So now both the cruise AND the flights are booked! Heading out of Sac Int’l and will layover in Houston in just 18 days! So excited! So is Tammy, whom we spoke with yesterday. I don’t expect to have access to the Internet like we did in Hawaii since we’ll be at sea for much of the trip, though I will try to document things each day on my laptop. I may upload entries all at once after the trip or do it a little at a time. Don’t know yet. But even the little things like that are exciting to think of as well as the big things. :)

As Tammy said, it’s also a shame that it’s taken this long as well as exciting. Yeah, well, we know who we can put most of the blame on for that one, don’t we? But even so, it’s kind of pointless to lay blame at this point when what’s done is done. We can’t undo the last 25 years.

I’m SO excited for SO much! Seeing my family, flying first class, cruising, swimming, shopping and just enjoying the warmth after freezing my ass off here. It’s in the low 40s right now. My morning walks to the clubhouse for the exercise group are nearly excruciating. I can see my breath in the air and can’t get there fast enough.

The ship we’ll be on is 4 times bigger than Holland America’s Amsterdam that we were on 9 years ago. It holds over 4K people, including the crew. I hope we don’t get lost on it, but I would think most decks would be useless to us as they’d just be staterooms.

The ship has a wave pool, rock wall climbing, and much to my surprise… an ice skating rink. No thanks. I did enough of that growing up in New England.

You have to pay extra for it, but what I look most forward to on the ship (besides eating and swimming) is a massage and a mani-pedi at the spa. I’m going to spoil and pamper myself silly.

Like I said, so many things, big and small, I’m totally looking forward to! The only thing I wasn’t too thrilled to learn is that men must wear shirts with collars even in the casual dining area, and both men and women must wear long pants. Jeez, give us a break! We’re on vacation, and well, not all of us appreciate being told what to do. But unlike what I went through 16 years ago, I can live with this demand. If we want to eat in our robes, we can just get room service.

My Fitbit report shows I sleep as shitty as I knew I did. Not only that, but this was the first time we could actually “see” a hot flash that jacked my heart up from an average of 80 to a whopping 124. That’s when I got up and took the lorazepam I didn’t take before bed. I’m taking it before bed this time around for sure.

Had to take the thing off the last hour of my so-called sleep because it was too tight. It’s such a pain to put on too, cuz it’s wide and that makes it hard with my tiny little wrist.

While they’re still highly annoying, along with waking up a lot, they’re less scary now that I know what’s going on and am equipped with better coping tools (Stacey, the emotional tapping, the chicken with the calming tryptophan), but it’s a shame no one could tell me what it was a year and a half ago when this shit first started. Although the higher doses of levothyroxine fueled it, the docs were right… it’s not the meds that’s the problem, but the perimenopause. And not that I didn’t have a few anxious moments when I was clueless as I really thought this stuff didn’t start till a woman was closer to 55. So I was anxious about being anxious and not knowing why. I just knew that that degree of anxiety was uncharacteristic of me, awake or asleep, and that something physiological was amiss.

This period has been wimpy so far, but that’s subject to change. I can say one thing for sure and that’s that I didn’t gain as much weight as I usually do before periods. I usually gain 5-6 pounds but this time I only gained 3.

Hopefully, we’ll both be done coughing up globs of leftover shit from our flu before the trip. We’re getting better little by little.

And I’m back! Yes, I took a break after my last paragraph to see Tom off to work and to do a more rigorous cleaning job than usual of the second bathroom. My heart rate was between 105-113 while I cleaned and right now it’s down to 97. Still a little high. My resting heart rate is about 90, though I did get as low as 68 in my sleep. Yes, I’m the opposite of Tom. I have a high pulse.

We added each other on Fitbit (plus I added a couple of friends) and he accidentally “taunted” me. Funny too, since he’s only over 1K steps and I’m currently at 5K steps, 2 miles and burned nearly 800 calories. I did get up a few hours before he did, though.

I feel ever so slightly anxious, probably because he’s gone and it’s early in the day, but I don’t think I’ll need to take anything before bed. I sure hope not anyway. After I post this I will be walking down to the clubhouse for the morning aerobics. If I had a slow heart rate and hated to exercise, I hate to think of just what my weight might be like these days!

I’m trying lavender-scented toilet paper for the first time and I kind of like it. It’s different and I like trying new things.

After picking up his blood pressure medicine and my thyroid medicine at Walmart yesterday, we went treasure hunting at Goodwill where I found two cute dolls and a cute fake plant. They’re pink flowers and they did a good job of making it look like it was really planted in dirt. It’s not very big and can fit in most windowsills.

One doll is a 9” all-porcelain ballerina dressed in pink with blond hair and brown eyes. The other is a 15” blue-eyed strawberry blond in a blue-green floral dress with pink accents.

And back yet again! Guess who walked down in the cold to the clubhouse with 6 pounds of weights in tow all for nothing? Yeah, you guessed it. Had I been smart enough to check the schedule first I’d have known they don’t meet on Monday mornings.

Here we go with the daily racket at the house that’s for sale. I’d say they’ve already moved out. The guy that lived there just pulled up in front of the open garage door, which tells me there will no doubt be some noisy shit going on inside of it today, and who knows how many other vehicles coming and going. I dread what the new people are going to use that garage for other than to park their cars!

Oh, he just shut the door and headed down the circle, probably to visit someone here before he leaves.

Again with the stuck-in-jail dreams. Why do I keep having these things? I’d rather go back to being broke and in hotels.

In one dream I escaped from jail and went straight home even though I knew it’d be the first place they’d look for me. I just wanted to savor whatever moments of being home that I could before I was captured. Tom wasn’t there, though.

He was in the second dream. In that one, he came to visit and I asked if he was adapting to single life since he now lived alone. He said something like, “Yeah, but your stuff won’t be brand-new when you get out.”

I became very sad and was about to tell him that I was afraid I’d never get out when I woke up.