Well, I’ll be damned! They are going to come through for us after all! With mixed emotions attached, of course. Meaning, we’re very appreciative of the fact that they’re sending out a check today for 3K, but they’re refusing to let us pay them back. We were going to give them $100 a month, then $300 a month once the house was done, but they’re saying that instead of paying them back, no more! That’s where the mixed emotions come from. On one hand, telling your kid “no more” when you have a good 100K or so is pretty low, but at the same time we do hate to ask for help and we do want to be independent. I know the “no more” is for our own good as mom knows she’s not going to be around forever to rescue us. Then again, is that really the case? Or could it be she no longer gives a damn? Our goal is to get 5K - 10K saved up ASAP and 20K saved by the time he turns 60 because you just never know.

Meanwhile, life in the Klamath Falls Forest Estates, unit 4, lot 13 can begin!!! Oh, how I hope we stay here for at least a decade! Tom thinks it’s more likely we’ll get a summer cabin nearby, than people living here year-round. Yeah, I guess it’s better to have the summers spoiled than the whole year, but as long as they don’t fuck with us, we’ll deal with whatever. It should be easy enough to get them out of sight, if not out of sound. Even if I was psychic enough to know we’d never get neighbors, though I still think we will sooner or later, I’d still plant flower hedges next spring anyway. It’d be nice to have something pretty like that no matter what. We were thinking of going with the Rose of Sharon. They’re cheap and they grow fast. I also think the wildlife here isn’t as likely to mess with them in this kind of climate, though we’ll get older plants if we can.

I’ll still write mom periodically, though not as much, as like I said, I have mixed emotions about her. She, Mary and Dave, just aren’t my favorite folks. They asked if I went to the temp agency with him, and of course he told them I did. Anything they want to hear we’ll tell them to get the money we need. I’d tell them I tortured the old neighbors without provocation if that’s what they want to hear and if that’s what it’ll take to get the money. Either way, we’re pretty confident that once he gets a job, we should be able to fend for ourselves so long as we don’t have a mortgage or any other huge expenses come up.

So I was half-right in the end. I mean, I was really starting to doubt they were going to put their actions where their mouths are, but I pretty much expected the “no more” part.

Why couldn’t Doe and Art have died the day before I dumped them?!

Between the two of us, we’ve had one black eye, a bad rash (though now that he’s taking Ibuprofen it seems to be healing), and two bouts of the runs, on top of the usual sleep curse. Tom agrees that most curses go in cycles for set numbers of years, but when he says the sleep curse will probably end when the shed’s built in a couple of months from now, I’m highly skeptical. This is because it’s been going on for 12 years now! Nobody’s this light a sleeper, nobody!

Tom had to run out for water because I had to flush the toilet so many damn times when I got sick. He got it from this hotel in Beatty and found that they do propane there which he was happy to learn.

We’re going to make sure we don’t start spending money on fun things, as in setting aside allowances for ourselves, till we have a certain amount saved up. This amount will depend on what his job pays. He filled out applications today and is going to check out some production companies tomorrow. I’m also not going to get the mannequin till the house is done. Besides, there’s no room for it until then anyway, and it can wait. There’ll still be mannequins in the world by then and I’ll still have many years to enjoy it when I can get it, so I’m fine with waiting.

Tom got an inflator kit that sounds like a blow dryer for $5 so I can blow up my bed myself if I ever need to.

It was freezing in here at 6:00 this morning. Just 54º! We set the thermostat to 65º and we intend to leave it that way for as long as we have to live in this shitbox!

Our local rodent friends never cease to amaze me with how smart they are. The chippies seem just as intelligent as rats! When I call out “Chippy,” they actually come running! Also, Tom got to see the big gray rat today.

Last night I began Anyone’s Dream which I think is my best writing yet. I wrote it in my notebook to kill time before I could fall asleep. I abbreviated a lot of it so I could write faster, figuring I could always fine-tune it once I typed it up.

I’ve got to concentrate more on subjects, whether I’m personally sick of them or not, that interest most people if I want to stand a chance, no matter how slim, of selling my books. They want sex, they want murder, they want childbirth, they want substance abuse, they want violence. They mostly want to read about things they don’t want to experience in real life.