My day turned out pretty well, although the neighborhood stakeout has been delayed. When I got up Tom told me he’d tell me all the promising things he found out about once I had a chance to wake up. So I woke up with yellow jacket #2 waiting to greet me in the bathroom, downed some coffee, and told him I hoped he had something good for me since my dreams weren’t telling me anything spectacular.

In one dream we both got handguns to carry on us for protection, though neither of us seemed bothered by anyone in particular. Then we were living in some building. I don’t know what it was. It didn’t seem like a hotel or an apartment building, but it was huge, whatever it was.

So Tom said he found more sites with more promising places selling from 16K – 40K. Because he wants to check these sites more thoroughly and because of my schedule, we’re going to bump the neighborhood stakeout up to next weekend. What’s cool is that the place we end up getting may not just come with a dishwasher but with a full-size washer and dryer too!

What’s most important is that we don’t go biting off more than we can chew like we did in Arizona. I hate to have the place – any place – suck up all of our money so that we’re unable to save anything. We realize that although it would take a little longer, we could save for a house in an adult community, which in the end would compare to a trailer that’s paid off in just a few years or less but that you have to continue to pay lot fees on afterward, but we’d still prefer the trailer. The monthly fees will be cheaper than the mortgage payments would’ve been and you get more than just a home and a lot to keep it on. You get a community pool you never have to take care of yourself, plus other amenities. Another reason is that if we decide to move to Spain or Florida when he retires, it’ll be easier to sell a trailer than a house, and when I say “trailer” I don’t mean anything like the little old heap of shit we’re in now.

I still worry about cars parking too close, barking and annoying kids visiting, but I don’t think these things will be that big of a deal. If they are then 55+ places would be absolutely nothing like I’ve always heard they are. Still, I can’t imagine getting there and ending up hating it.

When I realized a whole week had almost passed without hearing from Nane, I knew something was up. I’ve gotten to know her online habits pretty well, depending on what country she’s in.

So I sent her a message letting her know that her Lady Rainbow missed her this week. I signed off with my usual weirdness: Light some Burberry incense, hug a rat today, eat a caramel Popsicle, and get back to me when you can.

She got back to me today and sure enough, something was up. First, though, she said, “Hug a rat? Nein!!!” LOL Anyway, she had really bad cramps Sunday night and had to go to the hospital. She didn’t say why, though. Meanwhile, she’s been staying at Askim’s house and had to go to her doctor when she got back to Munich, which I guess was sometime today (now yesterday in her case).

Andy’s about to head to Hyannis for a week of vacation and says he’ll have access to his niece’s computer while he’s there but will give Ask a break. Ask is losing its luster anyway.

I got a kick out of how Andy said he loves reading my journal even though I’m a complainer. Damn right, I am! LOL, and damn good at it, too.

I’m a little worried about Alison. First it was because of her physical health and now it’s because of her mental health. I always considered her one of my most sane and intelligent friends. But lately, it’s like she’s losing it or something. She’s not saying or doing anything crazy, but she seems to be drowning in a well of depression though not suicidal.

No one’s got me as worried as my husband who I didn’t hear coming in just a few feet from where I sit. Sure heard the Jes pest come in, though, at nearly 200’ away. Sad, huh? Even sadder that I’ve got to wonder if I’ll have to run sound machines all night tonight to drown out barking. It is Friday night. I don’t understand why these damn dogs are so afraid to be left alone. Especially at night and really early in the morning.

Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight to the 10-hour shifts at his job so now he has to work 48 hours a week and live like a bum while some that work 20, if even that, get to live like queens and kings.

He’s exhausted and he has no life. So is this how our lovely God is going to stop us from moving and keep me away from the dentist; by making sure there’s no time to do these things? We’re out in the country. I couldn’t just walk, ride a bike or take a bus.

Tom and I just talked some more and he’s feeling a little better now that he’s had a chance to rest and unwind. We found another doublewide 2 bed/2 bath for just 15K, but it’s not quite as nice inside. Like I said, I don’t expect the Rolls Royce of them all or anything brand-spanking new. But to be done with the dumps would be nice, too. We’d have no privacy at all, but I don’t spend much time outdoors anyway. There’s also one for 21K we’re looking at. There was a super nice one for 26K that disappeared today. But it’s not listed as sold. We’re hoping they pulled it off with plans of reducing it, cuz if they do, that’s the one we’re going after. It was fucking gorgeous!

This weekend we’ll stake out some 55+ parks, but probably won’t know how hard or easy it will be to get a nicer place that we can’t buy outright till next weekend. Or at least on our way to knowing by then.

Short-term wise I wish I’d hurry up and get my period! My boobs are such water balloons that when I went to put my sports bra on I felt like I was stuffing the damn things into a training bra. I just want to punch them right off my chest, yank my uterus out, and be done with the whole damn thing!

I heard what might’ve been a woodchipper running earlier when I stepped outside to hang sheets. My first thought was that it was Jesse on the bulldozer till I realized I could only hear it outside. He also wouldn’t be working in the middle of a hot afternoon. It was coming from up at the summit somewhere. There’s someone else up there who’s like Jesse which means they’re always doing something. It sure beats all that sawing that could be heard indoors for over 6 months several times a week.

Tom’s finally entered “adulthood,” LOL, and we’re now eligible to move into a 55+ community! Poor guy has to spend his birthday working, but oh well. It happens to the best of us, doesn’t it? The money he’s going to make just today alone is quite a nice birthday present even if he does have to work for it.

We thought of another potential problem if we decide, for whatever reason, to grab a small cheap trailer till we get what we want. The 55+ parks with manufactured homes and houses all say that only one resident per household needs to be 55 while the other needs to be at least 45. Well, the older, dumpier trailer parks don’t say this at all. Does that mean you both have to be 55???

Although I’m trying not to think of it, I’ve got every possible problem we could encounter flying through my head right now. God has proven that He does not want us living where we want to. It would be totally like Him to have them change the rules on all adult communities forbidding anyone under 55 to live there now that Tom’s 55. I just worry about any number of things going wrong and us being stuck here saving just to find that the place we want is twice as expensive a year or two from now. The one thing most people say about God that I do believe is that all things are possible with Him. So if He really wants to stop us He can and He will, leaving us with no other options but to stay here or get something in the mainstream. If there’s anything I hate to do it’s to struggle for what isn’t meant to be. Sooner or later we’ll both be 55, which would mean He would then have to do something else to keep us out of an adult community if He was hell-bent on doing so. I started to tell myself nothing up there could hate us that much or be that mean and unfair, but who the hell am I kidding, right?

I guess that like I said before, once we actually talk to someone, we’ll have a better idea of what we’re up against. We just had to wait till Tom turned 55. I just want to know if we’re wasting time with something that isn’t meant to be. I hate chasing the impossible, so if it isn’t to be I’d like to know it so I can choose between the options that are meant to be and get on with life.

