Woke up to an email from D, which put a smile on my face as always. She said, “Yes, smartass, we are freezing our asses off right now,” after I teased her about her cold and snowy weather. As I told her, “Keep warm, Detective, cuz your highs are going to be half of our lows.” I tease her about going ice skating on the pond in front of her place.

But I also worry about her safety out on those snowy roads. Where cotton fields are aplenty here, cornfields are the thing there, and she drives through them getting too and from work. There’s also a deep ditch nearby too, so getting home is always a bit treacherous. Guess she got home early tonight because I just missed her when she tried to catch me on Facebook. She only had a few minutes, but I was taking a coffee break.

She’s made it her long-term goal to visit someday which would be nice, but I worry that actually seeing me would pop that perfect bubble she seems to imagine me to be in. As I reminded her, I’m not that 27-year-old, 100-pounder in that topless picture of me she loves to drool over, LOL! I know I’m doing damn good for 44, but I am 125 pounds and I do have a sprinkling of gray hairs.

She has her own worries too, like her becoming a distant memory to me by the time she can get out to see me. I don’t think she will, though. I know nothing in life is guaranteed. She may decide tomorrow or next year that she’s sick of me. I just try to take it one day at a time, seize the moment and enjoy it. Sure I worry about the future too, and am sometimes haunted by the past. But living in the moment is what I try to focus mostly on.

Like Tom is to me, Mel is everything to her as sexless as the relationship is, and would follow her anywhere. I’ll admit that while I’d always be polite to Mel if we met, I’d also be a touch envious. She’s got what I want, but I’m also glad she treats D right.

I still try to imagine what it would be like to be with D, and I know I can never know that for sure. Maybe it’d be heaven, maybe it’d be hell. Maybe she’d do right by me and always take care of me. Or maybe she’d start drinking again, whoring around, and then toss me out on my ass with no means of support.

The pest was nice enough to wait till after I got up today to come down and push the strips of grass together. He came down on the bulldozer, followed by his kid on the ATV. With the kid guiding him, he pushed the grass strips into place. They look like they can simply be picked up and moved around like a mat, but are actually super heavy.

Maryann was down at one point too, to see the grass. She didn’t come to the door, but Tom thought it looked like her car.

The only good in it was having fun playing with the dogs. They seemed really timid at first, then they were all over me, all loving and affectionate. Whiskey, who weighs almost half of what I weigh, nearly knocked me down when he jumped on me. He’s about 60 pounds, and Tom thinks I’m too small for a dog that size if we get a dog of our own and that we’d be better off with something like a cocker spaniel. Yeah, maybe someday.

Anyway, after Jesse left and we were on our way to the store, Tom told me he thinks Jesse’s mean to the dogs. He says he thinks he may hit them or throw stuff at them when they misbehave. I can believe this, and this is exactly what he told us to do to shut them up, along with yelling at them. As soon as they realized we weren’t going to hit them, they were sucking up every ounce of attention they could get from us. This doesn’t surprise me, considering how much of the time they’re left alone, and if he is abusing them, that’d make them want to seek out attention from good people all the more. They didn’t even want to go home at first. Once Jesse and his kid headed off, I figured the dogs would be quick to follow, but they weren’t. They wanted to hang around down here. The fact that Jesse doesn’t always keep an eye on them when they’re loose is enough to tell me something about him. If one of my dogs had just wandered down to the main road and gotten hit and killed by a car, I’d want to be more careful, but he didn’t seem to care whether or not they went home.

We went to the store and picked up a few treats to give ourselves a break from the usual stuff we’ve been eating, and to get out for a while. The store was pretty crowded, but hey, this is California. Why wouldn’t it be?

NorCaliGirl is still in the lead on the story site! And fast losing hope of ever hearing from the publishers at the other site.