Today’s the memorial service for Dad. I didn’t realize they also got plots for one who has been cremated, but it’s courtesy of the veteran’s cemetery since my dad was in the Navy, and well, some people still like to have a place they can go from what I’ve learned.

I remember a time at the beach when I was no more than about 10 years old. Dad and I took a leisurely stroll down to “the dock,” as we called it, heading away from the flat rocks. Those who know Old Colony Beach would know what I’m talking about. I was playing with a stick or a straw of some kind that I’d been carrying with me when we happened upon a plastic pail filled with water and a jellyfish in it. I don’t know whose it was or what it was doing there, but for some reason, I felt compelled to poke at it with that stick or straw I had. Just one of those funny/fond memories to look back on.

I wonder what my mom will do with the store. I would guess she’d have to sell it. I can’t imagine her running it all by herself, though Dad once mentioned having people to help them. It’s hard not to worry about her and wonder what will become of her.

I am very glad to know that despite the sadness I feel right now that Operation Bridge the Gap has been successfully completed. This means it is a huge relief to know we’ve got the rent covered till April when we could get unemployment if they laid him off right now! As well as a relief to know he could buy a new car if he had to and even if it meant being stuck here another year because of it.

Next, we can hope he gets a permanent job, but whether or not he does, we have to decide what operation March is. I guess it’s Operation Get Rid of Old/Unwanted Shit? Then April is Operation Sell Old/Unwanted Shit? I’m just glad he can get boxes at work. That makes it a lot more convenient, since packing and moving are enough of a bitch, though I don’t mind the packing and unpacking. We have a system now as many times as we’ve moved. I pack, he carries, LOL.

No matter what it sounds like around here, we’ve definitely outgrown this place. I still find it hard to believe the people in an adult community would be as loud and as regular about it as this fucktard is. I just hope we can get in and find out! I still think most would agree with me that 5-10 barks a few times a day is one thing, but 6 hours at a time??? Even just once a week, 6 hours is a bit overkill.

I was thinking of Tammy. I will admit I was hesitant to burn any bridges and walk away from someone who probably could and would rescue us from our next crisis if my folks weren’t around to do so, but I still think it’d probably be best to quietly walk away at some point. I’ve got time to decide this, but it isn’t just that what she did was too big to forgive or that she’s scarily vindictive when pissed, but because I simply don’t care any more than I care about some waitress that may’ve waited on me in Friendly’s in Springfield in 1978. So I can sort of relate and understand Tom’s family’s “moving on” ways. She was someone I once knew/saw long, long ago that isn’t the type I’d normally be buddies with anyway, and it will eventually be time to move on.

While I am glad to know I have thoughts of our goals to help keep me going, it’d be nice if I spotted some picture of a hot chick as a bonus to help carry my mind off to Never Never Land for a while and away from my dad. It would help fire up my creative writing juices again, but oh well. You can’t control lust any more than love. It’s just that one minute I’m thinking about what to eat or the weather, then next I’m thinking my dad shouldn’t be a pile of ashes right now. He should be home with his wife!

In the midst of my grief, I forgot to print a little retraction. I was wrong, Tom said, in saying Q10 helps with high cholesterol. It’s actually high blood pressure that it helps with. He’s been feeling better since he started taking Q10 supplements a few days ago, so hopefully this is the answer to revitalizing his energy. It’s also said to help make you live longer.

As for me, I still think my weight is going to keep climbing and climbing no matter how much I work out until I either miraculously find the strength to eat just 1200 calories a day every day, or I go to a doctor that finds something wrong with my thyroid, and I’ve wondered about that. Since learning of my dad’s death diet and exercise have been the last things on my mind, but tomorrow I may at least do a little walking. I’m up a pound or two since I quit dieting about a week ago. Initially, I dropped, but it was just water. Now I’m coming up as I expected I would.

Anyway, we’re not sure if he’ll get a permanent position or even if we’ll have insurance if he does. Even many of the permanent employees these days don’t have insurance. Sometimes it’s offered to them like it was in Oregon, but it’s simply not worth losing a buck an hour for and is just too expensive. It may be a week or two before we know if he got the job as they’re still taking applications for it and it will depend on what he’s got for competition.