I don’t know why I thought I “saw a light in the dark” for the first time like I said I did. I guess that learning that there are some affordable homes for sale after all in these places got the better of me. What may very well be a case of serious wishful thinking more or less tricked me into thinking it was more possible than it may actually be. Just because we don’t need 100K or more to get a place doesn’t mean we can still get a place. There’s nothing to say for sure that we can get what we want. Even if it looks like we eventually can, things can and do come up along the way to throw us off the paths we choose to walk down. I guess all we can do is hope that someday, someway, we’ll get to live in a place with adequate space that’s not as old or older than I am and that has no barking.

Tom knocked down a couple of starter hives on the porch rafters yesterday. Why are these fuckers such a problem this year???

Later…

I’m in a surprisingly good mood despite what just happened earlier and what’s going to happen tomorrow while I’m sleeping.

I turned on the faucet and found the water pressure was low and I’m like, great. Just great. Now we’ve gone from plumbing problems every other month to every other week. Not only that, the kitchen faucet is off-balance, the tub faucet still leaks, and when I went outside to check for leaks I could see that rodents had torn the insulation out from underneath pretty much everywhere and not just in pockets. In other words, the place is falling apart.

So I called Jesse and let him know the pressure was low. With a well, you have to jump on these things right away or else it could become a much bigger problem if not a downright crisis. When our pressure is low downhill here, Jesse has no water at all up at his place.

He was attending a funeral when I called him, even though you’d never know it by the way he was dressed. I’ve also decided I like him better drunk than sober cuz he’s so much more jovial yet my extra years and pounds keeps him in line. The only thing that’s annoying is the way he repeats himself so much, interrupts me, and asks the same questions over and over again. Didn’t smell any booze on his breath, though.

He said he was irrigating and working on his truck this morning (I’m glad I wasn’t awake to have to deal with that one) so he may’ve left something on up there. So he ATVd down to the pump house, then back here a few minutes later, saying that the tank was filling back up and our water would be fine in an hour. It’s a good thing I hadn’t showered yet.

He asked what my hours were and I told him I’d been getting up around noon and to beat on the bedroom wall if he ever needed to get a hold of me when I was asleep cuz I’d never hear the main door over the sound machine. It’s too far away to put out enough vibration to jolt me awake. He was kind enough to say he didn’t want to bother me, not to ask why I can’t just “get up” every morning, and to jump on the water issue right away. Like I said he’s a lousy neighbor, but a good landlord. So I told him not to worry about doing what he wants to do tomorrow morning and that if he wakes me up I’ll know it’s him and just go back to sleep. He said he’d be quiet, though. I guess he’s going to run water down in some spare tank he’s had sitting out there for the last couple of weeks that will supposedly stop this from happening again. Wish he’d done this 4 years ago! But it does need to be done so I told him not to worry about me and just go for it. Although I would’ve loved to say so, I didn’t let him know that that’s nothing compared to the sleep I may lose trying to get out of his fucking dump, LOL.

Oh, I told him I was sorry for going off on him a couple of weeks ago and that I was basically just cursing life itself but not blaming anyone in particular, like one curses the rain for ruining their outdoor plans even if it’s no one’s fault. He said he understood and that we all have our days.

So he returned to the funeral saying he’d be back in an hour and to call up to him if there were any problems then. Again he was rather uppity for one attending a funeral. Was the person who croaked anything like Dureen O?

Later…

I’ve just about got the 80s and 90s posted and the Jes pest came down to report that yes, it was his fault that we had water pressure problems because he left a valve of some kind open. Love it when it’s this guy’s stupidity and not something that broke that fucks things up. Still, these common occurrences have you end up missing tap water but without the city chaos to go with it.

Speaking of the city, we’re going into the parts that house 55+ communities to stake the place out and get a better sense of it. I asked Tom if he thought we’d be meeting with anyone this weekend so I know if I should dye my hair tomorrow or next Friday. He said he wanted to drive through the area first. I asked why and he said, “Well, there’s no sense in meeting with anyone if you see it and decide it’s no place you’d ever want to live.”

I doubt I’d decide that, especially in the nicer areas that give you a little more space around you and that contain real houses or modulars, but he has a point. I’d really like to walk up and down the street and see how many dogs it sets off. This will give me an idea of how much they may leave them outside there.

I’m a little worried about Tom. They’re really running him ragged at work. Do they realize that their employees are people and not these little machines or robots? He points out how nice the money is but I don’t care about money if he’s going to end up sick. It sucks that his birthday wasn’t the least bit fun. He gets paid biweekly and after taxes, the man has been taking home $1200 - $1400. We don’t need any more OT if he’s always going to be so rundown. When we pay the rent we’ll dip just under 5K in savings, but in a couple of weeks, it’ll be just over 5K. When we estimated we could save about 6K a year in this place that was a very conservative guess. That was without even trying to save. If we cut back on groceries and I worked even more at MT, we could come closer to the 10K – 15K range. So we’re at the point now where we’d be ok if they cut his OT cuz we have half a year of rent saved now.

Damn! Just damn! It sounds really weird being able to say that! It sounds weird just thinking it! Maybe God doesn’t hate us so much after all. Just hope it lasts! Meaning that just because Tom could use a break from the OT, we don’t want to go back to struggling either.

Later…

Sometimes I think it would be cool to learn a language that doesn’t use my lettering system. It’s just that none of those without the alpha-beta system has ever appealed to me. There’s nothing interesting to me about Russian, for example, and the Asian and Arabic languages are ugly.

Jesse doused the tanks with bleach again so I smelled of it after my shower. I put on extra perfume to try to mask it but ended up simply smelling like fruity bleach.

Now that my hair is getting longer I’ll need to start using a detangler again to get through the mass of curls. It has thinned out over the years somewhat, but that basically means going from insanely thick to just thick.

Brown eyes are the most common, I just read, while mine are the least. Seems I’ve heard that before. That’s good, though, because seeing an awful lot of green eyes running around out there would be, well, an eyesore.

The new thoughts.com sucks shit! I deactivated my account. They not only needlessly changed the entire layout, but they took away a couple of handy features and stripped every single picture and TIP code out of all my posts. A lot of people were complaining from what I could see. The people running these sites just don’t seem to get that if we didn’t like them just as they were, we never would have signed up in the first place. So Thoughts as I once knew it will never exist again no matter how many people complain because people are going to do what they want to do no matter what. Especially if the site is free. It’s also still full of bugs and running slow as a snail. I had two accounts there, one being through Facebook. That one I couldn’t shut down because it wouldn’t let me log in through FB, so I sent them a message asking them to deactivate it and why. So they either do or they don’t.

The yellow jackets are back to hanging out in the bathroom window so Tom will have to check for hives when he gets in. Oh, the joy of country living! If we can’t figure it out and they keep showing up, we’ll bomb the place again.

I got to wake up to barking today. Lucky me, huh? With nothing running it could be heard so well in here, reminding me that trying to soundproof a trailer would be pointless, even if you did the doors as well. I had to scream at them twice to get them to shut up.

