#i may talk about him later. because i really like this project in particular

[netzieart]

[CW: BLOOD, GORE, other things please check the tags] I was in a silly candy gore mood

I had a lot of fun drawing those pieces! I guess there's just something about neon candy colors that make me glad just to look at them. So tasty

[fiddlefordisms]

Canon Details and Analysis of Fiddleford McGucket Part 2

See the first part here

Let's flash-forward to what we know about Fiddleford after college. At some point, he got married to Emma May Dixon, and they had a son together (Tate McGucket), they live in Palo Alto, and Fiddleford seems to be self-employed: McGucket's Computermajigs. Now, don't get me wrong I enjoy Fiddauthor quite a lot (and I'll give some in-depth analysis and theorizing and thinking of possibilities about that particular relationship in that context at the very end), but I want to focus on Fiddleford's character and what we do know about his wife and child.

We know from Journal 3 that Fiddleford keeps a picture of his wife and son on his desk because he says it helps keep him "grounded." It's very important to note that this picture includes his wife - if they really wanted to imply that Fiddleford's relationship with his wife was on the rocks, they could've easily made it just a picture of his son. We know that Fiddleford must have had strong feelings for his wife because in the Gobblewonker episode of Gravity Falls, Old Man McGucket claims that when his wife left him, he built a pterodactyl-tron (building giant death robots is something he does when he's upset or wants attention). If he was wanting to leave that relationship, he would not have been upset about her leaving him.

In another page of Journal 3 when Fiddleford quits the portal project, Ford writes about how he should "go back to his doting family." This tells us that while Fiddleford and Emma May did have a fight over him not getting her a Christmas present, Ford still somehow had the impression that his family was "doting." I think it's important to point out that Fiddleford has been erasing his memories since the Gremloblin incident - and the fight scene with his wife happens very shortly before the big portal test. We know the memory-erasing gun has side effects. So, anytime Fiddleford "forgets" something should be looked at as highly suspect and indicative that his memory-erasing gun is affecting him.

We know that Fiddleford must have been a good father before he left to work on the portal for Ford via context clues. In the show, despite Tate's original home being in Palo Alto, Tate chose to pack up his things and live in Gravity Falls where his mentally-addled father now lives. He chose to do that and seeing what became of his father, even though he's the town's biggest embarrassment with a reputation for being a crazy old man - chose to stay. In Shmeb U Unlocked, we're informed that Tate is extremely intelligent and capable of predicting lottery numbers.

He could literally go anywhere he wanted if he wanted. And yet, he stays in Gravity Falls where his father lives. He must have really loved his father despite it being so hard with his father's mental state and the fact that he has every right to be angry that his father left. We know that Fiddleford must have really loved his son because of that picture on his desk, because much later even with all of his memory problems, he still remembers his son, and he's desperate to spend time with him, and in the end, they're able to repair their relationship and spend quality time together.

Now, let's talk about a couple of details that I think a lot of people overlook. During the stargazing scene in Journal 3, Fiddleford mentions offhand that he'd like a place where "the screen door ain't broken." I think this is a VERY interesting detail because it makes it sound like Fiddleford's business hadn't quite taken off yet and that he might have been struggling financially because he can't afford to get his door repaired.

This opens a doorway into a theory of mine that Fiddleford is being paid for his time as Ford's assistant. Now, we're not told this outright in Journal 3, but I think we can gather this from a little thing I like to call context clues. After all, Ford probably thought the exact nature of payment deals for his assistant didn't need to be included in his research and personal journal. There's nothing interesting about it. Additionally from a narrative standpoint, it might have come across as looking like Ford had to bribe Fiddleford to help him, and that's not the vibe they wanted for Fiddleford. They wanted to emphasize that these two are at the very least good friends and that Fiddleford is the type of person who will set aside his own personal projects and self-sacrifice to help a friend at a moment's notice.

We know from the show and Journal 3 that Ford was given grants to study the anomalies of Gravity Falls. Presumably, this money would not only cover the costs of field research equipment and a research base (the shack) but also money for a research assistant if needed.

Fiddleford's wife would have to be the most permissive, most doormat wife in THE HISTORY OF EVER to allow her husband to go up to Oregon to work on a project leaving her to not only take care of her son by herself but also have to pay all the bills and rent/mortgage by herself. We know this is not the case because she (rightly) did NOT let it slide that her husband forgot to get her a Christmas present.

Fiddleford would not have had much time to work on his own business while working on Ford's portal. At this point in his life, he has his mental faculties intact, he's proven time and again to be considerate and sweet (Alex Hirsch even refers to him as a sweet soul). He's big on making thoughtful gifts, he wants to help others (in Journal 3, he is seen fixing up the ferris wheel at the carnival where he meets Ivan, although it was definitely wrong - he had good intentions in wanting to help people with their bad memories, even in the show - Old Man McGucket shows up in the sap-hole with the dinosaurs having fixed a broken lantern - Fiddleford is exactly the type of person who would see a broken-down car on the side of the road and pull over and get out his toolbox and help that person out), and he loves his family very much. He would NOT let them go unsupported and floundering for themselves while in his right mind.

So, this leads me to believe that to help convince his wife to let him help his old college buddy with his project, he'd be getting paid for his help. Ford likely would've found this reasonable and might have suggested it himself if Fiddleford expressed wanting to help but not being able to leave his family without any support. It probably wasn't a lot, but it might have been a bit better than what he was currently drumming up via his own business. This could also be why Ford is so adamant about referring to Fiddleford as his assistant in the journals rather than his friend.

Do I think his wife might have still had some reservations about her husband going to Oregon and could be a fertile field for argument later? Yes. Absolutely. But I think the fact that she let him go in the first place and the fact that Fiddleford is self-employed rather than more conventionally employed generally shows that she was a supportive wife and trusted her husband.

I absolutely DO NOT think, as some have posited, that Fiddleford abandoned his wife and son (especially his son whom he dearly loves) to have a "Brokeback Mountain" situation with Stanford. That is a terrible misreading of Fiddleford's character AND the situation. Again, Fiddleford is the type of person who HELPS people, and how much more so for someone who is likely his best friend? Not only that, but his FIRST EVER friend. A friend who Fiddleford probably knows has been alone in Oregon for years and who also has a hard time making friends, a friend who probably doesn't call him enough because he's "busy" with his research (Ford even says in the journal that he "has no choice but to call Fiddleford"), a friend who is probably stubborn about asking for help who is asking HIM (the guy who helps) for help?

Fiddleford might even already be worried about him.

And this is a "project" - a project has a beginning and an end. Fiddleford was NOT expecting to stay in Gravity Falls. He was going to go there, help Ford, and then go back to his family whom he loves. I'm not saying complicated feelings couldn't have arisen (again, I am a Fiddauthor shipper), but I am saying that Fiddleford didn't go to Oregon because he was running away from marital problems with his wife (on an additional note - people are free to write what they want - But what is WITH bisexual erasure and villifying / ignoring female characters? I mean, just because she wasn't in the show or talked about much doesn't mean we should do female characters a disservice) and intending on cheating on her.