Later…

Instead of getting the rain and peace I hoped I’d get, I got sun and saws instead. I’m sure it will rain when it’s dark and normally quiet anyway. Maybe someday I’ll get to live where I not only don’t have to hear other people’s animals but other consistent and annoying sounds as well. I won’t count on it, though.

I forgot to write about the latest Florida dream I had. Yeah, I finally had one last night, but oddly enough, still nothing pertaining to my dad. Not sure if I like this one as much, but in the dream, Tom and I were in Florida. We were at the home of two old ladies, though I don’t know who they were. One said we might be in for a record low of 25° that night and I sarcastically said, “Well, of course. I’m here now so why wouldn’t we be?”

Then Tom and I were driving along some road somewhere. Everything was very green and it appeared to be wet like it had recently rained. I was worried Tom wasn’t happy about being in Florida due to the humidity and lack of weather variety. He liked Oregon the best because of its mix of warm, cold, sun, rain and snow. Then I said something about how if you closed your eyes and didn’t know you were in Florida, you would never think you were in the desert.

It’s starting to get rather obvious to me that some people have been avoiding me and I’d really like to know why. I don’t know if they’re playing games, if they simply don’t care, or if something else is going on in their lives which I don’t know about, but whatever it is I hope they’ll tell me about it someday so I can stop wondering, worrying and guessing. If not, then I guess they’ve got their reasons. Even so, one example is how it kind of hurt that Christiane didn’t even care to reply to my message about my dad on FB, yet total strangers have come forth to offer condolences on thoughts.com, WTF? I think I really need to sit back and think about who’s really a friend and who’s not and stop wasting time over those who raise question marks in my head.

Later…

Yesterday was the first day I made it through without crying. Maybe that’s cuz I’m pretty pissed off right now – not hurt, not sad – just pissed. I’m going to go ahead and use first names so no one mistakenly thinks I may be referring to them when in fact I am not. It’s Christiane and Nane I’m pissed at right now and I don’t care if this note prompts Christiane into dumping me. Then again, she obviously doesn’t give much of a shit about me anyway, as I’m about to write about, so why would she care to read this, right?

Let me first start off by saying that most of us agree that a true friend is there for us throughout our good AND bad times. My buddies in the north and southeast that I’ve actually met – they’ve been there for me. Sure I’d like to hear from one of them a bit more often, but they’ve been there for me and that’s what counts. As one of them said, friendship shouldn’t be measured by how often you hear from your friends. I agree. But there are certain situations in which you should at least acknowledge a friend with a quick, “Hello” or “How are you?” or “I’m sorry” or “Hope you’re feeling better,” that I’m sure most people would agree with me on. Like when we lose a loved one.

Most of my cyber buddies which I’ve never met have been there for me, but I’m a little disappointed in Christiane and I’m thoroughly disgusted with Nane. Both know I just lost my dad, but neither one of them cared to take the time out to offer their condolences, and I know they’ve been online. Why the hell did Christiane add me if she doesn’t give a damn? To keep tabs on what I might say about Nane? I doubt it. She doesn’t strike me as the type to read my notes, though they can be read by friends of friends and I will admit I don’t know much about her. I know where she lives, when her birthday is, and what she does for work. That’s all I know. So no, she’s not a close friend. But still, if you add someone and you know they just lost their dad, wouldn’t it be polite to have at least a little common courtesy and offer condolences? Yet I only hear from her ONLY if I contact her first, and not all the time either.