Tom will soon be paid $25 to make himself bleed, LOL. He’s been having to do so much OT that he doesn’t get off work before the lab closes, so they’re mailing him some kit that’ll allow him to take a blood test from home. It’s just one of those things where he pricks his finger, smears blood on a piece of paper or whatever it is, and mails it back.

They’re talking more and more about a second shift, which would be both good and bad. It’d be bad in that there goes the OT unless they gave him a raise, but good because it would free up some business hours so we could do things like go to dentists and move.

The question is when will we move? We both agree I could probably sleep in one of those cheaper trailers with the sound machines blaring but we hate to get a place based on probablys. It’s pretty much guaranteed that I wouldn’t get any peace while I was awake. I would think it couldn’t be any worse than hotels, though as rough as it was, I did survive nearly a year in one before we moved in here.

I really would rather not make a trailer our next stop on the way to getting what we want. I would really like to go straight into something we want. Obviously, the more money we have, the more likely this will happen. As Tom said, the absolute soonest we could do that would be this weekend while the absolute latest we could do it would be two years with the most realistic being sometime this year. We won’t have a better idea of just how long it will take until we actually talk to someone and we can’t do that till he turns 55. That will be tomorrow, so hopefully this weekend we can get the ball rolling. I’m willing to stay here a few more months to get to the gold. A couple more years, no. If it came down to a couple more years here or buying our own cheap little trailer, I’d buy our own and take the $200 monthly savings and the peace of mind of knowing we’re the bosses of the place.

The type of place we really want averages between 25K - 40K and is a 2-bedroom, 2-bath with a garage. They’re fairly modern manufactured homes that would be as nice as the one we had only not quite as big. It would be bigger than the Phoenix house, though. I didn’t realize until Tom pointed it out that when the realtor told us the Phoenix house was 1470 square feet, he was counting the garage. So the place was probably closer to 1200. What we’re looking at would be in the 1400-1500 range.

I’m torn between thinking we’ll get it (eventually) and thinking we won’t. Looking at it logically, there’s no reason we can’t keep saving till we have enough. On the other hand, why would we have lost a nice house and been living in bummy little old dives ever since if we were meant to have anything nice?

While it continues to have a way of making me feel insulted to keep getting an endless supply of attention from the fat, ugly and crazies of the world, I can’t deny that Aira really is a sweet person. No doubt about it. She doesn’t just tell me about herself, she asks about me.

That feeling of being so sure we were on the road to owning the place of our dreams has left me. Why? Not because I suddenly think it’s impossible, but because I don’t think it will happen anytime soon the more I think about it. If we had 26K in our hands right now that would buy us a nice house outright where we wanted to be with no credit checks or questions asked. The problem is we don’t have that kind of money right now. We’ve got around 5K and that won’t get you very far these days unless you’re willing to settle for an older, undersized trailer in a 55+ park that’s not as nice. It’s either that or stay here another 3-4 years till we have more money saved. The only problem is that by then that 26K house may be 46K.

Another thing is that once you factor in the fact that we’d have to pay utilities, we’d only save an extra $200 a month if we bought a cheaper trailer to stay in till we could buy what we really wanted. Better than nothing, and better to own it outright than to rent and deal with pesky landlords, but I’m really worried I may not get any sleep there. I intend to take Nane’s advice and just stay put if I have any doubts after going and seeing the place in person. The problem is that there are things we couldn’t know without actually living there, and once we do live there, it’s not like we could turn around and leave that easily like checking out of a hotel. Once we’re in, we’re in.

In just 4 months the NHA projects in CT landed me in the hospital after the animals that lived there continually deprived me of my sleep and ultimately my sanity. And I was still young! I did smoke, though, and my asthma was pretty out of hand at the time, but nonetheless, I ended up so sick that I was hospitalized for two weeks. It was then that my dad, who came up from Florida to help out, arranged for me to go from my sister’s house where I spent a few days following my discharge, to Andy’s place in Arizona.

So would I be able to sleep in one of these 3K trailers so long as the sound machine was blaring? sighs I don’t know. I just don’t know. Unfortunately, it’s not like buying a car so there’s no way to test the waters for a week or two before actually buying it.

There are other things to consider besides people slamming car doors all day that may jolt me awake when on nights, and that’s landscaping projects. Most of this could probably be drowned out, but if they’re mowing, blowing and trimming regularly it could get old pretty fast. There doesn’t look like there’s nearly as much to do as opposed to the apartment complexes I once lived in, but it’s another one of those things to consider.

Another thing I wonder is how often people may come to our door. They may not be landlords and we don’t have to let them in, but how often might the park people come to tell us there’ll be a party that night in the clubhouse? How often might the people that live there come to offer to sell us cookies for some fundraiser they may be having?

Aside from these unanswered questions that might or might not get me sicker than a dog in no time at all (today it’s the other way around; I don’t smoke, my asthma has gone dormant, but I’m not young) there are things I know I would definitely like. Mail doesn’t get delivered straight to the trailers but to the clubhouse. That way if we’re expecting a package while I’m on nights, we don’t have to worry about not being around to get it. They may leave it by our door, though, and that’d be fine too in a covered area. I’m sure the porch roof doesn’t leak like it does here as they’re not going to allow for slop jobs there.

I would love to be able to go swimming whenever the weather permitted, relax in the Jacuzzi, and walk to the clubhouse to mail outgoing mail, not that we have much these days with the way everything’s done online, and I think they might have fitness and arts and crafts centers, too. I have a treadmill, but I’ve always wanted to try an elliptical machine, too. I don’t like to walk. I like to run. That’s what my body’s trained to do. An elliptical machine would cancel out the joint impact.

Sometimes I still think we’ll never live where we really want to live. Would we have been in tiny old dumps all these years if that weren’t where we were meant to be? The slightest doubt and I’m not moving. Not after making too many dumb moves in the past. Even Tom said we’re done being stupid. I certainly don’t want to stay here much longer, but at least the annoyances here are familiar and confined to just two sources – dogs and loud motors. Jesse’s never going to slam car doors regularly a few feet from our place. He’s never going to have dogs just a few feet away. He’s never going to have anyone with little kids visiting just a few feet away. He’s never going to mow, blow and trim trees and bushes on a regular basis. There’s never going to be regular turnovers a few feet away where I have to hold my breath and hope to not get noisy neighbors yet again, although people usually own the places in the 55+ parks and so there wouldn’t be the kind of turnovers you can expect with rentals. The house next to us in Phoenix (we were on the corner and had only one immediate neighbor) went from an owned home to a city-owned rental. A family with a couple of kids and dogs moved out shortly after I joined Tom there a few months after he got the house from his brother who moved into his new wife’s house. Next came the Mormons and their 5 kids and dog. Then came the black, bass-thumping welfare bums followed by the Mexican welfare bums that virtually lived outdoors round the clock and made the Mormon family seem tiny. We all have our different likes, habits and traditions and that’s fine… until it affects and puts others out.

