I have been on quite an emotional rollercoaster today! And busy, too. Let me try to go in order of events.

I had a semi-scary dream, but it wasn’t God/life beating us over the head with money. In the dream, I was standing by a road somewhere with Tom and a few others. I don’t know who the others were, but we were to wait for my parents to drive by – each in their own vehicle – then we were to all jump in a car and meet them a short distance away. So my dad drove by first followed by my mom. Then we piled into the car and entered some highway where we encountered a few scattered cars on the road. I said something about being careful getting around them in case there’d been an accident. Tom, who was driving, managed to squeeze through them ok. Then we turned onto a curving off-ramp in which there was an overturned car, but I woke up before I could see if my parents could be one of the ones in it. I was really scared in the dream too, right before I woke up.

I wonder if the strange dream I had with Charlotte was really about her son dying, though I didn’t even know he was ill till Andy told me he died.

Because of the dream, I decided to go to the mail place with Tom. Not just to get out and to help carry the packages, which the lady at the place called to say had arrived, but because I figured that if the dream was a warning for Tom and his car was destined to end up upside down, I was going upside down with him. But we got to and from the mail place without incident.

Besides all the Beanie Babies from my parents, Paula sent $10 to make up a CD for her. I emailed her to let her know we got the money and would make it up and send it as soon as we could, but that it may be a few weeks. I’ll also be enclosing some other goodies for her.

On the way back we saw the cutest, smallest deer ever. They were barely bigger than a cat!

Then it was on to stress all about Congress and their damn voting while I enjoyed – or at least tried to enjoy – checking out the Beanie Babies.

I started to say, “I’m sorry for saying this…” but why should I be sorry? It’s my journal. But damn that Bryd senator for dying when he did! He sure picked the right time to go belly-up, that’s for sure. God, I hate it when people die on our time or our expense and end up being more trouble dead than they did alive! And no, I don’t care how selfish this sounds. I’m sorry for his family and all that, but those of the living and who are struggling just to survive need their lives to go on. And his death put a real kink in millions of people’s lives, including our own. Meanwhile, I guess the compassionless bastards are going to vote as early as tomorrow or as late as next week. Then we can go back to worrying about beating the clock. Or at least I can. I wish I could be as stressless and as optimistic as Tom, but I can’t be. Seeing is believing for me. So until he gets a job I’m not going to believe shit. Right now all I can believe is that we have a 50/50 chance of making it through this. And sometimes I’m not sure that I want to. The longer this goes on, the more I lose my will and desire to go on. For what? Just to keep struggling? For now, if you’ve got any kind of a hold on us, even if it’s indirectly, don’t croak, ok?

Anyway, the Beanie Babies will help tremendously and we really appreciate them. We’re still guessing we’ll be able to get a few hundred for them, but it’s going to take time. We’ve been doing our homework (in between other things and playing fix-it) to find out where would be the best place to sell which items. Tom created a spreadsheet in Word to make them easier to keep track of.

I’m keeping a couple for myself, even though I have enough dust collectors hanging around and in too small of a space. I’m keeping Neon, a colorful seahorse with soft pastel colors, and Ty 2K, a color-speckled bear. It has squares of green, red, blue, yellow and purple against a white background.

I called to let them know, as promised, that the packages had arrived. Dad answered and then he went and got mom in case I had any questions. I didn’t, though, since we could research whatever we need to know. We didn’t talk long because she was planting bushes, a storm was coming, and so she wanted to hurry up and get them planted.

Tom thinks they may be testing us, whether they realize it or not. Meaning, they’re planning to distribute things before they die, and they want to see how good we are as sellers. This way they may be tempted to give us more stuff to sell later on.

Eileen turned 59 and I sent her a birthday email. She assured me my stories didn’t “scare” her off and that she’s just been limiting her computer time, saying it had gotten to be a real time sucker. She’s spending time with her granddaughter and reading.

It was cool to be able to read and understand a lot of the German I read on someone’s profile page on the language learning site, though I couldn’t have pulled the words out of thin air on my own. Not yet anyway. There’s a difference between being able to speak a language versus being able to understand it. I can understand lots of languages, but can only speak 3 right now. If I absolutely had to speak Italian I could probably do it, but my sentences would be slow, broken and sometimes incorrect.

Today’s fix-it game was all about the shower faucet leaking. It’s been dripping, actually. We set up a large bucket under it the other day to see how much. In a day it amounted to about enough water for one toilet flush. Then today we noticed the hot water tank fired up in the middle of a hot afternoon when we weren’t even running any water. The problem was obviously caused by rust and calcium trapped in the faucet, so Tom unscrewed the hot one and cleaned it. Of course we’re not going to tell Jesse about it, knowing he’d be quick to blame the well problems on that when there’s clearly not enough water leaking to cause it. Wells are simply problematic and unpredictable. We’ve had one before, so we know. It’s the biggest turn-off to the idea of us getting a place in a rural setting, should a miracle grant us the option to choose in the first place. Rural may be more fun, but it has the potential for a lot more problems. I would think the only problems with a senior community, though, would be barking and car doors slamming since we’d be back to being just a few feet away from neighbors, and everyone in the world but us has company 5 times a day.