Because again - A) He loves his family (family photo on his desk which doesn't exactly scream "Make sweet love to me Ford") B) His anxiety issues C) His empathy - he doesn't have the narcissistic traits cheaters generally have D) He's likely Catholic and all the religious hang-ups with that - (also adultery being a sin is mentioned waaaaaay more than homosexuality) E) The hostile time period for queer folks.

Also, Stanford "I find romance baffling" (Journal 3 - stargazing scene) is probably one of the biggest indicators that no cheating went on (but I'll throw you "cheating Fiddleford" headcanoners a bone much later on in which I think a possible "cheating" scenario could have realistically occurred - and I'll tell you my reasons for why I personally don't believe that happened either, but I'll begrudgingly accept a "possibility" and let you guys go nuts with the idea.)

More to come in later parts.

[acourtofthought]

Lol you're hilarious. Everything about the story and SJM's recent online activities AND the articles point towards elriel endgame but y'all will only stop when elriel is announced I guess.

Anons like this are always better than a cup of coffee because wow, do they wake my brain up in an instant.

Articles pointing to an E/riel endgame? You mean articles written by journalists who never sat down with SJM and who never even spoken to the author or Bloomsbury regarding the content? Articles that were factually incorrect, one originally claiming that SJM was the author of the Elemental series with a hyperlink to a different authors Amazon page? Journalists who definitely are not more qualified than Sarah's own best friend who is on record as saying she doesn't think E/riel is happening?

Also, if we're really claiming her posts as possible clues of which we have zero evidence they are, those clues suggest Elain more than any ship.

Bloomsbury tweeted flowers and fire (not stars or a night sky). Which actually would hint at Lucien over Az.

She had the book of flowers displayed during her live. It's cute how some tried to claim there was a black bat on the spine of the book but alas, it was a blue petal.

She wore a Bambi sweater with flowers during an IG and yes that sweater was on a black background but only because that's how the shirt is produced. I'm sorry but you can't be so ridiculous as to think that the author would want to wear that particular sweater (something she's owned for years as it was mentioned in another article from way back when) but second guess herself because the black background it was already on might have people thinking it hints at Az.

The Spring story had nothing, NOTHING to connect to Az but if you recall from the actual books, Lucien is permanently stationed in the Spring Court.

Let's break down the Az clues you're so confident in.

She was writing ACOTAR 5 in September. She was already into the process to the point that she was obsessed with the book, that it felt like having a crush, that she was so focused on it she didn't even have time to make a treat for her childs school. So that probably means she was at least a few chapters in? A third in? In February, about 5 months later, she did a fan made bracket (that did not include Lucien). and said Az was someone she'd be exploring more in the future.

She wrote the current version of HOFAS in a month. If she had already been working on ACOTAR 5 and had already spent 5/6 months writing about Az, why would Az be someone she wanted to explore more in the future? Shouldn't she have already explored him in e/riels book?

The post where SJM went up North to draft and stopped in front of a small body of water in the middle of the mountains? Guess what, Koschei's LAKE is hidden in a forest, surrounded by mountains. Illyria is not the only place in their entire world with mountains and pine trees. Also, Vallahan is surrounded by mountains on the map! Places SJM could easily have written about in this next book, places more connected to Lucien, Elain and Vassa. And as mentioned above, she said she was up north to draft. It is now 7 months since she did the Live interview talking about how she was working on ACOTAR 5. Chances are, whatever she was up North drafting is not ACOTAR but her next project.

Onto Guilty as Sin. My point mentioned above twice still stands. Why are you assuming it made her think of a book that's probably already written rather than a book she may be working on? Maybe it gave her the feels for the LoA / Helion's love story as they were forbidden lovers who were not yet lovers in their youth. Sarah has often spoken about wanting to write an ACOTAR book set in the past, maybe it's time for theirs. Mor heard rumors that the LoA waited before agreeing to Beron's proposal, after having met Helion at an Equinox the previous year. Helion claims that he heard her family wanted ties to power. At that time (before they ever had an affair), the LoA and Helion would have been forbidden because he had no real power. If you recall, he only became HL during Amarantha's reign after she killed the HL of Day and most of their family. Or maybe she is writing about the Seraphim from 500 years ago, before the first war. Where Miryam and Drakon fell in love when she was with Jurian.

Would it honestly make sense for her to be excited about a song that she just heard for the first time three days ago over a book that should be finished save for maybe final edits?

I like imagining how these things might hint at Elain and Lucien too, it's fun in this drought of ACOTAR info. But I don't have such blinders on that it makes me unable to consider other possibilities.

Stop claiming you see the whole picture when you are only selecting the puzzle pieces you like best. Trying putting the entire thing together if you want to have a chance at sounding like you know what you're talking about.

You guess we'll stop when e/riel is announced? You mean the ship that ended on Solstice, the ship Elain did not shed a single tear over the way she cried for Graysen (someone we know that she loved)? Elain returned Az's necklace and never once looked like she was struggling with moving on. What kind of Elain stan are you, having Elain daydream of being with the guy who rejected her and couldn't confirm real feelings to his own brother? Are doormats now the rage?

I think I remember the Bryce / Az shippers saying the same thing, how we'd see when CC3 was released, but guess who was victorious on that front? The people who believed Bryce was ending up with her mate.

[dr-futbol-blog]

Trinity, Pt. 7

Next, we get to see something that we have never seen before, which the show could not and went out of its way not to show us before this moment, and which we will not see again for a long time after this. We see a truly private moment between Sheppard and McKay, both completely unguarded, how they are around each other when there are no people around. As discussed previously, it seems like Sheppard's quarters are removed from where most people have their living spaces, in a tower in the part of the city that had been inhabited by the Athosian refugees before they relocated to the mainland. But even so, as we shall soon see, Caldwell's presence on Atlantis is still felt even during this private interaction.

We see Sheppard come to the door of his quarters and open it, and we do not know whether McKay had somehow alerted Sheppard to his presence, whether Sheppard just knew he was there, or whether he had simply been on his way out of his quarters and McKay had been waiting for him. It does look like he was on his way to just open the door. Regardless, McKay had come to Sheppard's quarters specifically to have a conversation with him. He sounds slightly out of breath, like he is either nervous or had exerted himself on the way there. While Sheppard seemed exhausted during the meeting and we have seen several indications that he has been sleeping in his jacket, he has now removed that at least, wearing a black shirt. He looks sad, as he opens the door. His eyes are soft and full of sympathy.

