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?