The Claritin still suppresses my appetite most of the time. Perhaps this is why I woke up at a surprising 119 lbs!

I still wish I knew why my wins have slowed down. I had nearly 20 in December and just 8 in January.

Things aren’t looking too promising at work, Tom says. The orders just aren’t coming in as fast as he thought they would. Yeah, I’m not surprised. I still think we’re going to be poor and living in noisy places throughout most of our lives. Why whatever’s up there has been so kind to us since moving beats me. I guess it thinks that even Tom and Jodi S need and deserve a break every now and then. But how long will it last? See, that’s the scary side to doing well; fearing you’ll get kicked back down. Especially since you’ve already been kicked down so many times before. There’s even a scary side to accumulating all the stuff we have and that’s knowing that we now have more stuff to lose, should we ever succeed in doing so like we nearly did when we first got here.

At least we know that if they fired him right now, the stuff we could sell on eBay would cushion us for a while, plus he’d get unemployment for a few months. Still, I’d rather continue to move ahead in life, not up and down and up and down like a damn yo-yo.

If there were two things I wish I could make myself do, it wouldn’t only be to keep a schedule but to love noise, too. We could buy a California house in two years if I did love noise. After I got the things on my list, we could put non-necessities in storage, then rent a room or a studio for $300 a month with everything included. We’d stop buying non-necessities altogether. Since he takes home two grand a month, we could put a grand a month towards the house, then set aside whatever was leftover from the other grand to use for fun shopping once we got into the house. If we did this for two years, we’d have enough money, and by then I could get current on whatever dolls came out along the way. I just want to get “home” in a rural place and have at least $100 a month for fun. It’s still hard to believe this will ever happen. Right now it’s looking like we’ll be city renters indefinitely.

In case I didn’t yet mention it, I managed to kill the cold within a few hours. It’s amazing yet weird how my body spits out the colds that try to set in. Is it really me doing it? Or is it something else?

Now if only my ear wouldn’t be under pressure half the time. I could live with the popping which I have 98% of the time, but the pressure really gets annoying. We still don’t think they’re connected. Tom agrees there’s nothing serious going on, but he thinks it could be sensitivity around the area where the frame was or migraines which can also affect vision. I don’t know what it is and I’m sick of trying to figure it out!

To my surprise, Webshots pulled a picture of me as a toddler in a bathing suit, saying they had to remove children that showed either partial or total nudity. But a bathing suit??? There are lots of community photos of children in bathing suits.