Let me point out, to start with, that once more they do not greet each other. There are no hellos, how are yous, what are you doing behind my doors. The two of them have an on-going conversation that never ends but is only temporarily put on pause when they have to vacate each other's company, and so they always just pick it up as though it had never ended, as though they had never said good-bye. McKay does not give Sheppard an excuse for why he is there because he needs no excuse. No "Hi, I just happened to be around" or "Hey, I was wondering if you have a minute" is required because they both know that they belong together, that if there weren't a hundred different things making it impossible between them, they would never be apart from each other. And so, McKay gets right to the point:

McKay: Harry K Daghlian. Sheppard: Who?

Interesting here is that McKay picked Harry K. Daghlian as his example, as while he was the first to die on the Trinity project, the so-called "demon core" that killed him also killed another man. What McKay tells Sheppard about Daghlian is not true. He fell into a coma following his accident and died three weeks later, never waking up again. But the other scientist, Louis Slotin, died a much more agonizing death from an accident that resembled what happened to the Ancient device, and he at least tried to make something good come out of his accident. Slotin was a Canadian scientist whose background does bear some resemblance to that of McKay. At the time of this death, he was hailed as a hero that had saved the lives of his colleagues through his brave and selfless actions but the story has since been revised to admit his reckless behaviour while "tickling the dragon's tail," using improper and unsafe procedures, endangering others in the lab along with himself. Some good did come of his death because it led to removing the human element from criticality testing that has since been made using remotely controlled machines. The fact that McKay chose Daghlian as his example rather than the man that more resembled him and this particular circumstance but whose actions may not have supported the point he was trying to make does tell us something.

Now, as McKay is talking to Sheppard it seems like Sheppard does not say anything. Some people might interpret this as Sheppard being angry at McKay for something when there is really no reason for him to feel any anger whatsoever toward McKay at this time. He feels sympathy, if anything, Sheppard wishes there was something he could do for McKay. He does not enjoy seeing the other man in pain. Sheppard is not quiet because he is angry or because he has nothing to say, he is quiet because this is how they communicate when other people aren't around. They do not need words to say things. McKay is talking using words because he has things to say that he had rehearsed for this precise moment, that he wanted to tell Sheppard. He needed to say the words. But Sheppard is not being quiet. He is responding to McKay using his eyes in a way that he knows McKay can understand. They are having a dialogue here.

McKay: He was a scientist, worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. He was only twenty-six years old. Accidentally irradiated himself while performing a critical mass experiment on two half-spheres of plutonium. Sheppard: Yes, and? McKay: Took him a month to die. Sheppard: Okay. Very sad.

McKay: While his body was slowly shutting down from radiation poisoning, you know what he did with his last thirty days? Sheppard: Obviously not, but you're about to tell me. Go on, then. McKay: He worked. Sheppard: Oh, okay. Of course he did. McKay: He tried until...

McKay: ...his last breath to understand what had happened to him so that others could learn from the tragedy, so that his work, his death, wouldn't be rendered meaningless. Sheppard: Your work isn't meaningless, Rodney.

McKay: Now... have you considered what would have happened if they'd just shut the Project down after that? Sheppard: This is different.

While "This is different" are the first words Sheppard says out loud to McKay, the whole point of this scene is to show us their wordless communication, their closeness. That bond that is closer than that even of a task master and a trainee, that bond that is deeper than words. This isn't Sheppard stonewalling McKay, this isn't Sheppard having nothing to say, this isn't Sheppard not bothering to say anything, this isn't Sheppard being too cool for school to talk. This is them having a full conversation. Sheppard says only four words out loud but he says much more than that, and McKay can read him, knows what he is saying that he isn't saying. This is that unsettling ability to read each other's thoughts. When Sheppard finally does say words out loud, his tone is soft. This is how he speaks to McKay when no one is around to hear them. You can hear the love in his words, the sympathy, how much he feels for McKay.

McKay: Is it? Collins' death is a pointless waste of life unless something comes of this, and I am not sure that I can... Sheppard: Don't. McKay: I think I know what happened.

Sheppard can hear the pain and anguish in McKay's voice. One wouldn't need to know McKay half as well as he does to be able to tell that he is not alright. Seeing McKay in so much pain and not being able to do anything to help him is breaking his heart. Now, as McKay implies that he may not be able to live with it, to live with his guilt, we see Sheppard blink. Sheppard himself associated blinking being near the breaking point in Poisoning the Well (S01E07). Previously, we saw him blink when he thought McKay had died on the Ancient satellite platform in The Siege (S01E19). McKay does not say it, he never finishes the sentence. He is not implying that he would take his own life, merely that he does not know if he can go on. But the mere implication that he might not be able to go on stabs an icy sliver of fear directly into Sheppard's heart. There are many things that he might be able to protect McKay from if he really put his mind to it. McKay simply giving up may not be one of them.

But then, just as soon as he has allowed Sheppard to see the full extent of his pain, McKay seems to shift gears. He wants to fix this, he needs to fix this. And clinging to this hope, Sheppard lets him know that they are in this together:

Sheppard: Let's hear it. McKay: Can I come in? Sheppard: No.

This is the most interesting thing to happen not just in the episode but possibly on the entire show. This is such a strange thing to say from a team leader to team member or from a friend to another. Here is a man who has just lost a colleague and is clearly in a lot of pain and wants to talk about it. He asks if he can come in and talk. If Sheppard was his team leader, it would be his duty to let McKay in and have a talk. To talk this over with him. Seeing to and assessing McKay's condition for the field is something that Sheppard should be occupied with, it is his duty as team leader and it is something we saw him do to both McKay and Teyla in The Gift (S01E18). And if they were friends, it would be the kind thing to do. Again, there is no reason for Sheppard to tell McKay this, to not let him in, if they are just colleagues. Either he is being a huge asshole for no reason, or he was doing something illicit in his room that he did not want McKay to see, had someone over that he did not want McKay to see (of which we have zero evidence), or he just generally wants to keep his quarters as a private space (we see people in his quarters later plenty of times, and we saw Weir walk right into his room in Home S01E08, so this is not true either). Maybe it was really messy that day, the maid had a day off. What ever.

This scene, this exchange MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE unless they have a history of having been romantically and sexually involved with each other. The only reason for Sheppard to not want McKay to come into his quarters and to tell him no, and for McKay to accept this without comment or argument, is if McKay knows what the reason is why Sheppard does not want him to come in. And that reason is because the last time McKay had come in (likely between Duet and Condemned), something had happened. Something had happened of which Sheppard did not want a repeat, not just then. They were both much, much too emotionally fraught at that moment for anything besides heartbreak for both of them to have resulted from Sheppard letting him in.

Because the previous time, the previous time McKay had come knocking on his door to talk they had ended up in bed, having sex. That is a thing that happened. We see an echo of this in every scene with the two of them in Sheppard's quarters from henceforth in how Sheppard always needs some kind of a barrier between himself, the bed and McKay like he fears that if he isn't holding a golf club, hiding behind a magazine they will end up having sex again. That is the only explanation for this exchange. And here, Sheppard was afraid that it would inevitably happen again if he let him in, and with Caldwell around he could not take that chance. And he knows they would both just feel worse as a result. It might make them forget for a few hours, but it would not make the pain and the guilt and the sadness go anywhere. They would still be there, after. He did not want to feel used like that. He wanted it to mean something, like it had before. But he is not unkind as he tells McKay no.

