Had what I thought was a real period starting yesterday but all has been clear so far today. Forget “erratic.” This has gotten more like crazy. When they first became erratic there was still a degree of predictability in them, but not anymore.

Changed the rats’ cage and went to Goodwill. Got some incense and a cute squirrel figure to decorate the patio with.

Trying to figure out why the people next to the Twenties have a movie projector screen in front of their place. I’m guessing they’re using it to shade a particular plant.

Going swimming in a couple of hours. Right now the brats have the pool.

Got two more necklaces, one pink gems and silver, the other blue gems and silver. Both are beautiful but overpriced.

Ran into Virginia and gave her our new cell numbers. I asked her if they’d ever had woodpecker problems, and they haven’t. She says she doesn’t go to the pool, but Bob sometimes does. This doesn’t surprise me.

Had some interesting dreams last night. In one, we lived back out in the country. One of us left the door open and a big black bear wandered in. At first we were both holed up in the bedroom terrified. Eventually, Tom decided to go out and try to sweet talk it back outside. I stayed in the bedroom trying to listen through the door, terrified for Tom. After a while, I slowly opened the door to find both the bear and him sitting on the floor with him gently cooing to it.

“Do you want me to call 911 now?” I asked.

He said no, not yet, and that was the end of that dream. He got a kick out of it when I later told him about it.

Then I had this really cool dream about a house in which a river sort of wrapped around part of the living room. I don’t know if we lived there, but what was cool was how the walls raised up like a garage door at the push of a button, turning the living room into a dock and giving the feeling of having a floating living room. The river was greenish in color and in a heavily wooded area.

I also had a dream of running super fast down a curvy path in the woods. I began to wonder if it was worth going to wherever it led to (a friend’s place?) because it was not only getting dark but there were patches of mud that I didn’t want to slip on.

Later…

Oh, that felt sooo good! So good to get it all out after 3 years of sitting back in silence. Well, almost all of it out, anyway. Yes, we have finally voiced our opinion of life in this park in an anonymous survey. Finding brats at the pool yet again during hours they weren’t supposed to be was what prompted us to speak up.

As I learned the hard way from past experience… if you complain, people can’t handle it and they retaliate, no matter how legit and reasonable your complaint may be. Thanks to the freeloaders in Arizona, I often find myself hesitant to speak my mind. You just never know what kind of connections they may have. Then I realized that as a paying customer, I not only have every right to speak up when something bothers me but not doing so would really be letting them win. Like a rape victim is essentially letting her rapist win if she crawls into a shell and never lets herself out of it, I’m only letting the desert shitsters win by keeping my mouth shut. Oh, I don’t expect my two cents’ worth to change anything. It’s just that I can only keep quiet so long before I feel like I’m going to explode. I may be anti-revenge/vengeance (unless anyone ever harmed us), but I believe one should always have the right to say what’s on their mind if they can do it in a civilized manner.

Not wanting to overdo it, we agreed to mention no more than 3 things, so we chose the top 3 annoyances. The motorcycles roaring in and out, sometimes as early as 6am, was number 4, and the live band they sometimes have that penetrates these walls and my peace was number 5 on our list, so we left those out.

Number 1 is definitely the way too frequent landscaping and project sounds, especially the landscaping. It’s a big park. We get that. But restricting this racket to 2-3 days a week instead of near-daily in the summer and daily in the winter would be nice, so we can at least count on enjoying a few days off from it. The park’s gas-powered blowers are insanely loud.

Number 2 is the frequent water shut-offs. When we were told they sometimes have to turn the water off, we thought that meant a few times a year. Not twice a month.

Number 3 is finding screaming brats in the pool as often as we have after 1pm when they’re supposed to be gone. We didn’t sign on for that or else we’d have stayed in an all-ages community. Seriously, I’m sick of all the rules people break around here. We’ve got kids living in at least one house (though I never said anything because it’s not near us) and at least 2 households that we know of that leave dogs out overnight.

We still rate this park a 7 on an overall basis and understand that no place is perfect, but for the fortune we pay to live in an upscale luxury park, rules should be better enforced and the place should be quieter.

OMG, talk about a hilarious typo that auto-corrected quite incorrectly! Until I caught it, the last part of my last sentence read: for the fortune we pay to live in an upscale luxury park, rules should be better enforced and the place should be queer.

LMAO!