I thought I was ready for sleep, but I guess I’m not quite there yet. The day turned out wonderfully quiet. We only heard the dogs for about 15 seconds at 10 PM. What sucks is knowing that tomorrow they’ll be back to barking the day away. Due to where my schedule is now, I should sleep through the worst of it. That would be the barking fit that starts just after 7:30 and lasts for an hour, sometimes longer. Then every 15-30 minutes they’ll go off from anywhere between 5-20 minutes at a time.

How does one get away from all the barking in the West??? It’s so bad here that I’ve sometimes thought about heading east where dogs are pets, allowed indoors, and made part of the family. Not tossed outside to stay 24/7 like some old, used-up piece of furniture. I don’t understand why anyone would want dogs if all they were going to do was keep them outside. Trained guard dogs, I can see, but what else would be the point in keeping them out there? To get attention? To annoy your neighbors?

Florida appeals to me, but at the same time, Tom and I both agree that the humidity would suck. Plus, Florida’s so damn crowded. There’s no acreage or real space of any kind to be had there if you’re not ready for a retirement community of some kind. I’d still like to remain in rural areas for another 20 years or so, then maybe get into a retirement community somewhere.

Tom trimmed my hair earlier, but it’s still a bit uneven. It’s not too noticeable with all the curls, so it’s okay for now. After having it between my waist and legs for two decades, it’s nice to have a break from the hassles that went with having such long hair for so long. Who knows? I may keep it short forever, although it’s not literally “short.” Guess that depends on one’s definition of the word. It’s to my shoulders. Pretty short for someone who had it as long as I did.

Tom agrees his weight is getting out of hand at 262 pounds, so he’s going to start dieting. Being laid off and home so much of the time has made it easier for him to eat more and be less active. I’m sure he’ll lose some weight. Once he makes up his mind to do something and is serious and sure he wants to do it, he usually does it.

Me, I could still stand to lose 25-35 pounds, but my problem is constant hunger. Until I can figure out a way not to be so hungry so much of the time, losing weight is going to be a challenge for me. And having such a slow metabolism doesn’t help either. So running every day alone doesn’t get the weight off. I’d have to cut down to at least 1000 calories a day and at that rate, you might as well starve cuz you’ll feel like you are anyway!

After finding a couple dozen or so typos in We’ll Meet Again Someday, along with a few missing words and sentences that I felt I could restructure better, I replaced the old copy with the new, corrected version on MD, but I’m not going to bother putting the corrected copy on Kiwi. So hopefully there are no more boo-boos to be found within it.

I decided, after all, to go through the 26 pages I began of Rainbow Dreams and see if I could make a story of it. I’m just not sure where to go with this one yet, but maybe it will come to me at some point. I usually get my ideas from dreams, believe it or not.

Still not sure what makes my journal so popular on MD, but after thinking about it I realized that there are up to 9 people that I know or have known (and this is kind of funny) that could be checking it out. My folks, Tammy, Mary, Andy, Marla, Satish, Michelle, the black bitch & pig. Plus there could be OLSers checking it out too, along with Lucinda, who told me my journal was “fascinating.” I never heard from her again after that.

Later…

Shit! The past really does come back to haunt me, doesn’t it? Now I know Tammy not only could be checking my journals out, but she is. This part is great. I like to share my thoughts, opinions and experiences. If I didn’t and if I cared what others thought of what I may have to say, I wouldn’t have an online journal set to public as opposed to private.

With sites like Facebook, MySpace, Reunion and shit like that which I had to join due to contests they were conducting, I knew it was just a matter of time before I was found by someone I didn’t want to be found by. I guess she’s still living in Connecticut. She’s a medical assistant, or so her profile says.

I still don’t think I ever could forgive her. Forgiving someone is simply asking for old cycles to repeat themselves and the last thing I need is to go through that shit all over again. She may never be able to cause me to end up in jail again, but just knowing that she did once is enough! Besides, she and I are like night and day, and she’s on one side of the country while I’m on the other side, so what’s the point of reconnecting? My friends may be far away too, but we have common interests and we don’t have the shitty history the drama queen and I have.

At first I was going to ignore her message which simply said, “This is your sister. Hope all is well,” but since I don’t always do the smartest thing, I told her no, I’m not going to tell you to go to hell or wish every bad thing in the world to happen to you, but I think it best that we continue on in silence, as silence really is golden at times. Yet I at least let her know why. I also told her I wasn’t sure she got the link to my journals and so I gave that to her too, then deleted the entry I had for her. Not sure why she’d care, but it’s up to her to do what she wants as far as reading any of my stuff. If she bugs me I could always set my journal to private.

To sum it all up, I told her that while I may’ve had fun flirting with a few of the detention officers who actually liked me too, she has no idea what half a year of missing your loved ones, your pets, eating food not fit for an animal, taking cold showers, and not getting any sleep is like, and she ought to hope she never will!

So I may not be perfect either, and the past may be the past, she may not have known what the hell she was doing, but one simple fact remains and that’s that while we may not hate each other, we don’t like each other either.

Who’s next to find me, Miss Perfect?

Her contacting me on Facebook makes me think my folks never gave her my journal link. Unless she wanted to keep her email address hidden and not have to set up her own journal account just to contact me, why didn’t she contact me from there a while ago if she had the link? And why did my parents not give her the link, if that’s truly the case? Maybe they didn’t want her to read anything I may write about them that they didn’t like and that may embarrass them? Or maybe they didn’t want her to feel hurt on account of the entry I made just for her?

I already got my first win of the year. Two gift cards for Albertson’s. One’s for $75 and the other is for $25. The only problem is that there are no Albertsons in NorCal. So Tom called their 800 number from the landline and they said to simply return them and they’ll send us a check for $75.

I also won a pouch of cinnamon crumb cake coffee that’ll make 10 cups and some candy.

I got the tank top I won from ESPN and it’s too small on me. Argh! Well, I’m not going to lose any more weight. I’m SICK of dieting! 135 may be an astronomical amount of weight for a 5-footer, but that’s okay. I hate being hungry, I’m still pretty fit and making sure I run about a mile each day.

According to the amount of time I smoked (started between ages 13-15 and quit at 31), and the number of cigarettes I smoked during that time, I’ve taken off almost 4 years of my life, according to this health site I was just at. That’s it? I would’ve thought it’d be more than that.

While I was correct in assuming we’d managed to escape the car stereos, the dog curse still lives on, although today was annoying as opposed to maddening. I think he was home today. Especially because of the rainy weather. If he was there, just letting them bark the amount that he let them bark for is enough to convince me that they need to be killed and that a note would be a waste of time. Besides, he’s said and done things in the past that indicate that he wouldn’t care to anyway. We’ve asked him to call first before coming down here yet he does it anyway, so why would he care about controlling his dogs?

Tom, who got up at 8:00, said they barked for 3 minutes. Then he heard a big diesel truck come in around 2:00 and they went off for 6 minutes, were quiet for 5, then went off again for 2 more minutes. We also hear (at least we think we do) someone else’s dogs, but aren’t sure where they are. Sound carries better at this time of year too, because the leaves have thinned out.

I just wish the owner was over 500’ away instead of almost 300’. You really have to get over 500’ before barking isn’t as much of an issue.