There was this trailer going for a little over 4K that wasn’t quite as nice inside but was actually the most appealing so far for several reasons. It has an extra room that was added on, a stackable washer/dryer, and a dishwasher. Also, it’s sort of on an “island.” The lot sort of juts out and prevents any trailers from sandwiching it in. We could run out and buy it this weekend, but like I said, I’m not sure this would be a wise thing to do. sighs I don’t want to take any chances I may regret and end up thinking this place wasn’t so bad after all like when things got so bad in Sacramento that I realized the Caribbean cruise we went on wasn’t so hectic after all. But I also don’t want to stay here. It’s either move and take a chance or stay here and dream.

The dreams I’ve had are not at all hopeful as far as signs of anything better to come on the horizon. There were two dreams that I recall. In one we were back in the Phoenix house. I noticed the back door was cracked. I pulled it open and gazed out at the pool. Part of the surface was covered with grass. I shut the door and turned to a desk that Tom had been using and sat to the right of the kitchen doorway. Soft music was playing from a portable radio. I reached to turn it off, but the buttons and knobs kept multiplying the more I tried to figure out which one turned it off, so I gave up. I walked through the kitchen and into the living room where Tom sat dozing on and off in a plush chair. “Don’t forget to shut the back door,” I told him, then I asked if we could afford to get the pool in shape for the hottest part of the summer, and he said yes.

In the second dream, Tom and I were sitting in a parking lot looking at 3 scummy buildings that were part of an apartment complex which not even Tom liked the looks of. “God would just love us if we lowered ourselves to this shit and put up with the untold amount of noise that’s got to reside within these walls,” I said as I studied the buildings that actually looked more like giant old houses. I knew one housed rooms while another housed studios with kitchens and baths and another housed 1-bedroom apartments. It then hit me that Andy had once lived there for a few months and described it more like a rooming house than anything else. “This is the Montana,” I said next. Weird name for it, but that’s what it was.

A split second later I was on the upper floor in what appeared to be a single room while Tom waited in the car. A small suitcase and my handbag sat on the foot of the bed, which was topped with a thin, worn white bedspread. Some of my things were scattered about including my little puppy figurine, which may not actually be called a figurine since it’s not that small and is covered with real goat fur.

I then peered out of the room and into a somewhat small hallway. There were maybe 4 other rooms, plus the community bathroom and the stairs leading downward. A few young women were milling about the hall, all appearing to be in their late teens to early 20s. A snobby-looking chick wordlessly passed by me and somehow I knew she was in charge of the renters. She went into the room across the hall, came back out, and then motioned me back into my room. She wanted to fill out the paperwork for the room, but still seemed very unhappy about me living there, which I assumed was because I was older.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “My husband and I would want a 1-bedroom if we’re going to stay here. He’s 55 and makes good money. What do those rent for, between $400 and $600?”

“At least,” said the woman, who began to talk to this ghost that Andy had told me they talked to when he lived there.

I gathered my stuff, worried someone had stolen the puppy while I wasn’t looking.

In other words, I guess this dream translates to… We shouldn’t have left Phoenix but gotten rid of the problem next door and remodeled the place instead. However, we’d never have escaped the music anyway. But we did leave and now all that’s available to us are old dumps with crazy snobs and potential thieves unless we go to some shit state that’s a virtual icebox practically year-round like Montana.

Oh no! I just went to log into thoughts.com and got a blank screen with a message saying they were upgrading to the new version, come back tomorrow. sighs This is like the third or fourth upgrade in just a few years! Let me guess… it’s going to be slow as hell and full of bugs, right? And they’re gonna change so much shit around that it’ll be like waking up to find all our furniture and other things rearranged and I’ll have to hunt for and learn new ways of doing things, right? How many features will they take away that I like and how many worthless ones will they add while they’re at it?

The Jes pest is as he usually is – good landlord, lousy neighbor. There was no overnight barking over the weekend, but from the sound of it, he’s back to driving that insanely loud truck of his. So now I have to hear that on top of the motorcycle. This is the last cool day too, which may bring out the worst in him, but it’s already afternoon and well into his drinking time so we’ll see.

Tom says the Internet was so bad this morning and will call them this afternoon if it hasn’t improved by the time he got home. It’s been holding steady for me so far, but there’s usually no service in patches. It can be fine all day but then out at night or vice versa. It’s truly terrible and I know I should wait till we get out of here before I do anything that isn’t absolutely necessary, like post old journals or work on MT. You don’t know the frustration of getting knocked offline in the middle of a $5 survey that only takes 5 minutes to do.

As Tom pointed out, though, if we can’t get what we want and have to settle for a year or two to save money, we may still be stuck with a shitty DSL line. Not all of the older parks have cable strung to them.

I really hope, though I don’t expect it, that we end up in a manufactured home instead of a trailer cuz they’re built more like houses and aren’t quite as close as the trailers. I’d still rather own a trailer than rent this place but I still worry it’d be noisy as hell. Even though a couple of old people sitting outside talking at a reasonable volume isn’t “noisy” - if I’m just an arm’s length away in a flimsy trailer, it might as well be. Even if I could sleep ok there, do you know how hard it would be to concentrate on my writing while people are slamming doors, chatting, barking and possibly having screaming kids visit? No one wants to be indoors in a temperate climate that rarely rains. Then again, I hear enough shit here too. It’s just not as often and it’s usually either just barking or loud motors. But if they blast their TV or music by an open window we might hear it just fine. It’s still better than nothing, though, and I’d love the hell out of the savings.

According to what Tom recently learned, we did the soundproofing all wrong in Phoenix in trying to block out the antics of the animals next to us there. It was better than nothing but you could still hear plenty. Every bark, every scream, every beat of the base in their fucking cars, every slam of the basketball into the pavement. We threw acoustic tiling in the windows and sealed the edges with foam that expands as it dries. Well, what we should’ve done was overlap, not fill, the windows with sheetrock and sealed the edges with silicone. This supposedly doesn’t transfer the sound vibrations. I don’t see what good any of this would do us in a trailer, though, that has flimsy walls and no attic. The trailer is also elevated which allows for sounds to reverberate underneath.

It would just be nice if we could stop “happening” to get the extremes. Most people have dogs, but most don’t have motorcycles and super loud trucks and bulldozers and dirt bikes and ATVs.

In another extreme we just “happened” to get, we were in a duplex that was perpendicular to another one occupied by a mother and daughter up in Oregon. Every day, practically round the clock, they would go back and forth between the two units. Whenever they’d slam doors, a split second later the sound would reverberate underneath our bedroom and you would hear and feel a little “slap” that sounded almost like someone kicked the underside of the room.

As far as I remember, though, the house we rented where Kim’s driveway ran alongside it wasn’t an issue. I woke up from loud car stereos much more often than I did from her car doors or her company’s. In fact, I don’t think she ever woke me up. But it was annoying when I was awake. I also slept with better sound machines there, so that was probably part of what helped.