As for Nane, that fucking Spitze Nase Hündin is a million times more cold-hearted and selfish than even I realized, and as I came to learn the hard way, she’s plenty bad enough! But now I’m at the point where I’m going from disliking her to actually hating her. I wished her well despite the way she so coldly shafted me in the end, but now I can’t wait till Jim dumps her and gives the bitch a taste of her own medicine. Then again, she’s already been fed a dose of that medicine after being with someone for 16 years, so you would think she should know better and what it’s like to be falsely accused of things and then coldly dumped like yesterday’s trash. All I know is that I was just totally ashamed and disgusted when I stupidly looked in on her wall today (yeah, that much was my fault). Instead of taking the time to at least send her condolences even if we’re not exactly friends anymore, she’s “trying to figure out where to spend her next vacation.” What a classic display of just how selfish and phony she can truly be! Oh, it isn’t that I have a problem with one enjoying the good life and their hobbies and things like that; it’s when they come before those they should still care about at least a little bit after all we’ve shared together. But that’s just Nane for you. First comes her travels, next comes her job, and last comes her friends and family. Nane wouldn’t cancel one of her many voyages to save her own mother’s life! When Jim gets fed up with her shit and leaves her I won’t feel the least bit sorry for her. He really oughta shove an anchor up her ass and pitch her overboard on their next little romp at sea!

It’s been a learning experience for me, though. I have learned to be a little pickier about who I befriend or let befriend me online, and these days I’m not really up to new buddies anyway, even if they’re sane, smart and good-looking. I just don’t want the drama again. It’s fun while it lasts, but then the drama eventually comes and ruins all that so-called fun.

My real friends definitely do help make up for some of these assholes. Maliheh had me laughing my ass off last night. She’s just funny even when she isn’t trying to be and has a natural sense of humor and a way with words (even if she did flunk out of writing in college) which cracks me up. I really needed that laugh, too. She also said there’s this song in Spanish she’d really love to sing but no matter how much she listens, she just doesn’t get it, LOL. It reminded me of Andy. About 20 years ago in Phoenix, he put on headphones and tried to sing along to a song of Gloria’s in Spanish as we recorded it. He had the lyrics in front of him and would sound it out to the best of his ability and how he thought the words should be pronounced. So fucking funny!

It was also the first time Maliheh “hugged” me. :)

A certain certifiably crazy individual had me going from amused to pissed and back to amused.

Last night I was amused to learn that in less than a week the troll left her engagement ring behind after she was smacked in the face by her BF’s elbow and told to find her own way to the airport if she wants to leave. Normally I would be appalled and enraged over any chick being physically abused in any way and would want to strangle the guy that did it. But in this case, if there’s any desire to strangle him it’s for not killing her or at least putting her in a coma so that some of us can live our online lives in peace. But knowing the kind of person this troll is, I have zero sympathy for her. Neither do my cyberbuds who are normally very empathetic people.

So her parents basically spent hundreds of dollars just so she could get “elbowed” in less than a week. Dumbshit should’ve kept the ring and sold it.

But then I stopped laughing once I realized that this sick twist would then take her anger at her BF and the whole damn world out on people online. I figured her mom would feel sorry for her after getting beat up and would be a little more lenient with letting her darling daughter go online unsupervised.

Sure enough, the sicko not only cried, whined, ranted and raved about the BF, but she also used a friend’s full name to bash and trash her with and that’s why I got pissed. I was pissed for my friend. I’ve been friends with this friend for nearly 4 years now and she has always been kind, smart, intuitive, funny and caring and just an all-around good person in every sense of the word. She’s also been through a lot of unwanted and unfair shit and the last thing she needs is to be verbally trashed by some delusional psycho full of all kinds of fantasies with no concept of right and wrong or fact and fiction. It doesn’t take a BA in psychology to see that this paranoid nutjob isn’t deliberately and knowing making up stories for the fun of it due to a warped sense of humor or anything like that. No, she’s truly delusional, out of her mind, and actually believes every bullshit thing she says. Most of the time, however, she is vague in her love/hatred for my friend. One minute she hopes to patch things up with a “former friend,” and the next she is spewing hate for her like crazy and wishing her death because my friend wants nothing to do with her and the psycho can’t seem to move on. It’s okay to feel hurt or angry over those who have cut us off. It’s even okay to write about it. It’s therapeutic. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it and some things you just don’t put online for the entire world to see. Thoughts gives its users the option of setting individual posts to private, but that would defeat the whole idea for this lunatic. The idea is to hurt my friend by airing their dispute in public. The Thoughts staff did remove one of the blogs that listed her full name, but then she just carried her bullshit over to Blogger where she hasn’t been reprimanded yet (she left a link to it on Thoughts).

