Tammy got the flowers and says they’re gorgeous. I’m glad they made it to her! She deserves them.

Had a near-perfect upper BP number reading at 121. Yes!

Got a lab appointment for 4:00 on Friday. Not looking forward to it and dreading the numbers, as always, but certainly they can’t be that bad. My hair’s growing too fast to be low on thyroid, and I remember phone numbers too easily, LOL. I’m more worried about cholesterol numbers.

Did a 32-min RV walk last night. My HR peaked at 142. The beauty and serenity of the park at night helps make up for the daytime annoyances, and damn are there many! Yeah, it’s not a very thrilling thing having to wake up to tons of hammering. God, I am SICK to death of there being one thing after another going on here! We can’t even go two whole weeks without having to hear someone working on something.

Anyway, they’re repairing the damaged wood that the termites destroyed at the Twenties, and I’m sure next comes the tenting. Then maybe they’ll put up a garage. Then maybe they’ll redo their landscaping… and this is along with what everyone else around us decides to make us listen to. Oh, to live in a place that when someone has something worked on, you don’t have to know about it. A true fantasy, I know.

So glad I got up at 1pm and not 7am. I’m sure the hammering had to have been going on all day. The question is how many weeks with this particular project take?

Right now the only annoyances are the blasting freeway stereos.

I wonder just how noisy Stacey’s neighborhood is. It looks like there would be plenty of screaming kids, barking dogs, and probably stereos, too.

In fact, I wonder a lot more than that. I asked Tom if he thought I’d ever hear from Stacey if she didn’t hear from me first. I personally have my doubts since people don’t usually take the initiative upon themselves to seek me out first. It’s only after I’ve sought them out that I may or may not hear from them. Believe me, a part of me is tempted to listen to my head and forget her since that’s how you get stuck dealing with the Alisons of the world.

But Stacey isn’t Alison. Not even close.

Anyway, Tom thinks that yes, in 6 months to a year, I’ll hear from her.

What I wonder, though, is if I hear from her… how would we work things out? If she wanted a friendship with me, how would we get any alone time? I have no problem with Tom, or even her husband, being around some of the time. But I would like to have her to myself for the most part and I just wonder how we’d make this happen. Other than when Tom works a Saturday here and there or is out running errands, he’s always home on weekends, which is when Stacey’s not working. So would she bring me to her place? And would her husband always be there?

Also, there’s the issue of driving. Driving to pick me up and bring me to her place and then back again would mean spending 1.5 hours on the road. Would I really be worth that to her?

Had an interesting chat with Jen on Facebook. This is the Jen who was just 9 years old at the time I lived next to her and her large family at the NHA projects in Connecticut. The family that drove me batshit crazy with their thunderous noise, that never let me sleep, and that ultimately ran me into the ground both emotionally and physically. The whole place did. Between that and still smoking with bad allergies and asthma, I had a total meltdown and ended up in the psych ward for about a week before my father shipped me to Andy in Arizona. Ten days later I got my own studio and then I met Tom after nearly a year.

Jenny lived with her 3 older brothers and parents at the NHA back in 1992. I was 26 and her mother Barbara was 31. I swear that despite all the complaining I do about any noise here, this place is totally comatose compared to how the NHA was. The walls were so fucking thin that when their phone would ring I would think it was mine.

Despite having only a few years in my entire life where I thought I might want a kid, and mostly finding them to be loud, annoying, uncivilized and costly little brats, I’ve always kind of had a way with kids. They’ve always seemed to be drawn to me. Perhaps because I’m small? Or maybe cuz I like bright colors like they do? shrugs Who knows? Whatever the case, they would constantly be at my door and sometimes I’d let them hang out at my place. Good luck to me as far as getting any peace outdoors, though, for they would be just as quick to flock around me and smother me as soon as they’d see me.