I added Duewi (Marie), back on FB. She’s married now so hopefully her wife will keep her from pestering me. The wife doesn’t look gay and has a couple of kids. She’s sort of between pretty and plain. I’m just so glad she met someone. She believed she would be alone forever and I started to wonder about this too. If she were straight she probably would be alone cuz guys are bigger on youth and thinness (though she is thin) than women are. I’m just glad to see her happy these days. I remember back when she told me she had a crush on me all these years. “Why didn’t you tell me when we were in Valleyhead?” I asked her. Well, she was with Judy at the time so she didn’t see the point in telling me.

It’s amazing how sometimes it’s those we least expect that actually become quite special to us. Sometimes the person you’re so sure is a cold-hearted bitch from hell after some silly misunderstandings is actually a carbon copy of yourself in many ways and you find you have the same brain that thinks, feels and believes so much alike with few exceptions like whether or not Karen Carpenter is a good singer.

Later…

We learned something very interesting about the trip I won in 2007. Tom asked me to pull our birth certificates from the filing box to get what’s left of his measly pension going till they scrap that too. Get both of them, he told me, and I was like, you have two birth certificates? He jokingly said, “Yeah, for both times I was born.” LOL, what he really meant was the original and a copy of the original.

I was sitting at my computer as I joked back and said, “Do born-again Christians have two birth certificates?” and posted this interesting question on Facebook. 29 minutes later it had 2 likes, LOL.

Anyway, I saw that he pulled out the little booklet we were sent when I won the 10-day trip to Italy, as well as the travel certificate. A few minutes later he came back into the room and told me the certificate wasn’t for Italy. Meaning we don’t have to go to Italy but to any place this particular travel company does trips. Escape to Italy happened to be the theme and the place the sponsors (Jewelry TV) chose to feature. But we could go anywhere in the world except for some parts of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Well, I definitely don’t want to go to the Middle East or Africa, but the question then was, where do we go???

With 7K worth of travel expenses, there isn’t much we couldn’t do. We could fly first class to some 4-star hotel in some exotic location or we could do another cruise. When we disembarked from the Holland America cruise I won to various ports in the Caribbean, I pretty much breathed a sigh of relief and was kind of glad it was over even though I didn’t look forward to returning to subzero temps in Timber Country. I was a little drained from the craziness of it all, and as Tom and I both agreed, the food and entertainment weren’t that great. The theme of the cruise was Delbert McClinton and Friends. Well, I’d never heard of Delbert before winning the cruise which was kind of by accident.

But then time went on and we went through hell on a different kind of “trip” when we got stuck in motels in Sacramento for nearly a year. That’s when I started seeing the parts of the cruise we did enjoy and realized what a fun picnic it was compared to what we went through in Sacramento. It was actually the little things that were nice. Just being able to sit on our private veranda with nothing but the sky and ocean and know that no spiders or bees could torment me while I did some writing in my little pink notebook was kind of nice. The “wave” pool was fun as hell, though it wasn’t really a wave pool but the ship’s motions made it seem that way. Being able to tell someone at any given time of day or night, “Hey, could you make me a burger and fries?” was also a refreshing change. So I remember this as well as the rowdy guests, the pesky housekeepers or whatever the hell they were called that would be in the staterooms 3 fucking times a day, and other little nuisances. Just everyone being all excited as the ship would begin to pull away from the dock and waving to those on land was fun. I was jumping up and down like a little kid in some grand playground waving to everyone, LOL. It was pretty neat going to sleep in Florida and waking up in the Bahamas.

We could go to see Nane in Germany but Germany isn’t a place I ever cared to visit with or without Nane in the picture. It’s cold, old and ugly. Instead of that, it would actually be nicer to spend just one day in most of the European countries and visit all my cyber buddies there, but 7K isn’t enough for that.

Tom, being the nice and versatile kind of guy he is, would go anywhere I wanted to go. Even to the United Arab Emirates which I’ve heard is absolutely beautiful. But hanging with a bunch of bomb-toting towelheads isn’t my idea of a good time.

So where do we go???

Well, I know I would never want to go anyplace cold or snowy or both. I would also prefer to go someplace I’ve never been to before. Sure it would be nice to be able to experience another country I haven’t been to, but going through Customs is a pain in the ass. It really slows things down, that’s for sure. It takes forever to go through everyone’s stuff and if they find something suspicious in anyone’s baggage that delays things even more. But there is one place in the US I haven’t been to that I wouldn’t mind visiting, even though traveling is hard as hell on one with a sleep disorder and just one day of lost sleep can be hard on this fit, but aging body.

Hawaii. Yes, Hawaii!

So Tom jumped online and checked out Hawaiian all-inclusive vacation packages and found that Princess Cruise Lines has cruises from San Francisco and back, and I have yet to visit San Francisco so that would be another new place to experience even if it’s only a couple of hours away. We’d probably Am-Trak down there like we did up to the airport in Portland for the other cruise, though in this case, we wouldn’t be flying at all. That’s something I have mixed emotions about. I love to fly but kids are so damn out of control these days.

Anyway, we’re considering this 15-day cruise to Maui in one of their high-end suites. It takes 4 days to get there. Then we’d spend a week there before spending another 4 at sea on the way back. Even though traveling is still a pain and a bit hard on me, I’m looking forward to it even though nothing’s for sure just yet. It would be easier in some ways than going to Italy since the 9-hour time difference would’ve been hard to deal with whereas Hawaii is only an hour earlier. Because Tom works for a European company he’ll have enough vacation time accumulated before the certificate expires in two years.

Yesterday turned out to be a wonderful/miserable day all rolled into one. Unless appearances are highly deceiving, it sure looks like we’ll be able to get a 2-bedroom/2-bath double-wide with a garage in a nicer 55+ park where barking should be less of a problem (I hope) instead of only being able to choose from 1-bedroom/1-bath single wides with carports in dumpier parks, even if the “dumpier” parks are still quite nice.

Where I was miserable was that I had to spend most of the day bedridden with what turned out to be the worst allergies I ever had here. I couldn’t go long at all without sneezing and my nose was so stopped up I could barely taste or smell. I was so damn congested that my nose dripped like a faucet and I went through nearly an entire box of tissues.

My honey was kind enough to go out and get me some Claritin. Not the Claritin D that gave me nightmares (not a thrilling thing for someone who has a knack for hers coming true) and snuffed my appetite the first time I used it. I loved that side effect, but they stopped selling it over the counter in most states cuz people like me started buying it for the wrong reasons. This stuff, though, is supposed to be more a preventative medication and not a stop-the-allergy-attack-when-it-starts kind of thing. Let’s hope something stops them cuz I’m getting really fed up with having these attacks every few days or so that I’m seriously considering smashing my nose. Yes, literally breaking it. Maybe then it won’t sneeze so damn much if it’s too mangled up to do so. Damn near smashed it right off my face yesterday but Tom talked me out of it.