That’s when my friend had had enough and contacted Mommy Dearest once again who told her to let her know if she became a problem again. She thought she had blocked her but apparently, there was either a glitch or she unblocked her. Anyway, she let her know what was going on and how the troll runs to the library to harass people from there whenever she’s not allowed to go online at home.

What’s really frustrating as hell is knowing that this person really is truly crazy. I mean totally and utterly mad. She’s not just disturbed. She’s not just having a “hard time.” She’s not just dealing with a case of “anger management issues.” She’s CRAZY. C-R-A-Z-Y. And no amount of drugs, therapists or time can or will ever change that. If she could have her way she would spend the rest of her life stalking and harassing people online every single day, writing nasty things about them, following them from site to site, and making unwanted contact. And the more sites you’re a member of, the harder it is to avoid her. I don’t understand this obsession with online people and why she won’t try to seek the attention she craves so much from people she can actually see and meet. Perhaps this is because you can not only meet more people online, but you can also harass them easier than you can in person. You can create an endless number of accounts on various sites as well as email addresses to keep coming at them after they’ve blocked your millions of other accounts. But it’s harder to force your existence on people in person. This troll has no desire whatsoever to get a life. She doesn’t want to work. She doesn’t want to take up new hobbies. She doesn’t want to learn new skills. She doesn’t want to do anything but sit at home and be pampered and supported by her parents while she harasses people online.

My friend is pissed (and I don’t blame her) because her local cops won’t do shit to help her, only deepening my hatred for pigs in general even more. Not just because most of them are power-hungry bullies, but because of their warped sense of priorities. They could throw me in jail for something I supposedly wrote to one person that only that one person saw, but they don’t do shit to this little punk who bashes tons of people for the whole world to see??? WTF??? Just WTF?!?! How fucked up is that? It’s too bad my friend and I wasn’t black. Then the cops would do something, all right. All we’d have to do is cry racism and even if she really didn’t utter a single racial slur, it would be her word against ours.

What I don’t get is why they haven’t gone after her since she didn’t actually “do” anything. After all, this damn country seems to be really big on non-action crimes vs. action crimes, so why has this asshole been exempt from this twisted rule so far? They’ll go after someone for something they said or wrote faster than someone who stole a car or beat someone up, so what are the pigs waiting for? For her to go from taunts lies and threats to actually harming someone?

What was a little funny in the end was that Mommy Dearest must’ve gotten my friend’s message right away because both the troll’s blogs suddenly disappeared. She’s now “keeping her emotions out of her blog,” but we’ll see how many days that lasts. We’re not stupid. We know how this bitch is. It’s the mother that needs to do some serious growing up and reality-facing. She needs to realize her daughter is 100% hopeless as cruel and as harsh as that may sound to those she hasn’t stalked for many years. I just wish that if the troll had to be this way she’d cycle through different groups of people to stalk and not just stalk the same damn people continually for years. But the only new people she stalks are anyone who may become a friend of my friends.

I suggested my friend consider going underground. She’s thinking about it but doesn’t really like the idea. Some people want to be able to be themselves. I like to be myself too, so that’s why I only have that one Thoughts account where I don’t use any real names. But thanks to her, the few places I am myself in have to either be done in private or for friends only depending on the site. For now anyway. Meanwhile, I pray for the day she really fucks up badly. Bad enough to be locked up in either a funny farm or a jail and physically prevented from going online. That’s the ONLY thing that will ever stop her. She needs to be kept offline forever or at least forbidden from submitting content and contacting people somehow.

My friend has expressed a desire to be just as mean even though she knows it would be childish and doesn’t want to do anything that could get her own self in trouble, since no one will do shit about this troll, but we honestly can’t think of anything we could do that she would perceive as bad. If anything the troll would get off on it. She thrives on negative attention. When the troll failed to respond to my friend politely asking her to go away, she got nasty instead but no matter how nasty she got, it did no good whatsoever. The troll still either takes it as kindness or gets off on it. It’s sick. It truly is. And frustrating.

Had to really push myself to work out and do any housecleaning these last couple of days. Maybe tomorrow I’ll do better.