Melatonin experiment update: The day before yesterday my schedule ended up jumping 3.5 hours. However, I decided to take the melatonin last night at the usual time of 10 p.m. I probably crashed around midnight but couldn’t get out of bed until 9:30. Okay, so I backed it up an hour but why oh why am I still so sleep needy? As long as I sometimes need more than 8 hours of sleep, I’m not going to be able to hold my schedule. If I could need 6 to 8 hours instead of 8 to 10, that may very well be the answer to holding it steady. Until then, the best I can do is slow the roll.

My revenge story is going great and I have officially gone steady with voice blogging on Tumblr. Tumblr is much faster, less glitchy than Bubbly, and has a calendar to make it easier to trace back to earlier posts. The only negative with voice blogging is that it’s not searchable and not as easy to edit.

I decorate the posts with images of nature and animals but they’re tiny compared to those on Bubbly. Another advantage to voice blogging there is that I can set some private if I want to. Not on Bubbly!

We’ve been having some triple-digit days but once again we’re going to be having lows in the low 50s in a few days which doesn’t exactly help the pool being that it’s solar-heated.

I can’t help but think back to the ‘80s and ‘90s and how much I would have loved to have been able to prop myself up comfortably in bed, hold a tiny device before me, speak my mind, and watch the words magically appear on a screen. But I also realize just how much trouble I may have been likely to get into back in my younger days being as dumb and naive as I tended to be back then.

I wonder if Aly is getting ready to dump Kim. She seems to be getting more and more frustrated with her by the day and has often complained to me about her selfishness, repetition and lies and all that stuff. I see the signs. She seems to be in that spot I was in before I let Andy go. She wants to but she isn’t quite there yet as far as being totally ready. I think it’s coming, though. I always figured that day would come, too. I tried to tell her years ago that Kim was anything but a true friend but I knew she wasn’t ready to see and accept that at the time.

While it’s nice to get along and be able to exchange simple pleasantries with Kim, even though I get tired of her repetition and all that shit, I’m not stupid. Kim is anything but a changed woman. She’s still the same hateful, selfish, potentially vindictive person who can do no wrong and who would never admit to or take responsibility for her own actions. I’ve never known her to confess guilt or apologize for anything. She’ll never change either. I think some of it is her own doing and her own fault and part of it is because she was born mentally defunct. It seems like the whole family is screwed up in some way or another and while we know Kim isn’t totally innocent when it comes to the hell her SIL Sara puts her through, we don’t doubt that Sara’s a mean control freak. She seems to dominate and control the whole family and the sense we get is that she doesn’t like Kim. Then why did she marry Carol, Kim’s sister? I’ll be the first to admit I don’t live there and I don’t know these people so I can’t say exactly what the situation is, but I get the sense that Sara is no different than most evil stepfathers. Kim may be Carol’s sister and not her child, but still, she’s someone that she has custody of in the way one would if they were a minor dependent. Sara is the evil stepdad who berates and controls the family, including Carol. So we don’t doubt that they’re probably overly strict with her even if they may believe deep down that they’re helping her. I’m still kind of surprised that Sara doesn’t push to have Kim removed from the household and thrown into a group home, but maybe she likes having her there because she likes to hate, control and dominate her.

Aly’s going through her own family drama but in a different way. Much like my family was/is, they don’t all get along and many of them haven’t been in touch for years. Aly was thinking of going to her grandfather’s funeral in Delaware but is hurt and angry to learn that she isn’t wanted there.