I fell behind on my book so I’m catching up with that. I swear I hate the new NaNo, though! It no longer tells you how many words you have left to go before you hit your goal. Not only that, but I can’t see my synopsis or excerpt without editing the project, so what’s the point?

Big sites and change…I hate it. If the big sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are going to have so much change so often, I wish they would at least leave the old features alone. Adding new ones is fine but changing or getting rid of old ones sucks. When I first got hooked on Pinterest in 2015, I could see how many boards I had. Then they took that away and now I can’t even see my total pin count. They’ve even taken away the feedback option but that’s probably because they’re sick of people bitching about all the change. Some people are going to do what they’re going to do no matter what. They keep taking and taking but never adding. You know, like a convenient way to download our boards as we can download our photo albums, tweets, and journals from almost every other site in the world?

Another tired day for me and not because of traffic. I kept waking up a million times as if I was still in the worst of perimenopause. Sometimes I just woke up, sometimes it was to pee, and sometimes I was overheated. Why am I still having hot flashes in my sleep this late in the game???

What was strange was one dream in particular that I had. When I lost my parents in 2012 and they would often show up in dreams, I just assumed it was because they died. I don’t remember when it was, but sometime since we’ve been living here, I had a dream that my father said, “Mom understands if you can’t forgive her.”

I was thinking of that as I was relaxing for bed yesterday and also remembering the dream my grandmother was in back in the '90s telling me to pick new goals and dreams, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was them sending messages from somewhere beyond. Still not sure if there is a God or an afterlife, but yes, it definitely made me wonder.

So as I was falling asleep, I mentally asked my parents to send me a sign in my dreams if they were still out there.

I got up a few hours after crashing to pee and realized at that time that neither one of them had shown up in my dreams. I wasn’t surprised because I’ve tried this before where I would call out to them and request that they make their presence known in my dreams somehow, and nothing happened.

But then I fell back asleep and in one of the dreams I had, I didn’t know Tom. I was staying somewhere with no way to get home. I was so broke that I wondered if I even still had an apartment to go back to.

I looked down at one of my hands and saw it was swollen and distorted which I suspected was from some supplement I had just taken. Too worried to care, I let a psychic give me a reading. Only she didn’t read palms, she read upper backs, LOL. I knew she was for real because she told me things that there was no way she should know. I never mentioned not having kids yet she knew I hadn’t had any. Then she said something about there being a lesson to be learned. She also said I was a something baby. It seemed to be a single-syllable word like prawn or prong, referring to something I was either given or restricted from when I was born. Then someone stole her attention away and I was determined to catch her later to find out what she meant.

Then I went and checked my phone and found that my mother left a message. It was something to the effect of just checking in to see how I was doing. I don’t remember exactly what she said.

My phone worked differently than in real life. I was unable to call her back or retrieve her number in any way and I couldn’t remember it off the top of my head. It’s like my brain just wouldn’t function. I couldn’t think of the date and I couldn’t think of anyone else’s number either. When I mentioned something about my sister, some guy angrily said something about me starting a vendetta.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “I don’t want to start a vendetta; I just don’t want anything to do with her. There’s a difference between causing trouble for someone and ignoring them.”

Then there were bits and pieces of other dreams. Tom and I went somewhere and forgot our masks.

We wanted a couple of rats that were 10 to 20 pounds and very friendly and playful only to find they were $450.

I felt guilty over abandoning some rat in a building after using it as part of a prank.

Back to real life… Yesterday’s exercise mix-up was a 15-minute ab video, 15 minutes of bike riding, 15 minutes on the treadmill, and 15 minutes on the Bowflex. You definitely don’t feel like you did an hour’s worth of working out this way when you break it up and add variety.

I’m too tired to work out today, though, but if I absolutely have to be tired, today is a good day. That’s because my tummy is a little sore from the ab video I did, waking up muscles I haven’t worked in a while.

All my physical work is done like cage-cleaning, so I can relax for the rest of the night with writing, audiobooks and movies and not have to do anything other than cooking.

The honey garlic pork ribs I made last night were great. I was going to throw in another rib today with some veggies for one meal, along with bacon and eggs for lunch, and then a piece of chicken with veggies for my last meal. I don’t know that I’m up to cooking two more times, but I do have a couple of frozen dinners, so I may have one of those. I need to use them up so I can go back to low-carb anyway.

Tom’s trying to lose weight, but I still don’t see the point in half-starving ourselves and working so hard just to regain the weight with our super slow metabolisms. His life, his body, so he can do what he wants, though. I’m just making sure I don’t gain.

I’m surprised I’m not hungry as hell today because I’m tired. Often times I would notice that I had PMS-like hunger when I would be tired and could eat and eat and still be hungry. So I looked it up and sure enough, a lack of sleep causes hormonal shifts that raise hunger. When I have those days, I have to make sure I don’t eat any more than usual since it wouldn’t do me any good to do so. Both the tiredness and hunger stay with me until I can get caught up on sleep.