McKay: The Ancients had it wrong. Sheppard: I can't believe this. McKay: Our mistake was using their equations. Sheppard: Are you serious? McKay: Look, I just did the calculations again myself. I did them three times just to be sure and I am positive the problem is in the automatic containment protocols. Sheppard: OK, what's your fix?

McKay closes his eyes briefly as Sheppard tells him no, clearly both pained and frustrated by this. And it is not the fact that he is having to explain his theory out in the hallway that is his problem, it is that Sheppard does not seem to trust him. While he told himself that he had not come here for comfort, he had only come here to get Sheppard to support his proposal to continue the work, his need to be comforted could be seen from space. He tells himself that he had not come for that but he certainly could have used it. He wanted to lose himself, to forget if even for a moment. He had not come here for that and Sheppard did not seem to trust him because they both knew where it would, inevitably, lead.

McKay: I am proposing that we adjust the field strength manually. Sheppard: You saw how fast it spiked on you.

And this is Sheppard's problem. This has been Sheppard's problem all along. How quickly it spiked on you. What might happen to McKay and how quickly it might take place. How dangerous this is to McKay. How McKay is being reckless with his own safety, and how helpless and out of control Sheppard feels about this situation.

McKay: So we don't operate the generator at anywhere near its potential. Look, there's no need to be greedy. Even operating at fifty percent, it'll still generate the power of a dozen ZPMs. Sheppard: How come the Ancients didn't figure this out? McKay: Maybe they were caught up in the heat of battle. Maybe they thought they needed as much power as they could get. Maybe they weren't smart enough. Sheppard: And you are?

It might be easy to take Sheppard's question here as evidence of McKay's hubris. Sheppard does confess multiple times over the years that he thinks that McKay is arrogant (it's not a deal-breaker for him) but that unlike the Ancients, McKay sometimes had good reason to be arrogant and that unlike the Ancients, he always tried to fix his mistakes. But Sheppard interpreting McKay as arrogant is largely projection on his part and it is especially this, his feeling of inferiority when it comes to intelligence, of not being the smartest man in the room that McKay is in, that causes him to feel this way. But like McKay tells him here, he does not think that he is smarter than the Ancients. He can freely admit that. What McKay refuses to admit is that he is desperate, just like the Ancients had been desperate, and in this he may well be repeating their mistakes. Admitting to himself that he is not as smart as the Ancients is easy, admitting that he is driven by guilt and desperation is more difficult. That is a mirror he has not dared look into yet.

McKay: No, I didn't say that, but I have the benefit of hindsight. They didn't. Sheppard: McKay, how do I say this... McKay: Look, this is big. Sheppard: Big? What's big? I like big. McKay: This is the wheel, the light bulb, the hot dog big. Sheppard: Did you just say "hot dog"?

You can see that this is where Sheppard changes his mind. It is not the mention of the hot dog, although he does do a double-take on that since it is both an unexpected thing to say and very McKay at the same time. Trying to appeal to his All-American sentiments. But this is the first time since the accident that McKay sounds like he isn't just doing this as an act of penance, as self-flagellation. Like he actually believes in this. And Sheppard wants so badly to believe in McKay too. He is conflicted in wanting to give McKay anything at all that the man might want and to protect him at all costs. Of doing what is right by McKay and keeping him safe. Sheppard is a worrier, like he told Ronon. And it isn't just out of the goodness of his heart that he is this way. Sheppard is haunted by his own past mistakes and it is because he knows the pain of loss that he is this way, that he treats McKay as he does. He should loosen his grip. He should learn to let go. He should trust McKay.

Sheppard: Best case scenario? McKay: I win a Nobel Prize. Sheppard: Worst case scenario? McKay: We tear a hole in the fabric of the universe... which is much less likely to happen than the Nobel Prize. I mean, look, the risks are nothing compared to the potential benefits. Elizabeth will listen to you. I have never asked this of you before, but I think I've earned it. Trust me.

Now, because McKay mentions the Nobel Prize here as the best case scenario, some people take it to mean that that is his motivation, that he is doing this to stroke his ego and that he really wants the recognition. But that isn't true. In First Contact (S05E10) Daniel Jackson mentions that McKay probably could have won the Nobel Prize many times over, and maybe that is true. But this is a dream that he had knowingly given up when he had taken up a career in contracting for the military. If the Nobel Prize, if recognition and adulation of the masses were important to him, he would have chosen something else. He might have become a Dot-Com millionaire like his counterpart in SG-1 episode The Road Not Taken. Contracting for the military, he gets to be at the cutting-edge of scientific research and is guaranteed funding but the prize that one has to pay for this is giving up an illustrious career, giving up fortune and glory for the chance to make a difference.

And McKay had made this choice long ago. He is not hankering for the Nobel Prize. He merely presented this to Sheppard as the best-case scenario. And note that he did not specify Nobel Prize in Physics, either. He might have been referring to the Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel Prize. McKay really, truly thought that this technology could be used to end all wars. That it would usher mankind into a new Golden Age. That it would safeguard this galaxy from the wraith, and help them undo the mistakes that had led them to their current circumstances. That if there was no need for war there would be no need for militaries and the two of them could just... be. That is his best-case scenario.

Now, McKay is asking Sheppard to talk to Weir on his behalf, believing that he will be able to convince her better than he can. And it is true that Sheppard has much more expertise in maneuvring Weir into going his way. But the way McKay goes about this is interesting. He tells Sheppard that he thinks that he has earned his trust. Because McKay well and truly believes that he has to earn trust, that he has to earn love, that he has to earn acceptance from people. He believes that it is through his deeds that he gains worth, and that he has performed enough feats of brilliance for Sheppard that it has to be worth something, it has to count for something. He has tried so hard to earn Sheppard's respect, his trust, his love. He has been working to this end almost ever since they met. But at the same time, the way he says "I have never asked this of you before" contains the belief that he is entitled to ask. That he is within his rights to ask this of Sheppard. That they share a tacit understanding of the ties that bind them together and that it is the love that they share that obligates them to both give and to take in turn.

But because Sheppard does not think like McKay does, this isn't what he hears. He does agree that McKay has earned his trust. He has earned his trust by being there, at his side, unwavering in his loyalty. McKay has always come through for him, and he does not think about the things he has managed to do so much as the fact that he has always given it his all, has been willing to do the right thing even at the cost of his own life. McKay tells him that the risks are nothing compared to the potential benefits, and he wants to believe this to be true. Not about the experiment, but when it comes to the two of them. McKay has saved his life over and over again. McKay has kept his confidence. McKay has seen him at his most vulnerable and he in turn has been allowed to experience the same with McKay. Of course he has earned Sheppard's trust. He should trust McKay. He has every reason to trust McKay.