Barbara had a “tough” reputation and when she finally got fed up with me complaining about her and Dave not controlling their unruly brood, she flew over to my place in a rage, but of course I wouldn’t dare open the door. I was in good shape then, yes, but at barely 5 feet, 90 pounds soaking wet, I wasn’t about to face off with one that had a few inches and dozens of pounds on me, especially when I was sicker than a dog. I was exhausted as hell and wheezing my ass off with an asthma attack that soon landed me in the ER.

With my combination of good long-term memory and expert journal keeping, I looked her up on Facebook just for kicks and gave her the piece of mind I always wanted to give the coward who sued a tobacco company for millions when she got cancer of the larynx in the late 90s and had one of those things stuck in her throat. I don’t know what they’re called. It makes people sound funny when they talk. Tammy would probably know what it is. Anyway, I had said something like, “Come threaten this presently fit, muscular, healthy, smoke-free AND fat bitch now, Barbara.”

It was a few years ago that I read about her lawsuit and at first I was pissed. She chose to smoke and got millions from doing it while we lived in poverty for years… WTF?

For the longest time, I always felt that if there was a God up there, it’s always protected my perps by making sure I either couldn’t fight back or they were out of reach to at least try to. They always remained unpunished and karma always seemed to conveniently forget them. But then I realized that maybe this was to protect me. I mean of course if someone robbed me I’d want them to pay for it… but think about it, I told myself. What if you could have taken her that day she came screaming to your door. What would you have done? Well, the answer’s obvious… I wouldn’t have just stood there. I probably would’ve kicked the shit out of her and ended up in jail. Would I harm her now if she suddenly appeared before me? Naw, not without being threatened in some way. Then yes, you bet I’d open that door real damn fast no matter how shitty I felt. The older me gets pissed a lot quicker and easier when it comes to bullies whereas the younger me tended to get scared. Trust me, if Rick and Rosemarie paid me the same visit they paid me in Phoenix, I’d be in jail right now. Same goes for the black bitch next to Tom and I a few years later. Our local crazy war vet was a little scary at times, though, but only at first. Once my fear turned to anger, she was smart enough to back off.

I’ll never understand some people, though. How can you provoke people and then act like they’re the ones picking on you when you finally push them enough to get a reaction from them? Really, I hope no one makes any direct threats or tries to harm today’s me unless they’re either very tough or very armed because yes, I will rip them to shreds in a heartbeat. No more shying away and sending the wrong message. Ok, so there are some limits. If today’s disabled Barbara threatened me, then no. It takes a real coward to attack someone you know damn well you could hurt.

Back to Barbara. Well, today I got a message from Jen and at first she was very defensive and not the least bit friendly. She asked who I was and I told her. She then told me that her mother didn’t remember me. I wasn’t surprised. So many people will make casual threats and then forget all about them and the people they threatened (or sought legal revenge on), but the people they threaten never forget them. Really, I don’t think people realize the magnitude of destruction on one’s life you can have with your quick little fits of anger and your “easy” jabs of vengeance. They get on with their lives while others are left to pay for their actions be it with just shitty memories or a huge loss of money and freedom. Trying to tell these people, “It’s in the past and can’t be undone,” doesn’t always resolve the issue for them and achieve closure within their minds. Sometimes it can be like trying to tell a rape victim to just “get over it.”

It felt good to speak my mind and get things off my chest, as silly as it may seem to some people, and even though it’s ancient history.

They got a kick out of some of the journals I shared from those days and we ended up having a few laughs. Barbara remembered me from my pictures and said I was short and cute, and she kinda remembered the grease fire incident too, LOL. Tammy probably does as well. She volunteered with the fire/ambulance department at the time and heard the call go out over the scanner.

As we were discussing, I think Barbara was worried about me catching Dave’s eye, but honestly, I not only respect other people’s relationships, but I also wasn’t the least bit interested in him. Yeah, I was attractive back in those days. I knew it and so did other people. Stacey may think it a shame that today I call myself fat and ugly, but well, I kinda am compared to then, haha.

Barbara and Jen now live in Florida but Dave’s still up north. We all agreed it was now water under the bridge. There are only about a dozen or so people I could never forgive even with the most heartfelt of apologies and a few of them are already dead.