The battle of the bees still wages on and unfortunately, they’re winning. The good news is that where we were at a dollar a bee based on the cost of the trap and how many bees were in it, now we’re down to 50 cents a bee cuz there are about 20 bees in the trap now. Sunrise and sunset are when they’re most active since we’re having triple-digit temps. It’s just that some of them like to stop off and torment me in the bathroom before I give them their final send-off to the pearly gates.

Ok, now listen up, folks! Our internet connection has gotten so bad and no one will help us that I’m seriously contemplating shutting down and just using our cell or the library till we get out of here in the next – IDK – 3 to 6 months based on all the hurdles our lovely God (if there is one) has thrown our way to help hold up the move. I just hate paying full price for part-time service whether we were rich, poor, or in between. I’m going to make a point of being online less often and getting more into my writing because I’m so damn fed up with it being hit or miss when I want to go online. So I’ll basically check for messages when I get up, post journals, and then check in again before bed. I just didn’t want people to think anything was wrong if it ended up taking me a while to get back to them or that I’m ignoring them or anything like that.

Later...

I’m not sure which home calls to me more. Both are doublewides with 2 beds/2 baths, but one’s cheap, ugly and far from work while the other’s more expensive, beautiful and just a couple miles from work.

Tom sent an email asking to see inside that 6K home in W. Sac that looked beautiful on the outside. I would’ve been really damn worried had they not responded, as that’d make the fourth person to blow us off. Something up there is against us enough as it is. Tom said he had no idea our credit was this bad, and while I couldn’t have told him the specifics, I could’ve told him the logistics – nothing up there likes to see me get the things I really, really want in life, and when I do get them it isn’t without a huge fight. So nothing’s going to make it easy for us and pave the way home. We are right where it wants us – in someone else’s bummy old dive. Would we have spent the last 7 years cramped into these places if that wasn’t what was “right” for us and what was “meant to be?” Ah, but bad things do tend to run in 7-year cycles, don’t they? Well, our number’s up this year! It just might take 3-6 months to get over the hurdles currently facing us and it’s not just our credit (or lack of it). Tom hasn’t been at his job for over a year. There are things we can do to boost our credit but it’s not going to happen in 5 minutes.

Anyway, they emailed pictures of the inside of the home and it’s ugly as hell. Not beat up and broken; just downright ugly. The place is not only old but it was never upgraded in any way. It also not only doesn’t have a dishwasher but it doesn’t have a refrigerator either. Still, we could buy it pretty much outright right now if we had to. This is the place we’d save about a grand a month at having to pay just $500 for the lot. So we could remodel the entire place.

But… I’d still prefer to go for the gold, even if it may be forever out of reach, and for one of the nicer places with a garage.

A Facebook friend posted a picture of a billboard in New York suggesting abortion alternatives. She wondered why blacks and Hispanics were the only ones pictured on those types of billboards since whites often struggle with their kids’ expenses as well. Well, since there just seems to be no escaping topics like God and race, she’s right. Whites do struggle with supporting their children as well. But could she perhaps be seeing racism where there isn’t any? I ask this because I think she is on this billboard because non-whites are the new majority in most places these days. In fact, I’m waiting for the moment a white is shown on some kind of billboard and someone cries racism on their behalf. Oh yes, reverse discrimination is alive and well in America today, my friend. In the courts, in the job market, everywhere. It’s real, it’s sad, and it’s unfair. But we also perceive things differently. She sees racism in that billboard, I don’t. Most people don’t take offense to the term Native American, but I do because I was born and raised here. So if I’m not a “Native American,” what am I? These days I think too many people are seeing racism where it’s not and not seeing it where it is.