McKay is not the problem.

Continued in Pt. 8

[nonstandardrepertoire]

Parashat Vayeitzei: בָּגָד | bagad

If you turned this one-word Torah project into a parashah, you’d get parashat vayeitzei. The portion carries forward the narrative story of the Jewish ancestral families, yes, but it’s also obsessed with individual words and what they mean.

Specifically, it’s obsessed with names. Twelve of Ya’aqov’s thirteen named children are born in this parashah, and each time one of the sons is named, there’s a little explanatory gloss giving a reason that he was named what he was named. (The exception, of course, is Dinah, the only daughter, and the only child named without an explanation. There may be room here to expand on traditional trans readings of Dinah [a] to understand her as self-named, reserving the explanation of her choice to her own private thoughts. Goodness knows she deserves to have control over whatever she can in her own life, given everything she goes thru.)

[a] In Bərakhot 60a of the Babylonian Talmud, Rav explains that Dinah was originally conceived as a son, but then נֶהֶפְכָה לְבַת | nehefkhah ləvat | “was transformed into a daughter” due to Divine intercession.

These naming glosses are sometimes described as etymologies and then critiqued for their sometimes lack of scholarly accuracy, but etymology isn’t really the goal here as much as explanation. It’s like saying, “Oh, I call him Frankie because he’s honest to a fault” — you’re not explaining the philological origin of the name, you’re explaining what the name means to you and why you chose it in this context. And so it is with the names of Ya’aqov’s sons.

But curiously, one of these explanations is emended. We’ve talked about these emendations before — moments where the scribes who fixed the text in its final form looked at the text they had received and sought to fix a typo or the like. There’s one here when Lei���ah explains the name of Zilpah’s first son, Gad. In the emended version, she explains Gad’s name by saying בָּא גָד | ba gad | “Luck has come!” (Bəreishit 30:11). But the uncorrected text drops the silent alef and runs the two words together into one: בגד, which you could take as either a strict contraction bagad or perhaps as a more grammatically fragmentary bəgad | “With luck!” [b].

[b] There is some evidence for the existence of a g-d called Gad in the Ancient Semitic pantheon who had power over chance, fortune, and luck, which creates a slight ambiguity here as to whether the gad in the text is just the generic Hebrew word for “luck” or a proper name of a g-d of Luck, not wholly unlike how “hope” in English can be a generic noun for a feeling or a specific person’s name. Ryan Thomas argues (in “The [G-d] Gad”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 139 (2021): 307–16) that G-d isn’t really an independent deity at all but rather just a common epithet for the local g-d in charge — much as many contemporary Jews might refer to our G-d as “HaMaq-m” or “Sh-khinah” or the like.

This is all linguistically fairly uncomplicated. Two verses later, when Lei’ah names Asheir, she uses the same fragmentary בְּאׇשְׁרִי | bə’oshri | “With my happiness!” construction that the unemended consonants of verse 11 imply, so we might prefer “With luck!” to “Luck has come!” as a reading, but the emended version doesn’t pose any particular problems, and there’s lots of variety in the grammatical structure of the various naming explanations, so one structural parallel is hardly decisive.

Instead of teasing out a problem, I’m interested very specifically in the difference between these two versions in the Hebrew text. In this whole word-obsessed parashah, this is the only instance of this sort of emendation; it’s like a tiny sign saying “Hey, something happened here.”.

The difference is slight. Alef, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, has a numerical value of 1 — the smallest possible value in a system that deals only with integers — and is all but silent in pronunciation [c]. It is a sliver of a difference, the least amount of difference you can get, almost, before two things are just the same.

[c] Technically, it represents a glottal stop, the little hiccup that separates the two vowels in “Latin” when US English speakers say it in normal speech. This is already not a very pronounced sound, but people with US English as a first and primary language tend to drop a lot of these stops when they pronounce liturgical Hebrew; we like to run our vowels together. So alef is very frequently not just subtle but nonexistent, audibly, however up in arms prescriptivists might get over it.

Without the alef, בגד sums to nine in gematria; with it, בא גד sums to ten. Nine is the value of אָח | aḥ | “brother”. Ten is the value of בָּדָד | badad | “separation”. What can we learn from this?

First: Gad shares his brothers’ fate, and also doesn’t. According to the Biblical text, his eponymous tribe is one of the ten conquered by Assyria in 722 BC, whereupon those ten tribes are cut off from the rest of the Jewish people and separated from the rest of our history. So he is a brother to those other lost brothers, isolated from the chain of Jewish continuity by the ravages of empire. Perhaps Lei’ah’s gematrial “Brother!” was a plea that this fate be reversed, that the tribe of Gad persist down thru the ages as a brother to the tribes that escaped Assyrian oblivion, and perhaps the Masoretes’ “Separation!” reflects the sad reality of history as it ultimately played out.

But second: As I said, the difference here is very small. As small as it can be — no word can have a gematria between nine and ten; there is no such integer. And so too perhaps this teaches us that the difference between kinship and atomization is similarly small. Not just as a matter of perspective — Gad being both akin to some of his brothers and separated from others — but as a matter of instruction. Perhaps this, vayeitzei’s sole emendation, comes to teach us that there is not so great a distance between joining together with one another in bonds of trust and community and falling apart from one another in helpless individualized isolation.

And what’s more: This separation is distinguished from kinship not by subtraction, but by addition. It is not that we start out isolated and then add something to bring us together; we start out together and then something comes to drive us apart. And it is a very small something! A miniscule, inaudible something! Something as subtle as a slight hitch in the breath between one vowel and another.

From this we can learn: The roots of separation lie not in grand gestures of opposition, but in the thousand little moments of daily life, moments so small we may not even perceive them. A slight tensing of the shoulders, a subtle raising of the guard. A hitch in your breath when you start to call a man your brother.

[horrorscoupes]

speaking of hush

i know the “hush is a shade” theories are already RIFE on here, but i wanted to suggest my own idea for some variety :] (timestamped as always)

as an avid lover of the sovereigns and all of their shenanigans, there have been a few things gnawing at my thoughts for quite some time:

1. if the sovereigns under the river used the inversion as a feeding frenzy to glean more power than they typically would get from the natural progression of death via the river (“Was this your plan all along? Not to invade—but to feast? How much stronger will this harvest leave you? How long before something greater than Shades breaks loose?” [All Along 30:36]), then why, almost two years later, havent we seen ANYTHING else about that?

