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.