I read an article that said that insufficient sleep may cause hormonal shifts that boost both hunger and appetite. Well, I’ve been sleeping ok and have quit worrying about it, and although I am less hungry since I quit stressing over it, it won’t magically enable me to comfortably and subconsciously eat 800-1200 cals a day so I could either lose or maintain my weight. If someone had told me years ago that I’d one day reach a point where it was either starve most of the time or get fat, I’d never have believed it. I guess it’s just my time to join most of my fellow middle-agers in being 40-50 pounds overweight. All I know is that I’m tired of stressing over it and struggling to get weight off that just won’t come off unless I nearly starve myself. I go completely out of my mind trying to cut my calories down so low day after day. I need to let my body be itself, so to speak, and let it do whatever it feels it needs to do, and if that’s slapping on another 20-30 pounds, then so be it. I know I’ll look horrible and that it’ll be hard to get around and do things like bend over to trim my toenails, but I’m sick of having it be such an issue in my life! I’m just going to try to stay in shape as long as I can, though I assume I’ll one day get too big to jog and leave it at that. When I can no longer do anything bouncy like that, I’ll do more walking.

We’ve been having power outages that sometimes knock us offline, but Tom showed me what to do whenever that happens.

We got a catalog with this device that stops dogs from barking much in the way Tom wants to build something that’d interfere and even damage these fucking stereos no one’s going to do shit about. You can bet that I’ll be ordering the debarker in the fall when it starts cooling down! I haven’t heard from the one on the corner at all, but late at night or early in the morning when it’s cooler, I occasionally hear the canal dog. Just not nearly as much as I will when we start having highs in the 50s and 60s.

It would still be nice to have a “stereo killer” even if we could be granted the blessing to live where they don’t just because it’d be fun to destroy them whenever we came into the city for groceries and things like that. I could be sitting there fucking up any that passed us by while Tom drove. Hey, if the name of the game in this country is ‘control’ then I’ll gladly do some controlling of my own for once if it’s for a worthy cause!

My latest wins consist of a DVD, a coupon for a free candy bar, a $5 Home Depot gift card, an autographed book cover by Anne Christopher, whoever she is, and best of all, a $25 Target gift card in which I ordered Ashley a pair of black strappy sandals with closed toes to hide her not-so-perfect toes. They have a 3½” heel instead of 3”, but Tom and I agree that a half-inch won’t make a difference. I hope not, but if worse comes to worst, Denise can wear them since her feet don’t have to be precisely positioned being a sitting mannequin.

I haven’t been too eager to bring this up because we’ve been teased enough times in our lives with potential money-making opportunities, and haven’t wanted to get my hopes up. It’s looking promising so far, though we don’t know to what degree. It’s this program he’s writing to train his computer to pick winning racehorses in a much more complex and accurate way than any software out there to date can do. He’s not sure yet just how profitable it’ll be but says he should know within a week or two. Well, although I’m not clearly seeing any future U-Haul out front come to take us away, I do vibe that next winter will not only be our last here (God, I hope so!) but that he won’t be working till he’s 65. At least not outside of the house he won’t be. Right now my feeling is that we’ll leave this house and go somewhere in California in 13-14 months. I don’t know if we could get into a retirement community at that time, but that seems like that’d be our best bet when we can since rural has got too many hassles associated with it, a boat would keep us from being able to go online, and there’s no beach we could live on in peace that wasn’t in a cold climate. I still don’t know what that green house meant that I saw in my visions around the New Year, so maybe it was nothing.