I’m so excited about Mary being released from prison tomorrow! Well, today, where she is since it’s already the 29th there. I can just imagine how excited and nervous she must be! I can’t believe they made public the address she’ll be at, which is also in Florida. Do they want to get ex-prisoners killed or something? I don’t know whose house it could be, but it’s gorgeous. I checked it out by satellite and although it’s one of the few without pools, it looks like a beautiful house in a beautiful neighborhood. I thought she’d be going back to Arizona or maybe to North Carolina, though I don’t think she should return to her family. Her brother is one thing, but the rest of them seemed to be nothing but a bad influence on her.

I just worry and wonder what will become of her. I mean, how much of a life can the poor girl possibly have? Being in prison, even if you may not deserve to be, doesn’t exactly open up a lot of opportunities for you. She can’t just get a job or find housing wherever. The only other sucky thing to dampen the excitement of her release is knowing she’ll probably be on parole for the rest of her life, though I don’t know this for a fact. I haven’t talked to her in years, so this is just a guess. I hope not, though, because being on parole or probation isn’t much more than an extension of jail. Sure it’s better than actually being in jail, but you still feel like a child whose life doesn’t belong to you. You still don’t have much freedom. I would run if I knew I was looking at a lifetime of being told what to do and when to do it, though I don’t know where I would run to.

I wonder if she and her family want revenge on the judge who reneged on his end of the deal and didn’t let her go two years ago as promised in exchange for her testimony against the real monster. I don’t blame them for any ill feelings and wishes they may have. When it comes to the law and the courts you can’t trust a damn thing you’re told. Another job I couldn’t do is be a judge, though for very different reasons than why I couldn’t stand to be a hospice worker. I’d be in fear for my family and myself all the time. Whether most of them deserve it or not, you can’t just go around playing God with people’s lives and expect nothing to ever come of it. Sooner or later I would think I would sentence or lie to the wrong person. No thanks!

Later...

Despite the annoyances that go with living here (the slow, unreliable internet, the barking, the Jes pest), I’m getting close to calling off the move. I see old, familiar signs emerging of just what can happen when we try to fight fate. Before the move to Maricopa I had a bad feeling that although it made no sense, we’d be “punished” for moving to a better place. Then sure enough, all kinds of things went wrong with our brand-new house, and old enemies hunted me down and reached out to haunt me in ways that made the way they would torment me from just a few feet seem like nothing.

Now here we are with all these unexpected things coming up to delay us from becoming homeowners once again after 8 years. Tom is either too sick or too busy to even call to set up a lousy appointment to see if our scammers have fucked our credit up enough to throw us a curveball with that alone. We’re NOT paying our perps to get ahead in life, I told him. We were forced to do it down in Arizona; we’re not doing it here. We shouldn’t have to pay money we don’t owe to some con artists just to get something we want in life. Tom worked for the money to buy the place outright and to easily afford to rent the lots it’s on. THAT should be enough. Paying our perps is like a rape victim cleaning her rapist’s house so she can get a new car or something. It just ain’t right.

But again I ask myself, would we have lost two places if we were meant to have our own place, even if it ended up being a good thing in the end what with how cold Oregon was and how dangerous Maricopa was getting? Struggling for what isn’t meant to be can be a sure way to an unhappy life, so if all we’re going to do is get punished for just thinking about it, I’d rather just stay here. I hate to sink our money into dressing up someone else’s place, but I’ve really had it with all the delays and I’m ready to just call the whole thing off. These curveballs must be coming at us for a reason, right? IDK, maybe we already are where we’re meant to be, and maybe that’s all we’re good for is to be crammed into someone else’s old shitbox. Sure seems like something up there thinks this is all we deserve, but it’s better than jails, funny farms, hospitals, prisons, hotels, projects, or the streets.

A couple of hundred bucks won’t exactly put much of a dent in our savings, but we definitely need to get a REAL mattress. Airbeds are comfortable as hell but the first one lasted 4 months and the other one lasted 4 minutes. An inner wall let go in this last one too, and I did NOT overinflate it. Comfortable or not, it’s time to quit throwing money away on cheap crap. Foam breaks down, memory foam causes backaches and overheating, and so I checked out some coil mattresses on Amazon and Walmart. The coils may sag in time, but I would think it would take longer than foam. Especially when you’re not as heavy as most people.

Woke up with a sore throat today, but fortunately it went away after I ate and showered.