2. When Min’ara and E’Laetum are discussing the things that “lie bound in Death” they say this particularly interesting thing: “Their Prima seeks freedom from their prison.” “Give him a new prison instead.” [Held by Ancient Gods 5:29] which, of course, has always been assumed to be referring to one particular sovereign separate from the bunch

obviously this could be way off the mark, and i’m totally game to accept it if i’m wrong here, but i wonder (since they very easily created daemons and then, once rebelled against, experimented on humanity until they created vampires and empowered humans) if during their time in jail under the river, the sovereigns began to create something else. brachium refers to something “greater than” the shades that ravaged the E&E games during the inversion, which leads me to believe he was either talking about the sovereign themselves escaping OR that he referred to something else created by the trapped sovereigns to use kind of like they use shades to carry messages out of death (“Crafted, by what lies beneath the River, made out of the magic they siphon out of the waters. When they first climb back into the realm of the living, they’re weak. Running on pure instinct, draining anyone close to sustain themselves. To build up their strength. If they get enough, they become tangible, like this one. And if they get even more—a lot more, really gorge themselves… they start to actually remember their purpose. To be a messenger. An envoy. A voice, for what lies beneath.” [Blakes Truth 13:30]).

it’s been two years since the wolf/vamp storylines have seen the inversion and still we haven’t heard anything about the re-emergence of the sovereigns, because i really don’t think that the power absorption was solely to start breaking out. obv we don’t know where hush falls on the timeline just yet, but i think the fact that we also don’t know where certain people (project meridian cast, vega, regulus, blake to an extent, etc) were the night of the inversion is ALSO very important and interesting. <- i can talk about how weird and intriguing it is that we haven’t seen anything past inversion for vega and regulus for hours </3

so, if they’re using all the energy for creation rather than destruction it would have been incredibly smart to leave hush core-less. he isn’t a daemon, and without a core he has no threads linking him to aria. this means that not only can his powers be tethered to the metric fuck-ton of power that the sovereigns just absorbed by killing 1500 empowered people, in order to “rift” (idk what to call it. or if he did at all. anyways) he wouldn’t have to pass through the meridian at all.

so if he IS a new creation of the sovereigns forged from their power and energy, then it would make sense that E’Laetum and Min’Ara may want a bite out of him. they are starving and rotting away alone between terra and aria, and he is looking like a snack. which brings me to my second point: do E’laetum and Min’Ara want someone to bring them hush (in this theory a piece of the sovereigns waning power) to tide them over and perhaps lure a sovereign out of death? that’s a little bit of a stretch (and so is my theory linking hush and project meridian), but think that it’s something we could all stand to consider.

ALSO sidenote: i think that hush surfaces after the inversion while D.U.M.P. is still spinning over all of the deaths and distrusting the Chorus, hence why the deaths of several “articulates” (erik tell me what this means NEOW) seem to be going completely ignored/unnoticed. during the aftermath of inversion, D.U.M.P. and the Chorus are not friends, and it would make sense for them to overlook d(a)emon deaths while they’re still trying to decide if the Chorus knew that the inversion was coming

sidenote #2: the spellsong, which i’ve seen people questioning, has been defined as the binding between magic users and magic/daemons and aria/magic users to one another/magic to the world. to Me it seems like a somewhat broad term used to fill spaces, since no one in universe really knows where magic came from in its entirety. daemons use the term most often in canon, describing it as something they can “hear,” hence why i defined it as the binding between magic and the world. (“I can hear them. Every voice in the spellsong going silent. Every emotion being felt inside this… trap.” [Voices Gone Silent 5:08], “Your kind is a part of the Spellsong. Our harmony. And even if time has made some of my people callous, we still feel the loss of any voice, be it demonic or human.” [Comforted by Your Demon 14:15], “Most of the Chorus was… genuinely horrified to hear what had happened. They’d felt those losses. Heard those voices in the Spellsong as they went silent. Our people don’t always get along, yours and mine. In fact, I’d go so far as to say they usually don’t. But there’s a bond there that neither of our people can deny. And in those that I could read, they felt that pain.” [Consoling an Elemental and an Incubus 27:27], and “When you bit into him and he bit into you, your blood met each other’s cores. Each of your spellsongs met a counterpoint.” [You Bond With a Vampire 19:45]) <- these are the ones i found on short notice, i would be beyond thrilled to add more quotes to the collection

this is by no means me trying to shit on other theories, i think it’s so wonderful that we’re all here guessing. stay curious

[litsnobconfessions]

A Year of Animation Day 24: The Wind Rises

Date: January 24, 2025

Day: 24

Content Watched: The Wind Rises

Year: 2013

Rating: PG-13

Run Time: 2 hr. 6 mins.

I wanted to follow Avatar: The Last Airbender with a Miyizaki film because one of the videos I watched while researching Avatar said that the showrunners were inspired by Miyikazi (as are we all.) But Miyizaki is also a big name in animation—I think I've heard him referred as the "Disney of Japan"—and I think that you really cannot effectively talk about modern animation without talking about Miyizaki.

I believe Miyizaki started working as animator in the 60s, and about 20 years later, he co-founded Studio Ghibli, which also worked on The Red Turtle, which we watched last week. Both the studio in general and Miyikazi in particular are famous for creating animated masterpieces. I honestly think that Miyizaki's films really show us the power of animated media in a way that Disney can't because not only are they beautifully animated, but they are filled with realistic characters and complex storylines and unlike Disney, they are not made exclusively for children. Therefore, I think that someone who says they don't like animation or non-Disney animation or modern animation needs to watch a couple of these movies before they make that determination.

I was first introduced to Miyizaki by my parents' Japanese friends. I was really little, so I didn't know who this director was, I just knew, years later, when I re-watched his movies that they were already familiar and they felt like old friends. Miyizaki's films also tend to fall in the category of magical realism, rather than the more standard fantasy worlds that Disney creates. Magical realism and coming of age are probably my two favorite genres, and I think Miyizaki may have had a hand in that.

I watched this movie with my husband, and in case you're wondering, we did choose to watch it in English, to better focus on the film and not have to focus on subtitles. I thought the DVD was interesting, though because it asks what language you want to watch in before it plays the previews, and I'm curious what the Japanese previews would have been. Also, for that matter, the French ones because it also had French as an option.

One of the things I'm excited about with this project is getting to see studios' fingerprints. Like, even if you don't know what movie it is, most people can recognize a Disney movie when they see one because there is an animation style that is immediately evocative of Disney. Likewise, when we watched How to Train Your Dragon, we saw characters who looked like they were right out of Shrek. Dreamworks has a style. Studio Ghibli has a style. (This is what made The Red Turtle so interesting--it wasn't drawn in the style we typically associate with Studio Ghibli.) But I'm going to go one step further and argue that Miyizaki himself has a style--both artistic and thematic--which is what has made him such an iconic director.

Sure enough, Miyikazi's fingerprint is immediately evident in this film. It's filled with beautiful landscapes and baby Jiro resembles Kanta from My Neighbor Totoro. The animation is, without a doubt, filled with details. In the scramble to escape from the broken down train at the beginning, we see a pair of broken glasses and an abandoned shoe lying in the dirt. The difference between the German cities and the Japanese cities is clear in the way they're drawn. And even Kastrup looks way different from the Japanese characters--he actually looks like he could be a character in The Triplets of Belleville--and I think that's there to show that he stands out as a German in Japan. 

