When I read a post by someone in the park warning about out-of-control coyotes being in heat, I thought to myself that I’ve never heard any coyotes in the 2.5 years we’ve been here. I’d only heard them when I lived in California and Arizona. Then at 2:00 in the morning, I heard what sounded like more than one coyote. The dogs in the subdivision were going off like they often do at night. Then I heard the yipping of the coyotes, and then silence. I hope the owner was smart enough to take their damn dogs indoors and that they weren’t harmed. If not, then shame on them for making the dogs outdoor live decor instead of the household pets they should be.

Never will I go out walking at night! Not even with Tom. Rural areas aren’t the place to go out walking at night anyway. Even walking at night in a gated community in the city as we did was risky. Just because there may not be as many wild animals there didn’t mean there weren’t wild people. After all, homeless people were worming their way into the area when we left.

Anyway, I slept shitty…again. Removing the pillow didn’t help and I snored myself awake again, though I’m not sure it’s actually snoring but this weird sound I seem to be making. It’s not consistent but still.

The thing is that people don’t usually get sleep apnea this late in life which makes me think it really is connected to my weight or something else is going on. Something like a sleep curse because I’ve had problems with sleep in one form or another all my life. Tom may scoff at the idea of anything cursing my sleep but while we haven’t proven there is we haven’t exactly disproven this possibility either. If something happens every now and then, good or bad, I wouldn’t necessarily call it lucky or unlucky. Well, unless the good thing is winning a million dollars and the bad thing is dying. But when something unpleasant keeps happening and I see a pattern, that’s when I begin to wonder how it could be one big coincidence. I’m not saying anything either way but I definitely wonder at times.

I looked in my 2021 journal and it seems like I may have been about 5 pounds lighter than I am now when we came here. I didn’t start doing this shit till after we moved in here but can 5 lbs really make a difference? Well, I’m going to try my hardest to find out and limit myself to about 1000 calories a day. ChatGPT makes a great place to keep a running total of my daily calories as opposed to Fitbit where I had to look things up that I couldn’t always find. You had to be really precise there.

So I got up to pee when I woke up three and a half hours into my sleep and couldn’t fall back asleep for an hour. This left me exhausted when I got up. I had Ezekiel toast with salmon and a few eggs along with a small candy bar I sometimes treat myself to when we get groceries delivered. I’m out of coffee so now I’m having calorie-free tea when I get up. Green tea was recommended when I asked Alexa because it’s supposed to rev the metabolism. By then I’d had about 580 calories, did a little online work after I ate, and laid in bed for about 90 minutes. I didn’t sleep but it felt good to lie there.

Then I got up again for a while, got hit with a wave of tiredness, and took a real nap for an hour. I fell asleep to the splish splash of the dishwasher running and dreamed I was in a large waiting room full of people. I was with Tom and perhaps someone else I knew. We were sitting against the wall in what looked like picnic tables.

My name was eventually called by a young petite blonde woman. I got up and stepped out of the room and into a brightly lit corridor. Realizing everything was very blurry, I told her I wanted to run back and look for my glasses.

They were very hard to find because the room was so dark all of a sudden. This was an important appointment to get fitted for some clothes for some reason because I was literally thanking God when I found them.

When I stepped back into the hall, the woman was still young but now she was a tall stout brunette. She smiled at me and led me to see my new clothes. I remembered filling out a form saying that my style was trendy even though I would likely choose something along the lines of colorful in real life not that trendy clothes can’t be colorful.

We got some heavy rain yesterday which kept the place quiet. Could get some rain this morning as well.

No reply from Christiane. Figures.

The honker still has overnight visitors.

Not sure I’ll have the energy to hit the road. I’ve got about 100 miles to get through Missouri. My rank is now 126 and I have about 1530 miles left in the entire trip. I’m almost halfway through!

Soon I will be having tilapia with a sweet potato and veggies. This will put me at around 840 calories. Then it’s nothing but snacking on almonds for the rest of the day and toughing out the hunger. This kind of sucks too, because I’m only in the middle of my day. :-( Yet the only way I’ve ever been able to lose weight, even when I was young and had a healthy thyroid, was to severely restrict calories.