Romeo’s next door now shoveling Bev’s driveway, but his truck isn’t present. He was over for a few minutes yesterday. I hope my complaints about the music won’t spark them into other annoyances, like slamming doors, for instance. I’ve heard that front door more often, though it’s so far from where I sleep, it’d never wake me up. It just seems to be human nature, though, for people to act up in other ways when they’ve been complained about. That’s what the freeloaders did, always making a point to slam their car doors as loud as they could.

At least today ought to be animal-free, so we’ve got 15 more Sundays to hope we can dodge the animals, though I know they’ll be here a few times before we leave. There are 3 Sundays left in the month as it is, so one of those ought to include them.

The old man across the street came knocking yesterday. We figured he wanted to plow our driveway for a small fee, but we just ignored him.

If I don’t hear from Bob or Jeff come Monday, I’m going to tell them to forget my order. I’m also not going to play any more mail games with anyone else, so I’ll probably forget about trying incense from that other place and just get us a small microwave and me a new pillow. Mine’s just about mashed flat. I think I’ve had it since back east if I didn’t get it when I first moved to Arizona.

Later…

It looks like I’ve bottomed out at 126 pounds, though I’ll continue to do this diet for two days at a time with a day off in between to save money.

Last night I slept pretty shittily. That’s because I had to sleep on pieces of foam because this bed leaked just like the last one did! It fucking figures, though I’m surprised it took so long. Why is it always our stuff that breaks? Meanwhile, none of the stuff in here that we don’t own has broken in any way. At least I caught this leak while I was awake, rather than awakened to find I’d sunk like I did in the RV. I was lying in it reading when I realized it was getting softer awfully fast. By placing it in the tub, Tom was able to locate the leak by pushing on it. The leak would then cause the water to bubble. The odd thing about it is that the leak is in the area where my pillow is and once we examined it, it was clearly a puncture made by a sharp object and not wear and tear of the bed itself. But I don’t have anything that could do that. I don’t lie on the bed with things in my pockets, nor do I have sharp objects on me. The sharpest thing we could come up with was the metal clasp around my elastic hair tie, but even that seemed too small and just not sharp enough to go through a sheet and a wool blanket folded in half.

We tried to patch it with a piece of semi-rubbery backing from a mouse pad and some rubber cement, but that wouldn’t seal it enough. We had Tom sleep on it because I figured I’d always be waking up, paranoid about sinking. I was shocked to find it stayed up all night, though it did lose a lot of air. I was like, I nearly broke my back while this thing stayed up! Despite sleeping on 4 pieces of foam, I was still quite uncomfortable. I guess it’s because I’m a little heavy. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so uncomfortable if I were the 100 pounds I used to be, but since that’s not going to happen, we got a new bed today. Fortunately, it came with a repair kit because we forgot to get one and these cheap pieces of shit are obviously always going to spring leaks.

Next week we’re going to get a microwave and me a new head pillow as well as a new body pillow.

It wasn’t overly cold out there, but it was all slushy with patches of water and ice and just totally yucky. Dreary looking, too. Tom’s still finding this fun, though, and even enjoyed shoveling the driveway. He’s insane, I told him.

Again someone knocked on the door. Some woman with a little kid that was probably looking for hand-outs. They just don’t leave you alone in the city!

I wonder if I’ll hear from the publisher this coming week. The 6 weeks are almost up. I’d rather them tell me they’re rejecting my manuscript than just blow me off without a word, but a lot of people do that.