Tom just went to bed, so now it’s just me, my thoughts, and my journal. I feel more and more sure in my mind that this is our forever home. While I still would have preferred options and to keep the variety of locations going for the fun of it, I’m more OK with staying here. Florida isn’t perfect, but I do like this climate, and we’re getting up there in years. Money or not, energy or not, it doesn’t make much sense to get land outside of town when we have less than 20 years to go and are at the point where anything could happen at any time. Plus, we’d have sonic booms and barking to deal with.

I just hope things don’t get noisy here as it is. They’re now using the louder mower regularly, and I dread the day modern trash trucks catch up to this place. When they do, I’ll be woken up three times a week when on nights, which is about as often as traffic woke me up at the old place. So, like I said, there are pros and cons to staying versus going.

It would have been nice to have more breathing room around us, but the older we get and the more we need doctors and have health issues, it wouldn’t be very wise. Besides, it’s not like we could have gotten a place bigger than this. This living room is a little small for VR, and the kitchen lacks counter and cabinet space, but is otherwise ideal. The healthcare kind of sucks here, and I don’t like the idea of ending up spending what will be a total of about a decade with the honker across from us, but things could be worse. That’s why I worry about what we may be in for next door. All it takes is one neighbor to really make or break the place, so I worry about that, and modern garbage trucks, and who knows what else to make the place noisy.

For now, most of the noise is confined to the sky, but it’s nothing that can’t be drowned out easily enough. It’s those earth-shattering sounds that I worry about. Anyway, we’re kicking off prime time for hurricanes with not much activity going on. There’s a storm that may or may not amount to much, but otherwise the seas are relatively calm. We could be surprised over the next six weeks, but hopefully it won’t be in a bad way if we are. Hopefully, it will never get any worse than last year.

Tom’s doctor is completely out of his mind, trying to tell him his cholesterol is getting high. A total cholesterol of 169 is not high. 

Not sure why I needed a nap after sleeping nine hours, but I have decent energy now, so that’s good. I’m over halfway through the challenge and looking forward to finishing it so I can finish my own ride.