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.