“I’m dead serious, Tom. I want to rob a bank. We’re never going to have money the right way, so unless we think of how to get it the wrong way, we’ll be dirt poor all our lives if we survive this recession. I know you can’t fight fate and win. Meaning, if we’re meant to be as poor as I think we are, nothing we can do can change that, but we’ve at least got to try. Now how about I do the robbing while you drive the getaway car? The mannequins won’t mind my borrowing one of their wigs.”

Tom laughed and said, “Because you won’t get that much.”

“Yeah, most of the money’s in the safe, isn’t it?”

“Yes, and if you stay long enough for them to empty out the safe, you’re done. They trip the silent alarms as soon as they know they’re being robbed. But because they don’t usually have cops at the bank, you’ve got a few minutes before they get there. But you probably won’t get more than a grand from a teller.”

So since I realized that we can’t very well rob a bank twice a month for the rest of our lives, or get into the safe when the bank is closed and no dye packs are present to explode on us like in armored vehicles, we’ve got to come up with some other way to survive.

But how?

No one’s going to give my husband a job. Period. That became obvious months ago. And if they do give him a job it will be years from now. So that means we’re basically on our own. Our online job won’t do it, and his program – the one I can’t talk about – won’t do it. They’ll help, but they won’t give us enough to live on when we run out of money. All they’ll do is just buy us another month or two of life. To say I feel both hopeless and helpless is an understatement!

They told Tom to call the temp company every week to see if they had anything for him, but what that really means is, “We’re not going to hire you.”

I guess our time on earth just might not be meant to go on much longer, though we can probably stretch things out to the end of the year.

For the millionth time, I’ve had to ask myself, just what is this thing that’s so bound and determined to hold us back in life and keep us from ever getting ahead??? And why??? What did we do to deserve this? We’ve got to have done something to ask for it, right? But if we did, then so did some newborn infant whose mother smothered it for crying too much. So I don’t know if we did something in this life or a previous one to deserve what we’re getting. I only know we’re getting it, like it or not, right or wrong, and that being ready, willing and able to work hard won’t always get you ahead in life. Some of the hardest, smartest workers are dirt poor.

Tom’s Google email account got hacked last night, by what appears to be a spam BOT. Google’s been terrible lately as far as security goes. Fortunately, though, none of our money-related accounts are connected to this account and Google automatically shut it down as soon as they suspected suspicious activity. Tom reset the PW and when he told me what the old PW had been it was no wonder. I had a Hotmail account hijacked and my Yahoo account almost got taken over with a PW similar to it. I always use long PWs with both letters and numbers that have nothing you’d associate me with like rats, languages, singing, etc.

Time will tell if it’s just Tom they hacked or Google that’s been hacked. If it’s Google, the same accounts will probably get hit tonight as well.

Hotmail was the worst. Maybe they’ve changed since 2007, but they didn’t even have the decency to respond to any of my messages asking them to help me try to recover the account when it first got jacked after we first moved to Cali. So I never got back into it and I’ll never use Hotmail again either.

I forgot to say earlier that Andy said that Michelle found a site with our Tempe PO box address and that’s how he got the address. I asked Tom if that sounded possible and he said yeah, it could be. I just didn’t think they kept good records back then. If the letter was sent after we closed that PO Box and opened the Maricopa one, it wouldn’t have been forwarded or returned. In order to have mail from a PO Box forwarded to another PO Box, you have to pay a fee. We learned this when we left Arizona for Oregon. But we only had the Tempe box for a few months so we didn’t forward anything. It’s fucked up, but that’s the way it is.

Some people have asked why he would defend someone I had problems with if he were my friend. Well, this isn’t to bash, condemn or pick on Tom or Andy, but for some reason, that’s just the way they’ve always been. Meaning, no matter who I may bitch about to them, they tend to automatically side with or make excuses for whoever I’m upset with. That’s at least how it comes off to me. But since they are who they are and I don’t want to change that, I just try not to go to them when someone upsets me. The best one to go to is Marie. She always listens with a non-judgmental ear. The last thing an upset person needs to hear is a friend or a family member taking the other person’s side. I was always taught that the correct way to be supportive is to simply be a good listener. But if you’ve got to defend someone, it should always automatically be your friend/family, even if you think they’re wrong. Maybe this is just me but if I can’t defend my friend/family, then I won’t say anything at all. I’ll just keep my mouth shut, cuz I know I’d only be making them feel worse for defending anyone that hurt or angered them, and why would I want to? Wouldn’t that be rather backward? And mean?

I noticed another pattern - the less we like where we live, the more money we have. The best places we’ve lived were Maricopa and here, yet we were the poorest in both places. Well, we weren’t exactly poor in Maricopa, but the house sucked up almost every last dime that we sure felt that way. So does that mean the only way to be compensated with money is to take some dumpy, rocking $500 apartment? The costs would probably come close to what this is, though, once you factor the utilities in. I wonder if we could even get into anything run by a management company to begin with, not having the greatest credit. Well, I don’t like it here at all in the winter when it’s nothing but non-stop barking for 10-12 hours a day, so maybe we’ll have a little more money then, though I doubt it. We struggled in the duplex, yes, but only for the first few months, and while the place may’ve been noisy, it was pretty nice. Yet we sure did have good money in that old, ugly, microscopic rocking house up there that we lived in next! And had we stuck around, we’d have had the MOST money in Phoenix where it was the noisiest. Hmm… interesting. We just can’t get a 3-in-1 deal (money, peace and a decent place). Funny, ain’t it?

My allergies have been bothering me for the last few days. Because I was so groggy on Benadryl last night, I did nothing but laze around in bed when I should have been working on my story. It was the perfect time for it, too. Work was slow, Tom and my friends were in bed, so it was the ideal time to write. Maybe tonight I’ll catch up, though I’m actually a week ahead of schedule.