Did something I never thought I’d do and sent my brother’s daughter a message on MySpace. She would be in her late 20s today. I would’ve sent one directly to him or his wife, but they don’t appear to have accounts on MySpace or Facebook. I simply said that despite our past differences, I do think of them, wish them well, and sometimes miss laughing at Larry when he would be freezing his ass off during the winter. He used to love it when I’d give him a dose of that psychotic laughter of mine!

I don’t expect a reply and personally, I don’t know that I want one. Like I said about Tammy, we don’t need to have a relationship, but I’m all for moving on and dropping the enemy status. I was very angry with him for years for coming between family members and for basically being a hypocrite by saying he didn’t want to get involved, yet sticking his nose in people’s business anyway and condemning others for doing the same thing. I felt like I was back in high school playing the so-called he said/she said game. But I also realize that not only can the death of your own son make you do things you might not ordinarily do, and while it may be ok for each of us to disagree on things, it’s pointless to go on harboring such hate and anger. They don’t have to like me, accept me, or want me to be part of their lives. I just wanted to send a friendly hello through cyberspace is all.

And now I want to thank Maliheh for inspiring me to write the book I’m writing. I wasn’t going to work on it earlier, but then I thought of her and that motivated me to get off my ass and get typing away. Normally I write for me and for me only. But this time around I’m writing for her as well, and so that got me going with a good chunk of chapter 3.

Sure enough, Paula didn’t have the decency to take two minutes of her time to send an email about the package she should’ve received yesterday. Yet she has no problem sending messages when she wants something. Then again it’s always possible that she didn’t make it to her PO Box yesterday, so we’ll see.

For the longest time, I’ve been going on and on about how rough it is to be poor. But then I got to thinking about it and realized that since I’ve gotten my shopping sprees out of my system (and I sure did shop like crazy during the years we had money), I really have become a rather low-maintenance woman. Sure, there are a few things I could use around here. A new office chair would be nice. But I realize that as long as we can pay for our necessities, life on the poor side ain’t so bad. I know we’ll always be poor and that I will go through the bulk of my life uninsured and worrying about the car breaking down, for example, since we don’t make enough money to save anything, but other than that, I don’t need to have a lot of money. If anything, money would only get me fat, LOL, because I’d be tempted to splurge on all kinds of stuff, not just in grocery stores, but in restaurants as well. So while PCH is still welcome to float a few million our way, not having money isn’t the end of the world.