Right now I am not a happy camper. Not as opposed to yesterday. I a won $100 shopping spree at a place called Bluefly that sells designer clothes. The catch is that I have to get the affidavit notarized that we printed out. One in which we couldn’t adjust the margins, so it’s split into 3 pages. We walked in the cloudless 92º heat (we’re on for 101º on Saturday) all for nothing. I knew it wouldn’t be that easy for me, but that’s ok because their clothes aren’t that exciting. Unlike most folks, I never felt the need for fancy clothes, cars, jewelry or furs. To me, there’s nothing wrong with getting clothes from department stores. They have nice things, sometimes even nicer.

The bank we inquired at only notarizes for customers with accounts, and this check cashing place wouldn’t do it, so we have to go out Saturday morning and hope to get it done someplace when we go out to do the grocery shopping as either just he or both of us do at that time. I’m not going to sweat it if I miss the 10-day deadline because this is ridiculous. I can see if it was for a grand or more, but we’re only talking $100. Couldn’t they simply have sent me a promotional code to redeem like they did when I won the $100 Visa card from AOL?

I made an SOS order, so I have that to look forward to, but what I don’t look forward to is my office becoming a virtual circus. Just when I thought that maybe, just maybe, next door wouldn’t become a problem, after all, they go and plop a swing set down in the middle of the yard, so now it’s either listen to them scream for hours on end when it cools down, or move my office out of their playground and into the bedroom. It’ll be a tight squeeze, but I won’t have any choice if I want to get any work done. My ear can’t take the headphones for hours at a time. I knew it was only a matter of months before they became a problem. Obviously, those older kids did move in there because you wouldn’t plop the thing down in the middle of your yard a whole 4 or 5 years in advance if it were for a baby, and make it harder for you to mow. The playhouse and mini basketball hoop were just a warning. This is common practice in rental houses; to have more and more people move in after a few months or so. I’m hoping they won’t be out there when it’s cold, but I’m sure they’ll make an exception just for me. In a sense, this is worse than Phoenix. At least in Phoenix the center of the neighboring yards were in back and away a bit. But this is centered directly in front of our side windows. Right smack in front of them with the swings being just 10’-15’ away.

Tom is still very hopeful that the handicapping program will get us out of here and into a quiet place we won’t get run out of, but it flunked out entirely on tracks it’s not trained to work at yesterday. There was a close call, though. The horse it picked to win would’ve won if another horse hadn’t blocked it in in the end. If we can’t get into a retirement community soon or are rich enough to live on a boat, then the only escape from being in the heart of the chaos would be to have some acreage again. I don’t want to go back to fighting with wells, but if this works we’ll have the money to fix them and to plant trees and shrubs that’ll block out distant sounds and give us more privacy, though in California I don’t suppose it’d be as open as Arizona was. I would also hope the land won’t be haunted and that things could grow better in that kind of climate. I would prefer to get into a more ritzy area than an anything-goes kind of area to reduce the potential for trouble and noise, though people are still going to leave their dogs outside 24/7, and as far as disciplining their kids – forget it. There’s simply no such thing anymore. This little brat at the bank was jumping up and down on the couch in the waiting area and running all over the place screaming.