We got a letter from Unemployment today saying we’d be getting $300 a week! Tom said that’s way better than the $230 he expected. We don’t know yet if we’ll need to pawn the TV and one of the Macs, but if we’re really careful, we could make it on $300 a week till he finds a new job. That’s only $75 less than he was taking home, and since he hasn’t been driving 45 minutes a day or more, he’s been saving on gas. It lasts for 6 months, but we know he’ll certainly have a job by then.

Jasmine said that while she can understand that having to pawn things may be humiliating, you gotta do what you gotta do to save yourselves, and there’s nothing humiliating about escaping death or the streets.

She’s got a point there! We’ve all gotta do things we don’t want to do, and the humiliation of pawning things could never compare to the sorrow, fear and just downright horror of having to kill ourselves to escape a slow, miserable death on the streets. No one wants to die. I just hope we won’t continue to be teased about our survival like this every so often. The stress is a killer! It still is a little scary and it probably will be until he gets hired wherever.

Anyway, the reason the unemployment checks are this high is because of all the overtime he was getting for a while back in the motel.

I won a Blu-ray movie and got another coffee sample. It’s a dark roast, so I don’t know if I’ll like it. I can’t believe the amount of coffee I’ve been winning and receiving samples of lately!

In gay news, they’re protesting up a storm, but I’ve still got to see them conquer all the bigots of this world before I’ll believe they ever will. Some say what happened here was the best thing because it stirred up lots of support all over the country, but until gays have a full bag of rights in every state, I don’t see any improvement coming anytime soon.

The only bad thing, other than the stress of being unemployed of course, is the barking. It’s been terrible lately. Just terrible. Even worse than Oregon in some ways. Like I said, I’m not sure Jesse’s returning to work is a good thing after all. I like how it doesn’t give him as much time to come down and bug us, but it’s just as noisy, so what’s the point?

I’m also not sure if we’re better off here than in the city. I guess maybe we still are because it’s cheaper here. Besides, we can deal with the dogs, but there’s nothing we could do about all the car stereos and door-slamming in the city. Then again, if we do shoot the dogs, it’d only be a matter of time before they got new ones. People just don’t care. I don’t know why they’d get dogs just to toss them outside 24/7 and risk someone getting as fed up as we are, but that’s just what they do around here. They get dogs, they throw them outside, and they basically forget about them. And if the neighbors have a problem with it, tough shit.

We’ll have to just wait and see what kind of job he gets and then weigh the pros and cons of moving or staying. I know I’m just sick of moving and sick of this shit following us every fucking place we go! Then again, if he gets a shitty-paying job, we’ll HAVE to stay here. This is a classic example of how I can’t believe some things don’t happen for a reason. No one “happens” to get this shit everywhere they go. This is a definite curse and it’s been on me since the early 90s. I’m sick of running as I said. We’re not the problem here, the dogs are. So I think we should take care of the problem. If we leave and find a quiet place, we may have a bigger more modern place, but it’d only cost more and it too, would get noisy in just a few months, so we may as well stay put, face the problem and deal with it. The only thing is that it might be a while before we’ve got the money to deal with it properly, the only way it can be dealt with.

For now, we’re not going to say anything in case we need a few days extra to pay the rent, but Jesse needs to control his own dogs, too. They’ve been barking like crazy, more than the renter’s dogs. I don’t know what kind of setup he has up there, but I’d like to see if we can get him to put the dogs on the other side of the house.

Tom’s been taking this extra free time to work on the horseracing program. Not wanting to jump the gun again until it’s been tested enough, he’s been making picks without betting, and so far it looks good. It’s seemed that way before, though, so it still needs more testing time.

Wouldn’t it be oh so wonderful if I was wrong? I mean first I thought what happened last year happened to reunite my family and I, then I came to fear it was just preparation for death after all, only it would be a year later. Well, wouldn’t it be nice if this layoff was meant to be so he could have more time to fine-tune the program?!