Exactly 5 years ago today I was in a semi-drunken sleep, never knowing that in just a few hours I’d wake up, leave the house and not return for half a year. How different my life is today than it was then! If I’d known I’d be in Oregon less than 5 years from that day, I’d have assumed it was because we were forced to run, but who knows what would have happened if we hadn’t lost the house? Maybe we would’ve been. Those sickos that so cruelly and hatefully tormented us and ran our lives for so long weren’t the type to give up and let go. Take a break, but never let go.

Life is certainly much better today, but not perfect. My ear is getting worse, if it really is my ear that’s the problem. The extra oil doesn’t seem to be helping at all, but you know what? I’m sick of this. Just totally sick of it! Sometimes the best way to deal with a problem is not to deal with it at all and I’m just about ready to do just that. I’ll just do what I can to make myself more comfortable, but I’m not going to bother seeing a doctor about it. Tom said it won’t kill us to rent a car if we have to go either up to Portland or down to Sacramento to find a doctor who can deal with this (an otologist), but why bother? There’ll only be something else afterward. All my life I’ve had one medical problem after another, so why treat this just to move on to something else?

I had a dream two nights ago that I was to die in July. Then it became 2-3 years. Then I was asking Tom if he thought I’d be alive when I was 45 and he said, “I don’t know,” in a semi-doubtful yet hopeful voice. Just maybe I will get an early exit from this life after all. Wasn’t it something I’ve wanted so many times anyway? Sometimes I wonder if an early departure might not be such a bad idea. Do I really want to live to get old and arthritic, then lose my husband who’s older than me just to have no one to take care of me when my time comes? Do I really want to live if most of my life is still destined to be filled with poverty, stress and sorrow? For all I know, this thing just may turn deadly for real if left untreated. Maybe it’s a massive infection or a tumor. I just don’t know what the hell it is. I trust fate to do what’s best and I believe that whatever’s meant to be will be no matter what, so I think I’ll just leave it alone, and if it’s something that kills me, then it kills me. Somehow, though, I doubt this is anything that will one day go away on its own whether it kills me or not, so maybe since praying for help was useless, I oughta pray for it to kill me as quickly and as painlessly as possible. See, that’s the hard part of saying I’d let anything deadly kill me before I treated it. It’s the suffering leading on up till it finishes me off that’d be hard, but I’m certainly going to give it my best! Still, I wish I knew why I can put spells on Blondie to extend his life, and do spells on Tom to keep him cold-free and to help him with sprains and things like that, yet I can’t help myself worth shit.

There is one way we helped me, though, and that’s that we finally got me a pair of reading glasses at the grocery store yesterday. I was surprised by how big even the smallest pair was for my head despite having such a fat face. What a huge difference they make by enlarging the fine print I can no longer see! Eventually, though, I’m going to have to get in for a prescription to help me see close-up. I’ll get a child’s frame at that point.

It’s so true that the rich get richer while the poor only get poorer. Back when we were homeless, we couldn’t get winning lottery tickets to save our lives. Just an occasional two-dollar winner. I had to urge Tom not to bother spending the few precious bucks we had because I knew better. Now that we have money, however, he’s winning like crazy. He has $41 in winning tickets to cash in later on when he goes to do the laundry.

The most exciting thing to happen was the surprise package that came on Friday via FedEx from Nashville. Although it was at the end of my day when the mail was due, I couldn’t sleep because I had one of my feelings. One that said to try to stay up just a little longer for a cool surprise. When I first looked out and saw the package, I thought it was Tom’s party pack or the DVDs, but then I realized the box was too big and too lightweight to be either one of them. Instead, it was a white cowboy hat autographed by Terri Clark! I have one of her songs, Poor, Poor Pitiful Me, which Linda did in the late 70s. She’s got a good strong voice. Very country-sounding.

It was from the Grand Ole Opry sweep that expired on the 15th. It was a two-star sweep in which one randomly drawn winner a day was to win an autographed item of some kind from various country artists for 80 days. I won mine on day 76.

The sucky thing is that no COA of any kind came with it so I don’t know where/how I could sell it. I can’t prove she signed it. Besides, the writing’s so sloppy that I couldn’t even read the name. I thought it was a guy’s writing. I only found out who it was when I checked the sweep’s winner’s list.

Later…

I think that the olive oil we decided to try in my ear may’ve been a big mistake. It seemed to make my ear worse. When I went back to the baby oil, the popping and pressure backed right off like it usually does. The fact that the baby oil seems to help it suggests that it’s not a growth or an infection. Yet if it’s just dead skin, why has it been causing me such headaches for so long?

We’re going to hold off on the portable washer unless he either spots a good deal on one or there really is a windfall of some kind at work that delays the California move for years. We could give up $13 an hour without much risk, but there’d be no way we’d be quick to throw away either bonuses of many thousands of dollars, a potential partnership, or higher wages than what the bank was last paying.