Tom spent most of the day researching 55+ parks and both trailers and manufactured homes for sale. What was a little disturbing was that we emailed 3 people and all of them blew us off. I emailed two of them last week. By 3am when I was still suffering from allergies, it hit me that something could be punishing me for daring to dream and to try to make that dream a reality, and therefore trying to stop us. Tom thinks they blew us off cuz they’d rather talk on the phone, but I’m not going to let any cruel, twisted and unfair God that thinks we deserve to live like bums in someone else’s place stop me.

If absolute worse came to worse there’s no way we couldn’t get a 3K single-wide that would be both nicer than this place and ours. Not unless God saw to it that we were in a head-on collision on our way to buy it. In fact, Tom and I were laughing over how it would actually be smart to buy a place if he were suddenly laid off, as funny as that sounds. But if we bought a place for 3K and had to pay just $500 for the lot, it sure would be cheaper than paying $825 to stay here. Tom actually found about a dozen places going for 3K so 3K seems to be a magic number. It’s going to be ours too, once we move wherever and build our savings back up. I figure the two most important things in life to have is 3K and a bag of charcoal (if you don’t have a garage). The 3K buys you a new used car if yours craps out and it keeps you from being homeless if you lose the place you’re in at the time. The charcoal kills you if you don’t have the 3K to prevent it from happening in the first place like it almost did to us. Still, it’s funny and nice to know that even if this place burned down right now we still wouldn’t be homeless. We’d just buy our own.

Another thing we’re checking out is any complaints lodged against any of the parks. One complaint is one thing, but there was this one particular park that had like 6 different complaints, and some of them were pretty big. Like not having any water for over a day and not being able to reach anyone.

One park that looks promising borders a cemetery. I’ve always been one of those who are not bothered by what bothers most people (trains, planes and freeways) while I am bothered by what most people aren’t bothered by (kids, dogs, loud music). Cemeteries are another thing that spooks people out for some reason, though I don’t know why. They’re dead, for God’s sake! Dead people make way better neighbors than live people. Dead people don’t blast music, they don’t have dogs, and they’re always, always quiet as a mouse. So to those of you out there who are as dead as a doorknob, you are welcome to be our neighbor!

Back in my mid-20s, I didn’t know much about owning and buying places and about manufactured homes and 55+ communities and all that stuff. Not many that age does. I was remembering the nice doublewide manufactured home my parents got in the late 80s when they first went to Florida. It was only a 1-bedroom/1-bath but it was gorgeous and right alongside a manmade canal that opened up into the ocean. Sky and water were all you saw when you looked out of one side of the place. I’m happy they got to have it so sweet and fine without a fraction of the struggles I went through but at that very moment they were living in it up there, I was bumming it in the slums. I lived in one of the worst sections of the city while they did so, so much for each other when my mother got her inheritance. Just so, so much. My siblings lived in nice houses/neighborhoods, but my folks could’ve done more for me than just let me indulge in some new clothes and whatever when they’d blow on into town a few times a year visiting friends and family. They could’ve gotten me a modest little place near them in Florida and helped when things broke, but that would’ve defeated the purpose, wouldn’t it? After all, they weren’t just running from a shitty climate, they were running from their kids, too.

Many women these days are pressured into not having kids so they can save money, spend money on themselves, and chase some hotshot career without the distractions. It was just the opposite when my mother was young. I totally believe without a doubt that she had kids more for show than because she wanted them. My mother likes to live life and to do things, which is the very reason I opted out of having kids myself in the end. I’m too selfish to do more for others than for myself and I have no qualms in admitting it either. This doesn’t mean I’d let a friend starve in the streets, but I’m sure you get my point. Yet sadly, appearances and what others think have always been more important to my mom than anything else. This also doesn’t mean I wish bad things for her or anything like that. She is who she is. Everyone knows that, including me.

Later…

Chatted with Maliheh, who wonders if her neighbors may be lying in wait. The poor gal had to pay $500 to have a lawyer send their landlord a letter warning her to control her tenants or else she’d take matters to the next step, which would be civil court. She has two years to file.

As she said, she hopes they’ll back off, grow the fuck up, get a life, and quit while they’re ahead. But blacks tend to be sore losers and can’t seem to let things go very easily. They don’t like to lose and they don’t like to be complained on no matter how legit the complaint may be. So if they get evicted or decide to move before she does, they could go out in a very vengeful way. There’s also the fact that the courts still tend to side with blacks whenever a white person is involved no matter how much of a case the white person may have. Hopefully, she’ll get anything else they may do recorded (she’s got cameras set up all over her place) so that it’ll be too obvious for any court to ignore.

She’s determined to get on with her life as usual and not let them scare her from being in her yard when she wants to be and I think that’s a smart idea. Running and hiding will only send the wrong message anyway, and she was there first. Turns out she housesits. I don’t know why or for whom but she’s been there since 2005 and all she has to pay is utilities and Internet service. This explains a lot. I was wondering how the hell she could pay about a grand in rent and afford so much other shit on top of that. Especially if her student count is low. So I can see why she’s determined not to move until she’s ready to. She also said the layout of the house is perfect for teaching. That’s another thing I didn’t know; that she teaches at home. I thought she went somewhere to teach.

Today’s research is looking a helluva lot more promising than yesterday’s and it’s looking more like we may end up buying than renting. Let’s just say I see a glimmer of hope. A light in the dark where there was once none at all for 8 long years. To think that we may own our own place (and it might not necessarily have to be a tiny old trailer after all) in less than a year from when we had nearly both feet in the grave is truly mind-boggling. Even Tom agrees. As he said, he knew things would turn around really fast once he got a job. The problem was that we didn’t think we’d get the chance to turn them around in the first place, and that chance certainly wouldn’t have come had he not gotten a job in the nick of time. We had no more income coming in and our money was almost all gone.

The only negative is that we may not move till September or October instead of July or August as we might need to save up a few more grand first, depending on how flexible the realtor is. Better later than never, though.

The reason it may be easier to buy is that renting, for some reason, may actually be more expensive per month unless we got something attached to others or rented something in the mainstream. No thanks. Secondly, our credit isn’t the greatest. The fucking management company in Oregon says we owe them $200, and then there are the book clubs I stupidly stole books from.

I’ll never like having to pay to fix things, but I’m all for being our own boss again by owning. Management companies rip you off and individual landlords pester you. The only other negative is that even though we should own it outright in 10 years or less, it’ll never be completely “free.” You have to pay for the lot. Lots with trailers usually cost about $500 a month whereas lots with manufactured homes usually cost about $800 a month. But even while we were having to pay $1000 - $1200 a month till it was all paid off, we would still get enough in unemployment if he got laid off. Plus there’s the fact that it should never again take a couple of months let alone a couple of years to get another job. If all he could get were a minimum-wage job, it wouldn’t be for long. Most people with his skills don’t make shit money. Except for a few months, a few times, he hasn’t made shitty dough since before I knew him.

