own rooms as that’s what I’m used to. I also don’t know about the getting it on part of it. I don’t really want to sleep together or get it on but sometimes I wonder if I should anyway. Tom’s a very tolerant, accepting man, so it’s not like I’d be depriving him or hurting him in any way by not doing these things, and he’s always told me he’d never make me do anything I didn’t want to do.

Anyway, to sum it all up, I don’t know if I’ll ever truly believe most of the things Mary does any more than Tom does, but I am at least keeping an open mind. It would be nice if a lot of it could be true and if I could have more faith, but we’ll see. I’ve prayed to God for help with losing weight ever since I lost my ability to do so and got no help. Now to think I could praise him for my extra weight, then lose it, is hard to believe. And they say you have to believe and also not expect results, and I don’t know that I can do either one. Oh well, I try my best like I said.

Mary says she hasn’t been in the mood to work on her book. I understand being in a writing mood, versus not being in a writing mood. Sometimes our writing dictates us just as much as we dictate it. I thought this story would be at least 100 pages and take several more months, yet it looks like it’s nearing its end at around 90 pages. Sometimes our stories drive us more than we drive them. It didn’t come out as good as I hoped it would. It’s just ok. Pretty weird, though.

She asked and I told her that we still don’t know if we’ll get a cabin kit. I think we’ll just use the RV and maybe a tent until we build a dome, but we’ll see. While we may now know that the house is sold and how much moving money we’re going to have, we don’t yet know what he’ll have for a job and this is going to help determine just what we build. Domes seem cool, though, and the cheapest thing you can build yourself and the easiest, too.

We did both good and not-so-good with the 5 things that ended yesterday. Maria surprisingly went higher than Amelia and sold for $18.50, but the Barbies only sold for $1.28. The rodent lot sold for $32. We made $82 in total. It’s going to really suck like hell when we run out of stuff to sell. I just hope that when we do, we really can keep things going by getting more junk through yard sales, etc.