Got a couple of surprise wins today. One was a financial book. I don’t know if that’ll do us any good, but I also got a complete season of a popular cartoon series, so that will hopefully get us a little more.

I’ve stopped the Claritin again now that I know how outrageously expensive it is. I didn’t realize that it was costing a little over a dollar a day. Tom says it’s no big deal if I feel I need it again, but I hope I won’t and that I can deal with the hunger. Tom and I started a diet last week and he’s already lost 6 pounds, but as we know, God favors man. This means that because women retain water and fat more easily, I’ve only lost 1. I’m going to do it for 3 more weeks just to show Tom he’s wrong in saying everyone can lose weight. No, everyone cannot lose weight. Oh, I’ll lose 2-3 more pounds, but that’s as far as it’ll go. I simply don’t have the metabolism to lose a significant amount. Anyway, the Claritin still interferes with my sleep, causing me to wake up several times, so like I said, I hope I’m not too much hungrier. The stuff doesn’t always suppress my appetite anyway.

Although it’s still quieter than Phoenix and even the duplex, we still have our noisy moments around here, particularly between 4 PM - 10 PM on weekdays. The canal dog has backed off a bit lately. It seems to be at its worst when the temperature is in the 50s and 60s.

We were talking about soundproofing the walls and floors someday (unless we ever live where houses are built on concrete slabs like they were in Phoenix), and while it may be nice to be able to do that, no one should have to live that way. Besides, it’d cost so much damn money that by the time we could afford it we’d be eligible for a retirement community anyway.

After playing the phone tag I know she likes to play, I spoke with Paula yesterday. She was on her cell phone driving back from Boston in the car she was not supposed to be driving. She’s on probation till August as it is. Her latest Puerto Rican of choice lives near Boston. Supposedly she’s known him a while and he’s going to be moving closer to her. She also hopes to marry the guy even though he’s 50. I guess he’s ok in bed, too. Well, of course. Only I can have bad sex or no sex.

She’s also having more and more trouble with Justin just as I predicted. Tom says he sounds like your typical teenager, but I’m sure he’ll go much further and even end up doing time eventually, thanks to his mother who hasn’t always set a good example.

Without a big win of any kind, I’m starting to think that if I can ever manage to fight fate and get the right to see a dream of mine come true for once, then our only way to California might be to buy a trailer here. We’d only need a couple of grand to get into one provided there are no 2 or 4-legged animals allowed. But if we’re going to get something like, “Well, we let dogs and kids in, but we try to encourage people to keep them quiet,” we may as well stay here.

I still say we were meant to be in the city and so in the city, we’ll stay. That is, in the mainstream of it. We wouldn’t have been here so long if we weren’t meant to be. It seems the more we try to fight fate, the more set back we get. We tried to escape the chaos by running to Maricopa, and now we’ve got more noise to deal with overall than ever before. The only difference is that most of it was just a few feet from us in the past. Now it’s here, there and everywhere in general.