Oh, and one more negative. I still think daytime barking is still likely. But no place is perfect and I just might get my own beagle and bark back. :) Beagles are kinda cute and they’d surely live a lot longer than a rat, though I miss my ratties, too.

Other than my allergies bugging the hell out of me, I’m pretty damn excited! From what we’ve researched there doesn’t seem to be any way we could be getting our hopes up for nothing. Besides, if the absolute worst-case scenario came to play, we’d just buy the cheap single-wide, though there’s no reason we couldn’t have a nicer doublewide with the 2 bedrooms and 2 baths we want. It just may take a little longer. As long as we can make the down payment, they don’t care about credit in these types of places where there’s no loan involved. In a way, the economy has helped us as much as it damn near killed us. These are normally 80K - 100K homes that are now down to 40K or much less. For a while there the economy took so, so much from us. We had one foot (or a little more) in the grave. Then we pulled that foot out of that grave. And now it’s time to collect. We, two proud survivors of what was the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, and I know things still aren’t back to normal.

None of the house dreams I’ve had make much sense. At least not yet. Maybe there’s some small, seemingly silly detail that could mean something and I won’t know it unless it comes to play in real life. But the closer we get to getting something, the more details should be revealed in my dreams. So far I have a possible orange tree in the backyard, a driveway that’s on the right, and the colors blue and tan may mean something as well.

Tomorrow my dad will have died exactly 4 months ago. I really miss him! Funny, though, how after he dies and after years of struggling, Tom finally gets a permanent job, it has great pay, it has great benefits, it has more vacation time than usual because it’s a European-based company, and now we might be “going home.”

They had a picnic barbecue at work last Friday, but he didn’t win any of the prizes in the raffles they had. Too much competition, I guess, LOL. Instead of there being 40 others to compete with, everyone from all the buildings was there, so that meant hundreds of people.

The salt and baking soda concoction killed the tooth that was becoming infected. I’m amazed at how much it’s helped. Now my teeth should definitely be able to keep from becoming any kind of an emergency till after we get moved. Hell, that’s all I can think about lately. I can’t concentrate on Bunny Nose or anything else!

Still posting old journals a little at a time when I get the chance, and even told someone on Thoughts how to backdate entries that was interested in doing this as well. I gotta laugh at some of the shit I wrote way back when. What a sad, lifeless, naïve little idiot I was, LOL. But hey, I was young.

Aira finished my book, A Rainbow in Munich, and said she loved it. She said it cheered her up and made her happy on a day when she was feeling kind of down and gloomy, which happens to the best of us at times. It was nice to know I put a smile on her face. :)

Went to bed in the summer and woke up in the winter. Where the hell did all this cold come from anyway?! The cold woke me up at 3am and I had to get up, shut the window and break out the heavy comforter yet again. May as well leave it on the bed. The next 4 days are expected to be in the 70s and in the low 50s at night. Yesterday, which was semi-warm, was dead quiet. But I have a feeling today’s weather is going to bring out the worst in Jesse. He doesn’t seem to like the heat at all, dry or not.

Can’t swear to it, but I think I may know who the “woman who’s up there in years and has always admired me” may be. I finally came out and asked her if it were her, since she is up there in years, LOL. Well, when Christiane didn’t reply I figured I either embarrassed her out of responding (sorry if that’s the case!) or I hit the nail on the head. In truth, I may never know for sure who it is, but as they say, silence speaks a thousand words and her silence does make me wonder. I told her she didn’t have to tell me anything she didn’t want to, hoping that would make her feel less put on the spot and less obligated to tell me if it was her if she’d rather not say so. I’m flattered if it is. I don’t know her well, but she’s tall, slim, attractive, and has always seemed like a kind, intelligent and hard-working woman.

I’ve got roughly 30 entries posted on both my-diary and Thoughts since I found that Thoughts also allows for backdating, and should have all my 80s journals posted today. When I first started on October 27, 1987, my entries were short and sweet. They became longer and more detailed with time, so it’s not like it’s going to take me just weeks or even months to get everything posted. It could take years unless I get sick of it along the way. I must have something like 12,000 pages of text to go through. I can’t just throw things online. I have to stop and screen everything first and either omit or change names and locations.

Later…

A reality check has got me wondering if maybe we should check into a townhouse and forget trailers and houses altogether. If whatever’s up there wanted us to have what we really wanted it wouldn’t have given me this kind of a sleep disorder to prevent me from doubling our income so we could afford it. That much is obvious. Another thing that’s become obvious through the years is that neighbors are still going to be annoying at times even when they’re a couple of hundred feet away. Unless you live smack dab in the middle of a 100-acre lot or on a deserted island, people make noise. Whether it’s a single, older white person or a large Mexican family, they’re all going to be annoying in some way or another to those of us who would prefer to live in peace.

With a townhouse, there wouldn’t be anyone above or below us and it’d be the most affordable way to have our cake and eat it, too. There’s just no way we can afford a nicer 2-bedroom/2-bathroom trailer or house and those we could afford would leave us with little to no money leftover.

We all have to settle in life at times. I don’t agree with settling on things like lovers. I’ve always felt it was best to stay alone before we settled for second best. But in other areas of life, it’s either settle or do nothing at all. So now I’m ready to accept that I’ll never live where I really want to live and just take the best of what’s available to us. It’s either that or stay here.

All the detached houses and trailers are either too small even though we’d save a ton of money with them, or they’re bigger and nicer and would end up sucking every last dime out of us. sighs I don’t know what to do. Give up? Take an apartment? A tiny trailer? Stay here?

When Andy asked how I could not believe there’s a God after I posted a beautiful flower background, I realized that he, along with some others may not actually be reading my journal but skimming it. So just so you know, I believe there’s probably some kind of God. Unlike most people, though, I see it as mostly vengeful and cruel as opposed to kind and loving when I consider how much bad there is in the world as opposed to good, including a lot of the unfair and undeserved shit I myself have gone through in life.

Anyway, I’m feeling a bit discouraged right now. Between PMS, being bloated as hell, and not finding very promising ads, I’m kind of down. Worst-case scenario we take that trailer for 3K as it would be better than staying here. It would be just as small but it would be completely upgraded, we’d own it outright, and we’d save a ton of money each month. That is unless someone else bought it first.

The Internet was cutting in and out while I was trying to chat with Maliheh yesterday. The fucking thing has driven me crazier than Jesse and his mutts ever could! But all they’d do if we called would be to tell us either everything was ok or that they’d “check into it” after keeping us on hold for hours. AT&T sucks! I cannot wait to be back on cable!

Really worried about Maliheh. sighs Seems like it’s a no-win situation with problem neighbors no matter what you do. You either keep your mouth shut and take their shit, or you fight back and you STILL take their shit.

