It was after 6 PM and things were still going on around here. Some loud service truck was beeping loudly as it backed up across the street.

Be sure to hold off the noise until after I get up tomorrow too, God, ok?

I’m actually surprised I haven’t heard motorcycles zooming by. Tom injured his hip and he slept all day, so he doesn’t know if it was noisy earlier or not. He can sleep through anything. Wish I could! Both today and yesterday I was awakened by loud vehicles.

Elisabeth J is a friend of Irene’s that friended me today. She also lives in Austria and is a couple of years older than me. I’ve seen her around before. She’s a boring-looking blond with dull gray eyes and a few extra pounds so I’m sure she’s a sweetheart. It’s the hotties that tend to be the snobs.

I really appreciate that I’m getting more older followers on Prosebox. A 69-year-old woman in New Hampshire said she went through the same thing where she wouldn’t get periods for months, and then, in the end, she was getting fierce periods every 23 days and was so glad when they finally stopped. Her perimenopause went from age 45-51. I’m still not exactly sure when mine started, but I’m guessing between 47-48. Hope this doesn’t mean I’ve got 2-3 more years to go. I read that most women stop bleeding by 52, and that periods stop within 4 years of them becoming erratic. It seems like they went off schedule about the time we moved in here.

The hot flashes are back to waking me up. I awoke several times, once drenched in sweat after having a bad dream. I was working in some dimly lit restaurant owned by some guy. He and his 20-something-year-old daughter were there. I felt sick toward the end of the day and wanted to call Tom and have him pick me up, but I forgot my phone. They let me use theirs but I couldn’t remember his damn number. I asked the guy’s daughter what the area code and the prefix were and wrote it down. Then I tried to remember the last four digits of Tom’s number. But when I went to read the area code and prefix, I found my handwriting to be so small that it was illegible.

Frustrated, I left the restaurant, and all of a sudden a strange sense of hopelessness came over me. It was so intense that I contemplated hanging myself from a tree I passed by. But then a sense of determination came over me as I entered a random store along the way. A very friendly, helpful, and somewhat masculine lesbian was just about to close her store because it was now late in the day. I told her my situation and said that I was afraid I’d be spending the night on the street until I could figure out how to get home. She said she had some cash and let me use her phone to once again try to remember the number. I closed my eyes and struggled to think of the number.

Because it was now closing time the woman said, “Sweetie, you’re going to have to hurry up and try to figure it out.”

I don’t know if I ever managed to get through to Tom because I woke up at that point from the silly and impossible dream. Tom and I always know where each other is and make it a point to always be able to get ahold of each other. The dream still sucked, though, silly or not. I felt so helpless and like I would never be able to find my way home. The good thing about having bad dreams is being able to wake up and know it was just a dream, and that you’re really safe at home in your own bed.

I also had a dream that I might have been staying in some hotel. A black family, which consisted of a couple with three kids, was visible just outside the lobby. The couple was bickering and then the man punched the woman who fell to the ground. I shook my head in sadness, again noting that wherever there was violence, there was usually a black person(s) involved.

In the last dream, I “ran into” Evie, my SIL. She had been expecting a baby girl that she was going to name Amanda. But then I noticed her stomach was flat and said, “You had the baby.”

She nodded and I asked her what she named it. “Staphanie,” she said, pronouncing the short ‘e’ as a short ‘a’.

Enjoyed a 27-minute walk/run as the sun was setting. I didn’t bother to listen to music, though, because I couldn’t hear it. The freeway sounds were ferocious due to the wind.