Also, in several scenes we see men playing baseball like... off to the side of the airplane hanger? Like... it seems like a weird place to play baseball? But it makes sense in that these are men who are probably here for long stretches of time, and this is the best way for them to take a break from their work. I think it also adds a lot of the world we're in. I mean, I know this is more or less the real world, since this is a biopic, but I don't know anything about Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, and I feel like this little detail tells me a lot.

Also, the baseball scene just makes the space feel lived in. Like in Persepolis, we see a lot of locations like this in The Wind Rises. The train car is so busy that Jiro gives up his seat to another passenger. And the masses of people who are fleeing the train, and then the fire are all animated. Unlike Persepolis, they are not in sillouette, and unlike Avatar: The Last Airbender, none of them are static. Every. Single. Person. moves as the aftershocks of the earthquake roll under them. And this is not at all to criticize the animators of ATLA or Persepolis. I've already talked about why I think that animation works. But if we're talking about motion in the frame, this is like watching Nimona. Everything is moving. And this is from 2013, so it certainly flies in the face of hypothesis 7. At this point, it's practically superflous to talk about Jiro's workplace or the cafe or the hotel also feeling like busy, lived in places, but they do.

Some of the other movement we see includes the trains passing, as well as the scenery passing from the point of view of the people on the trains. There's the meeting with all the military men talking over one another, and quite frankly, both this and the earthquake scene at the beginning provide a feeling of chaos that reminds me of M*A*S*H. And considering they're both kind of about war, that sort of makes sense. I also really love the scenes where just see people's shadows moving. This is often connected to the secret police, and I would love a film that focuses on that type of event happening in a country and really utilizes that animation. Then there's the grass moving in the wind, which is another standard Miyizaki thing, as well as the gust of wind when the plane they're testing flies overhead, which brings me to one other thing. 

The movie is called The Wind Rises, which is a line we get several times in Jiro's dreams of Capproni. But the wind also blows his hat away the day he meets Nahoko and Kinu. And it blows Nahoko's parasol on the day he re-meets her. There's this beautiful visual of the wind throughout the movie, which makes the wind itself feel like another character. This comes up in some of the shots in the film, like at the beginning, when Jiro is imagining flying a plane, and we're in the cockpit, watching the terrian fly by. Or when the model airplane is flying directly toward the camera. It puts the whole film in constant motion.

There are some other interesting shots as well. At the beginning of the film, we see thorugh Jiro's glasses and the mosquito netting around his bed. We have shots on the wings of planes, which show us just how big they are. At one point while evacuating the train, the camera focuses on everyone's feet. In another scene, we see Jiro and another character at a table, shot from above, almost from the perspective of the overhead light. I don't know if all of Miyizaki's films do this, since I've never given them that much attention, but I did think it was very interesting, visually.

My favorite scenes are probably the dream sequences. I read ahead of time that this film doesn't have the same magical quality that Miyizaki's films usually do, which makes sense since it's a biopic, but I also disagree with this assessment. No, the dream sequences aren't the same kind of magical realism as soot sprites or forest spirits, but they are both ethereal and vivid, creating a sense of magic in a world that (theoretically) has none. I find this especially true in the scenes in which Jiro "dreams" while working. This indicated to me that these dreams--whether actual dreams or daytime imaginings were part of his work--that this is how he develops his ideas. This also really makes me wonder if Miyizaki saw himself in Horikoshi, and if any of the elements he depicts in this story, are, in some way autobiographical.

Like The Red Turtle, this movie doesn't really follow a 3-act structure, like we're used to in the United States, so I do think some people might not like it as much as Miyizaki's other films. Personally, I felt like there were plot points that got dropped along the way, and the storytelling just didn't feel as tight as I'm used to from Miyizaki. For example, Jiro's sister only shows up in three or four scenes, and she always seems to yell at him, but then follows up with her affection for him. And while this isn't necessarily out of character for a sibling relationship, she appeared so infrequently, that I felt like I never got a feel for her character, and kind of wondered if she needed to be there at all. I'm guessing she's there to show how Jiro struggles to balance his work with his personal life because almost everytime she sees him she starts with "let me guess, you forgot I was coming."

I also felt like there were some interesting anti-war threads that started weaving through the story, but didn't exactly go anywhere. For example, Katstrup tells Jiro in a very hush hush sort of way that ther German engineer doesn't want to work with Hitler. And a while later, there's kind of a side comment about the secret police coming after him? But we don't really hear any more about either of these things, or for that matter, about the secret police also looking for Jiro in one scene. My husband said he had similar feelings about Oppenheimer, so this may be a side-effect of biopics.

I do think this was a good follow-up to ATLA because of its war themes, and particularly its anti-war themes (I haven't seen this one bfore, and I didn't actually know was it was about before watching it.) In Jiro's first conversation with Caproni, Caproni tells him that planes are beautiful dreams that are not meant to be used for war or money. My husband observed that it feels like Jiro is interested in passenger planes, but keeps getting dragged into making bombers, and the film indicates that the Germans feel the same way. So over and over, the engineers emphasize the importance of planes to help people, rather than hurt them, as their governments desire. I noticed the soundtrack also reflects this, switching from romantic strings to military brass.

All of this leads to the final scene, which is perhaps the most striking in the film. Jiro dreams once again about Caproni, meeting him this time in what is essentially an airplane graveyard, as the romantic strings play incongrously over it. Miyizaki is known for pacifism and his anti-war stance, and despite making a film about a man who designed bombers, still made clear the destruction and devasation that war causes. Airplanes are beautiful dreams, Caproni tells us at the beginning, and at the end, we see dream after dream after dream cut short. I can't help but think that Avatar Aang would have liked it.

Tomorrow, we'll see a different kind of turbulance as we watch a very different animated biopic.

[pain-in-the-butler]

I hope this question doesn't bother you, but I wanted to ask you a bit about that weston arc rewrite you mentioned once in your tags? Like, any kind of info is welcome.