She got a pig to cite her neighbor for letting his dog bark up a storm. The neighbor appealed, lost, and had to pay $100. Well, now the cock and his wife are getting revenge on her by stalking and harassing her as if her complaint was unreasonable. Yeah, how dare we make people take responsibility for their dogs or their children or pay for their crimes! I guess it’s only human nature to want to deny and counter-attack when confronted with any wrongdoings. Hey, I was 100% guilty of the prank calls I was charged with. I knew that, the phone company knew that, and the law knew that. Doesn’t mean I wanted to fess up and pay for them, though. I’m only human.

She’s basically going through what we went through in Phoenix. Can you guess their race? Yup, you got it. They’re renters but not welfare bums like what we had. The cock is 61 and retired, but still referees kids’ soccer games or something like that.

God help her if they have any cop friends to do to her what was done to me, but from the sound of it, he’s a known troublemaker to the law. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that whites are not only the new minorities, especially where she lives, and the fact that our society/laws favor blacks. Judges always find for the blacks when it’s a case involving whites no matter who was actually in the wrong. It’s been that way since the LA riots.

The cock apparently was in her backyard calling her names and for her to come out, etc. She recorded it with her iPad as she told the cock she would get a lawyer and sue him and his landlord. Well, that right there is more ammunition than we ever had since our troublemakers didn’t come into our yard to taunt and bully us. They were actually a little more sly and clever with their abuse. It’s a little scary to think that someone who knows damn well they’re being filmed would so blatantly break the law like that. Either they don’t mind going to jail or they know they can just play the race card and get away with it. That’s another thing that worries me – all they have to do is claim she made racial slurs at them (though just like with us, Maliheh would never do that because their color isn’t the issue as opposed to their behavior) and they’re automatically believed. It’s the magic word for blacks these days – he/she called me racial slurs. When it’s whites feuding with whites, no one cares. When it’s gays getting fucked over, no one cares. But as soon as it’s blacks and whites feuding, everybody cares…for the blacks.

While most employers pass over whites for blacks these days regardless of who’s more qualified, they don’t just do it because they favor them. Most of the time it’s because they genuinely prefer blacks, yes, but sometimes they’re afraid to not hire them for fear of getting hit with a discrimination suit they know damn well they’ll lose no matter what their true reasons may be for not hiring them.

I totally believe without a doubt that not only were OJ Simpson and Michael Jackson guilty as charged but that the jury was afraid to convict for fear of a riot igniting. A piss poor excuse if you ask me, like a mother always giving in to her two-year-old that is spoiled and takes a temper tantrum every time it doesn’t get its way. People should be held accountable for their actions regardless of color. All Maliheh ever wanted was for them to stop the barking. Knowing her as well as I’ve come to know her, I can’t believe she did anything to provoke or deserve the shit she’s getting from these losers, and I know she doesn’t give a damn about skin color or nationality. The only ones I know she has any ill feelings toward are Arabs. Yes, Arabs are the worst of the bunch, but blacks are runner-up with their tempers, IMO anyway.

She doesn’t like guns and it may put her at risk for some serious retaliation, but in some states, one has the right to shoot any trespassers, especially one screaming taunts and threats. I told her she should think about that if it gets that bad, but then again, the courts would probably still find a way to turn things around and make it look like she popped the bastard for his color and not the real reason.

Someone asked me if I liked dogs. I told them I had nothing against dogs themselves, just the racket they make. Well, I see blacks as I see dogs. I don’t give a shit about their color, but I sure don’t like the way so many of them treat others! It’s like they just don’t want to get along with anybody. As Maliheh herself said, some people are so rude and disrespectful to others and just don’t give a shit how their actions may affect others.

Yet blacks don’t want to hear you complain about them, and whites don’t want to hear you complain about them either. Instead, they are widely loved, accepted, favored and given all kinds of special treatment all because everybody seems to think whites owe them for what our ancestors did to their ancestors a million years ago – WTF?! There will always be some blacks that get picked on for no reason at all and that’s too bad, but no one seems to want to see or acknowledge it when it’s the other way around as it is much, much more often these days. Well, I have no sympathy for blacks these days. 50 years ago, sure. Today, no way.

I also don’t agree that we’re always 100% responsible for our own actions either. I think that sometimes we really do instigate, influence and provoke the actions of others and that we can be just as responsible for them as they are. I was the one that hurled myself out the window when I was 17. But did others have a hand in encouraging it? Many people think they did, not that they’d ever have been held accountable for it. Today they might because the laws have gotten tougher on that sort of thing, but this was back in 1983. The point is that one can only be pushed so far for so long. You know, sort of like the woman who’s been abused for so long who finally beats, stabs or shoots her man? Well, I’d say he kind of asked for it in the end. Let’s hope this cock that’s been picking on my friend doesn’t ask for anything similar! As much as she’d love to put them in the hospital, she’s trying to play it smart like I am with Jesse and his mutts cuz she doesn’t want the hassles of court, jail or whatever, no matter what the outcome may be.

She says they don’t blast music, but they’ve had kids pestering her, they’ve driven over her yard, and of course the barking has been rather maddening. I just hope they either leave or lay off the poor girl if the courts aren’t going to do anything to help her. The good thing is that she’s 55 now and has also wanted to be in a 55+ community, so she’ll be on the lookout once her lease is up in about a year.

Later…

There’s a beautiful doublewide that’s new and spacious just two miles from work. Only they may want a few more grand down on it than we’ve got at the moment. We’re still going to scout the area this weekend. It’s a 2-bed/2-bath for 42K. I don’t think we could get the down payment lowered, though because it’s not the park management that has the say in it, but the lender themselves and they’re not going to want any less than they ask for. If they have trouble selling it, though I don’t see why they would, maybe they’d agree to at least rent it or something. I’m still torn between owning and renting and between paying more for something nicer instead of saving tons of money with a tiny old dump.

I never expected any place to be totally silent, but I still think daytime barking could still be an issue even in a retirement community. I don’t see anything in the rules that stipulates anything against keeping dogs outside round the clock or from excessive barking. Maybe they won’t be out all day long, but for a few hours here and a few hours there when the owners are out running errands, wouldn’t surprise me. Well, if we did decide to go with the smaller, older trailer that’s really close to other trailers, where would they put the mutts since there’s hardly any yard space there? The only option I can see is to tie them to the carport posts and that would be beyond maddening.

I misunderstood Nane. She actually has 2 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, a terrace and a garage. Now that’s not bad at all for what she’s paying.

The problem is that while there are plenty of gray areas, the gray areas are mostly apartments. We could have our cake and eat it too with one of those and be able to save money while we had something spacious and modern with plenty of amenities. But that’s not what I want. Therefore, that pretty much leaves the white and black options open; own something outright that’s a tiny dump too close to others or let a nicer place with some breathing room around it suck every last dime out of us. Sooner or later God’s going to miss picking on us and will want to yank the carpet out from under our feet. Well, when He lets Tom be laid off or fired by a boss who may be in a bad mood cuz someone spilled his coffee, I don’t want to be in a $1200 place when it happens.