Tom shared with me his “bold dream,” and I was like, oh no! Your bold dreams are scarier than mine! And mine are always impossible whether they’re far out or not, while my goals are hit or miss. Well, I doubt it’s possible, but it did sound good once he explained it to me. We haven’t exactly been doing the greatest job of saving money, especially since we’ve been having so much fun shopping. Who could blame us, after all? We so rarely have money like this that after being so broke for so long, it’s hard not to get the things that were just a dream for so long.

The plan is for him to gamble enough horseracing wins to cover the cost of a trailer, which would be 5 grand or more. Then we’d save up enough money to live on for 6 months (we’d have unemployment checks for a while, too), while I won a grand’s worth of stuff to sell once we got down to Cali.

As I told him, saving up 6 months’ worth of living expenses may be reasonable, but gambling enough for a trailer and me winning that much stuff to sell seems unlikely. We may be able to do it, but it’d take 10 years since most of my wins are small. He’s thinking we could do it in just a year or two, but we’ll see. Then again, I’ve won at least 2 or 3 grand worth of stuff already. It’s just that you can’t usually get what things are worth when you try to sell them.

He said that if we could afford a hybrid car right away, there’s this perfect trailer park an hour outside of Sacramento that’s 3,000 feet up. High enough to be above the city smog, but low enough not to get more than a dusting of snow every few years. I’d hate to have even one flake a decade, but an occasional dusting would certainly beat this place any day. He says they only allow one pet per trailer that’s no more than 20 pounds, so you figure they’d get on them about it if it were noisy. They do have kids there, but we don’t have to have them right up against our place, he said. They have play areas designated for them, and as for the younger ones whose mothers would want them to play close by, they group those people together. We’d tell them up front that because I work at home, I would need a quiet section. We also agreed we’d soundproof certain areas of the trailer, which I always thought would be cool to do no matter what. That way I would not only not have to hear from other people, but no one could complain about me for having my own music too loud either.

This is going to be our cheapest day here so far this year. The heat hasn’t run since I got up at 3 PM, and I’m sure it was off for hours beforehand. It’s been hovering at 72º in here, but by midnight I’m sure I’ll want to kick it on for a while.

It’s been an amazingly quiet day, too. When I got up I expected to hear stereos boom by every few minutes, for the dog to be going crazy in back, and for the yard to be swarming with people next door. Instead, the stereos went by a little less often than a few minutes, the dog only took a few barking fits, and I never saw a soul next door. Tom said he saw 3 cars in front when he went to the store and there was a girl of perhaps 12 sitting on the back of one of the trucks, suggesting visitors. I think they’ll have visitors every day. Neither of us saw or heard any dogs, though, so that’s cool. The owners must’ve stuck to their no-pets rule.

Yuck! I swear I smell skunks now. Thank God for Pink Sugar! Whatever trailer park we land in, I sure hope it is livable and tolerable and that we can skip what’s my definition of rural and just go straight to a retirement community. In the West, they determine rural areas by how far they are from big cities, but in the East, it’s determined by how far you are from your neighbors. My demented sister had 11 acres in CT yet she was just minutes from cities of substantial sizes.

The good news is that Tom found out that you only have to be 50 to get into a retirement community down there, but the bad news is that they’d probably want me to be at least 50 as well. So if we left Oregon in two years, that’d be 8 years before we could get in, so this is why I hope to hell we can find a suitable place and skip rural living, knowing all the hardships that come with western rural areas. We don’t want to have to drive an hour to go grocery shopping and we don’t want to deal with wells, shallow or not, or loose dogs running wild on our land which we can’t afford to fence.

Ah, to stay put for 8 or more years! So far this has been just a dream, but maybe, just maybe, we could even stay in the trailer park after I hit 50, though I would think that by then we’d want a nicer place because whatever trailer we get wouldn’t be much nicer than this house. I could easily live in a place like Sun City or Sun Lakes, although it doesn’t have to be that ritzy. I mean, I can’t believe my singing would bother neighbors in houses like that, though I wouldn’t blast the stereo. I may be able to sing nearly as loud as the stereo, not that I have such a shabby voice to listen to, but I have no vibrating bass in my voice as the stereo does. I’m not like most people, so insecure that she feels she has to get the attention of every single person, stranger or not, that passes by. The only negative to moving to a retirement community if we couldn’t afford a down payment on a house would be that we’d have to rent. However, he’d be 58 when I turned 50, which would mean he’d only have 8 years where the threat of being fired or laid off was present. I guess that as long as the monthly costs weren’t as outrageous as Maricopa and we didn’t have a million-year mortgage, our security shouldn’t be in danger.

Mary’s going to be in for one rude awakening once she gets out and has access to computers if she thinks she’s going to make money at home. I told her not to bother falling for the survey scams and their false promises and said that if everyone could work at home that easily, they would. Work-at-home moms are a big scam right now. They couldn’t do it even if it was totally legit. How much work could they possibly get done with the kid screaming in their ear one minute, needing to be fed or changed the next, having questions to ask, wanting attention, etc.?