Slept as badly as I do when I’m on nights and being woken up by traffic, but not feeling that tired. The neck knockers woke me up. What a coincidence that it starts after I go off my diet and have too much sodium. My ear is clean too, so it’s got to be a blood pressure issue. I’m also up a pound, of course. Definitely time to jump back on track! I’ll go easier on the sodium today. We both agreed to hold off on the sugar. We were going to get cookies to bake in our new oven but I don’t want to rehook myself to sugar. It really is that addicting. The more you have, the more you want. Definitely can’t eat like I used to. Things like pizza give me heartburn and too much sodium jacks my blood pressure up, which is normally perfect.

Anyway, the new oven is wonderful! If it was as exciting as it was to see the old heap of shit hauled out of here as one who doesn’t cook very much, I can just imagine how excited a real foodie who cooks a lot would be. This one is so much nicer and things actually work, too. The old one’s timer, clock and self-cleaning function didn’t work at all. Love the convection fan this one has and the center griddle. I also love how the light comes on when you open the door like with a refrigerator, and how you can set it to turn off when it’s done. I missed having an oven that beeps to let me know it’s preheated too, which I haven’t had for 18 years.

I’m going to allow myself just two eggs later on. For the most part, my diet means no bread, no sugar, low sodium, and little to no cholesterol. I feel so much better this way. I still get hungry at times but not as much, and I definitely don’t have the cravings I used to have for various foods, sweet and not. I don’t care that I can’t lose more than a few pounds. It’s all about how I feel that matters, not appearance, though I don’t doubt that I would be even healthier and feel even better if I lost 10 to 20 lbs. Still don’t see that happening, though.

The only thing that sucks is that even though he measured, the dishwasher door hit the oven door handle so one of the installers was kind enough to adjust it for us even if it meant having to throw the dishwasher at a curve. Later we’ll chisel out a section so we can move it over. I would be kind of pissed if this was the house we were going to spend the rest of our lives in.

We’re way behind on the projects we had planned for the vacation but we’ve still been very productive. We have to finish painting the hallway and putting up the murals. Plus, a few other minor things.

The fiber-optics upgrade has begun. It hasn’t been as loud as I expected so far except for the Jackhammer and some kind of pump they were using. I thought they were going to dig trenches throughout the entire park but it looks like they might do a similar tactic to what they did when they replaced the irrigation system. They just drill scattered holes and run conduits through them from hole to hole. I thought they were starting just up the hill here but Tom saw them way down at the other end of the park. I guess they work till sundown. They still haven’t gone around the circle yet which they’ve got marked, including one of the steps to our patio. Hopefully, they’ll be kind enough to wash that off when they’re done. Real early this morning the connection was as erratic as Auburn. Thinking of getting some melatonin to help keep me on days as long as possible. Tammy said it should take about a week because they did her place a couple of years ago.

I love being on vacation but I definitely don’t like the lack of alone time I’m getting, especially since we’re on identical schedules. It’s kind of throwing me off my routine and I’ve been neglecting my exercising as well as my writing and pretty much everything. But it’s great to have him around more often and to break up my usual routine and do things we don’t normally do. We’ve been going out almost every day.

So we got Sims 4 and my first thought was OMG, this is way too complicated! Let’s return it! Yet while it is a very complex game and there is so much to learn, it is kind of fun creating Sims. He’s been having some fun playing the game and building the Sims’ houses and finding them jobs and stuff like that. A couple of Sims I created lit themselves on fire while cooking, though, LOL. So I’m making the Sims and he’s giving them lives. There’s an automatic feature where you can watch them live out their lives on their own and help them with whatever along the way.

It’s pretty amazing how you can literally build them from scratch and design everything from the shape of their face, ears, facial features, body shape, etc., and not just their skin tone, hair and eye color. I’m gonna see if I can create Sims based on characters in some of my books. I also got the Cat & Dog expansion so I gave one of my characters the Basenji we hope to one day have. So far I have created both genders, though mostly females, in all kinds of shapes, colors and sizes, including a couple of funky-looking characters with pink hair and another with blue ponytails. I will have a collection of singles, couples, and families, gay and straight.

Last night I dreamed I told Tom that we better hurry up and get going with riding our bikes to this restaurant we planned to ride to or else we would end up freezing. Yeah, I’ve been doing enough of that in the early mornings here. Really sick of cold climates!

Then I told him in another dream I was afraid we would only be able to afford dumps and he said that might be the case.

In the last dream, we were renting an apartment and the landlord came to replace something on the kitchen sink while Tom slept. I guess we had been there a year or so because the guy said it was so nice to finally meet me and that he had been wondering who we were for so many months.