Decided that I want to return Sense. It’s overpriced and not worth it. The sounds it plays are nice, but they’re not loud enough and they don’t have enough base in them to drown out the thumps Tom may occasionally make like when he’s closing a door or something, and certainly not the loud traffic or planes. I could even hear him snoring in the next room with it on high.

I started off sleeping with the air cleaner and Sense’s Forest Creek, but then Tom woke me up an hour or two later when he got up and went into the kitchen, probably with the microwave or pantry door. So I then turned it off and kicked on the regular white noise I play through the stereo. I still slept shitty as hell. It took me forever to fall back asleep. Even with just one Tylenol p.m., I awoke groggily and feeling as if I’d only slept three or four hours.

My sleep score was 76, which isn’t very good. The app said it was way too noisy, but that was my sound machine it was hearing. It showed random noise spikes throughout the night and morning, but that could’ve been from me tossing and turning or a plane flying overhead.

It considered almost everything else just right… the barometric pressure, the lighting which is almost pitch-dark due to my blackout blinds, and the humidity. It thought it was too warm, though, and that the air quality was bad. It seems that this place stinks no matter how much we run our air cleaners, I clean, burn incense, use fragrant wax cubes, and run my diffuser. I seem to have been cursed with smelly homes ever since Maricopa. I think it’s mostly the rats. I try to air the place out whenever the weather permits, but if it helps it isn’t for long.

As much as I adore my rats, I’m also looking forward to when they’re gone so I can take a break from pets and have cleaner air to breathe that smells a lot fresher. No matter how often I clean the cage and wash their accessories, the place always smells. As cute as they are, I’m getting sick of rats anyway, not just because of the smell, but due to the way they piss on everything to mark their territory (and ours), the chewing, and the extreme timidness. I don’t know what it will be, but the next time I have a pet I would prefer to have one that doesn’t run from me as if I beat the shit out of it religiously.

Anyway, it would have been nice to have a sound machine and alarm in one unit where the sound would not only be sufficient enough to mask unwanted sounds and not just relax me but also would stop when the alarm came on. The slightest change in sound wakes me up. Technically, Alexa could do this if I could find prime nature sounds that lasted longer than 15 minutes or that I could put on continuous play. Then I would only have to hope that the connection didn’t hiccup.

I was dragging all day, but sure enough, as soon as the sun set I perked up. I swear I would be nocturnal if I could keep a schedule.

We’ll keep Sense for the rest of the month. Their Cosmos and Morpheus sounds are relaxing when I’m just kicking back. It’s nice to try, though, being the technology fanatics we are. Kick-ass Macs, 3-D printers, laser printers, Alexa, Dot… you name it, we have it. We don’t have an iPhone, though. We just have cheap androids because we don’t use the phones enough for them to be worth getting anything better.

The cosmetic organizer I got is awesome and fits perfectly in the bathroom drawer I put it in. Now I don’t have to dig through piles of shit to find whatever.

Our new electric pressure washer arrived today, and we can thank Trisha for that. It’s easy for me to say “ew” to some of the dark colors people paint their houses until I see how much dirt shows up beautifully on our white house. Everything needs to be cleaned… the exterior of the house, the carport, and the patio. We’ve been thinking about the best way to go about this, but realized it might be tough with a regular hose, and take a ton of water, too.

But then one afternoon we saw Trisha using a high-powered water hose to clean her walkway and decided that would be a great way to blast the dirt off our place. It actually uses less water as well, but it would be best to do it when it’s warmer because of the mist it kicks up.

Because I was so tired today I wasn’t able to work out. Sometimes I think maybe I shouldn’t bother, since so much of the time I’m either tired or it’s too warm or too cold, and using the skier is boring. But I know that if I stop I’ll gain weight and whatever I gain will never come back off. Once I started working out again I would stop gaining, but I would be stuck for life with whatever I gained in the meantime. I wouldn’t lose much strength, since I’m naturally muscular, but I would lose my stamina and fall out of shape. I’d hate to get all out of breath doing something physical, and I know my cholesterol and estrogen would go up right along with my risk for diabetes. So I guess I just work out whenever I can.

Heard back from my GYN. She still thinks I should get the hysteroscopy to evaluate my irregular periods. Hmm… I thought we determined it was from perimenopause and that the reason for the procedure was to check for precancerous cells. She also suggested I keep using the steroid cream twice a week until I follow up with her, which she would like to do in May, and at that time she’ll decide whether or not I should keep using the cream.

I checked and found that there are actually several things that can cause irregular periods, including hypothyroidism, but I’m still not sure it’s worth putting myself through when chances are almost next to nil that I have anything wrong. That’s my gut feeling, anyway. Either way, I’m still trying to cut down my appointments, and having the surgery definitely wouldn’t be cutting them down. She would probably want me to do a follow-up for that too, adding yet another appointment.

My period ended up being kind of wimpy and my boobs are still sore, like I didn’t bleed out hard enough to relieve them.

Last night I dreamed that Tom and I were walking alongside a lake somewhere, though it wasn’t here. It seemed to be in a public park somewhere. I was listening to music with earbuds and after a while, I realized he was no longer next to me. I stopped and looked behind me and found him several yards away. But as he caught up to me, he turned into a young girl, LOL, who stopped to talk to another young girl.

I turned and continued walking and that’s when I noticed that the lake was frozen and that there were baby ducks frozen into the surface of the lake as well. My dream self thought that because there were only baby ducks, their mothers must have neglected them.