Other than nearly choking to death this morning and taking a nap to screw up my schedule, I’m having an ok day. The melatonin supplements usually only hold my schedule for a week or two at the most, but I think I’ll still probably crash in the early evening as planned. I still feel kind of groggy. I wasn’t even going to do an entry today.

Alison’s comment about the guy living above her vacuuming every day got me thinking about the times either just myself or both Tom and I lived in apartments, duplexes and motels, and I am so, so glad those days are just a nasty memory! We got one extreme after another, mostly college kids and freeloaders. If vacuuming was all we’d gotten, we’d have had it easy, but we heard everything! Our neighbors practically let us know it every time they farted. We met in April of 1993 when Tom bought his house from one of his brothers after he moved into his new wife’s house. I joined Tom in September of that year thinking it might be nice to have a child with him within a year or two. Six years later we moved out of there with me hating kids after what they put us through while we were there! Yeah, first it was Mormons, then it was a black C-8 family and finally a Mexican C-8 family before the welfare bums drove us out of there. Yeah, God picked out the perfect neighbors for us, and it was their behavior I had a problem with. Not their color or anything else, just so I make that clear up front.

Kids will be kids. We were all kids at one point, so I understand. But I also don’t understand. Kids of today – and even a decade ago – aren’t what the kids of 30 years ago were. Most of us were taught manners, respect and discipline 30 years ago, but it seems that’s become a thing of the past. Why is it a fact that when old trends return for a while, they’re either bad ones or ones that are neither good nor bad?

Either way, this is why I remain forever determined to buy a place (if we ever do get that luxury) either out in the country or in a retirement community. People simply cannot control their dogs and they cannot control their kids, and so the only way to escape it is to remove ourselves from the mainstream altogether. We may still get some barking from a distance, but oh how nice it is to escape the car stereos, the 5-hour basketball games within arm’s reach of the wall of our place, the footsteps, the TVs, the doors slamming, and so much more!