Hi again, friend! It's not a bother to be asked things like this in the least! And I'm definitely excited to ramble about my writing, so thank you! Here's some bare bones of what I've thought up for this AU so far:

Cricket's O-U-T. Yana did fine with the sports angle, especially in retrospect (at the time, everyone was sick of it), but I want to focus on character drama because I think it's juicier -

Instead, I'm changing the angle of the Weston arc to consistently be about the school's social dynamics, with the emphasis on becoming a prefect's fag like it was in the canon arc's first half -

Being a prefect's fag in this AU means automatically becoming a prefect when the prefect graduates (can't remember if this is what it means in the canon story). Therefore, these positions are sought out by students who care about the hierarchy to any degree -

Maurice Cole is going to have a slightly different role this time around. He's not Redmond's fag yet but he wants to be more than anything. As a second-born son, he sees it as the one chance he'll get in life to feel what it is to have an inheritance, and so he and that enormous chip in his shoulder covet the position like anything -

I want Cole's villainy to be much campier. Instead of threatening actual violence and humiliation, he merely threatens to kick boys out of his posse. However, he has pretty big plans for the school — plans that would make particular students want to stay in his good graces... -

Students in different dorms will get along and become friends. The standoffishness between dorms was really just there in the canon to make it easier for Yana to hide certain details until later down the line, but it doesn't actually make much sense. There won't be so much rivalry this time -

While I'm going to try not to venture fully into Dadbastian territory, I do want Ciel and Sebastian to examine their relationship more closely following the Campania incident and consider what they would feel if the other was out of their lives forever. Is Ciel just a meal and is Sebastian just a loyal dog? Or do they actually maybe care about each other's well-being? I wonder.................. -

Sebastian wouldn't be a professor this time! Sorry, but I just never bought him becoming a dorm master so easily. Where'd the old one go? Do the Blue House students not see Seb's arrival as weird at all? Don't they have any loyalty to their last dorm master lol?? The idea's frankly too underdeveloped -

Instead, Sebastian is going to work in the Blue House kitchens as a chef. He isn't very excited about being so out of the way from the action, but Ciel has his reasons for wanting him there... -

The student body will talk about Derrick Arden going missing as if it is an actual big deal. But there will be more details that muddy the waters around Derrick's disappearance... as well as revelations that come to light sooner than they do in Yana's telling -

Now for the biggest change: it will be addressed to the reader from the get-go that Ciel is pretending to be his brother. I have always wanted to explore what it would be like if we knew from near the start that Ciel was faking his entire identity. The Weston arc may not take place close to the beginning of Kuro, but I think it's as good a chance as any for me to showcase how revealing Ciel's identity early on pointblank has a lot of potential for drama and character building

There's a lot that I haven't really decided yet, to be honest, but there are also a few twists and tricks that I would LOVE to mess around with. I kind of let my stories slowly incubate over time, though, so I hope when I actually get to writing this, everything will be in place and I can just go for it. It should be a very fun project, if and when the time comes...

Thank you for asking! I hope this answer piqued your interest... though it'll probably be another two years before any of it gets written lol 😈

[graceisprettygreat]

Any thoughts on the relevance of the vlr characters post ztd true end as in like how do phi and sigma talk about the ones no longer with them how do they think about them does sigma try to make any of them again do they look at Junpei and think about Quark I honestly don't know how to word this I just hope you get what I mean qwq also yeah this is coming from me struggling with my wip akshsk

i do get what you mean! and i wont claim to be the foremost expert on them, my starter thoughts (i may ramble refined thoughts to you later), are these - phi i think, wants to be in control of her life again. i feel that becomes her primary motivating factor, at least shortly following the decision game. or. finding the terrorist rather, if you go with that being true. dio, good fucking riddance from her existence. i think in true end would not have any particular warmth for luna - sad as that is- being a GAULEM and a facillitator of the ab project, even if she didnt want to be. and while she was shown to care deeply for quark throughout the game - and i think she would think about quark when thinking abt junpei, and feel a pang of guilt that quark never got to experience a 'normal' life, despite the fact that they created a world where rad6 didnt get out - ultimately she would for at least a while want to distance herself from everything morpohogenetic, to feel that sense of control. i dont think that would last long however. once youre in, youre in after all. these are the only people who can understand her. those who lives were wrested away from them by this *bullshit*. but im getting off-topic. i think in her otherwise good relationship with junpei, relating to each other a lot, there is some distance created by knowing him as tenmyouji first and foremost. as for kyle, its interesting. because she never met him in the 'true' path of vlr. but she DID get all her memories. i think she would feel a pretty strong sense of. sorrow perhaps? for him. that his life was entirely FOR a nonary game. that he had no choice from the moment he was created. its fucked. she defintely thinks about him sometimes, her connection to him. and pours one out for him. luna thoughts are probably what i have to cook the most on here next ill look at dr. klim. who, oo ill have messy messy messy feelings on. i think his primary focus is two-fold. securing that this is indeed the future he strived to create. he would make sure everything is as it seems. this would include confirming his. eugh. son's assertions of the terrorist. secondarily, is spending time with diana, time that is so sorely limited. time where he looks at her and how much he sees diana and how much he sees luna, even he is not sure. i think he couldnt feel much remorse for those he involved, or would have involved, in the ambidex project. he has to hold ardent the belief that all he did is necessary. i think he mourns kyle deeply, but would make no attempt to recreate him. i think it is something that would be too painful. the person he neglected, and created as a tool, there is no way to recreate him. luna, i think he would wish to see this world, something shes always wanted, but would feel conflict, considering diana is alive and well. i truly dont know what hed do, but i think hed be very torn in half about it and last, and also least, tied for least, sigma when he returns. he is discombobulated as hell. he's back here, now in the timeline where things are solved. arriving after its all 'over' and he just has to take in, that this is his life now. his connection to diana and phi. it feels bizairre. i think unlike what dr klim must make himself not feel, feels tremendous guilt for what he would have done to alice and clover. to junpei. to quark, even though they dont even exist here. to how he treated luna. and kyle. to phi. its really hard for him to navigate every relationship here, i feel. he'd WANT to give everyone from vlr a chance at life, he thinks that would be ideal. but doesnt know if he can learn to make luna. learn to make a CLONE. if those two could even shift in to their bodies here. overall, i think his story when he returns is one of a lot of internal conflict over actions he hasnt done, will now never have to do, but still hurt people. if i got too off topic lmk and i will do my best to rein in focus and actually answer your questions haha. i also. could be so offbase! this is not my expertise! but i love to help regardless

[know-the-way]

Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears Discourse(?)(maybe idk?)

So… at this point I’ve watched the entire 3 series and film. Twice. I was going to post episode reactions for series 2 and 3, but I really need to skip ahead to Crypt of Tears because I have… questions. If anyone knows the answer or potential answer to any of them, please weigh in because I am just… struggling to understand some of the narrative decisions they made here.

(Btw, overall I enjoyed it, so I don’t want it to seem like I’m coming from a solely negative perspective - obviously, the last 5 minutes in particular… talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show stopping, spectacular, never the same, etc etc. I may do a separate ‘things I enjoyed’ post. I just needed to talk this out. lol)

****Full warning, this is a very long post, I am so sorry in advance.****

1. Alright, first things first - wtf do you mean it’s been a YEAR since she left Melbourne?! What was she doing that whole time? Like obviously, you could infer that she got caught up in local shenanigans and hadn’t seen everything to a satisfactory end yet, but I feel it would’ve taken maybe 1-2 minutes to just briefly explain that for the audience’s sake.

I also totally understand that they were attempting to make a stand alone project that could be independent of the series, so referencing where the series left off would be antithetical to that. HOWEVER, I think at the point where fans of the series invested $1 million… that should have maybe made tying up loose ends from the series a bit more of a priority?

I also saw that they hoped to garner new audiences from the film. And maybe it’s just me, idk, but - I’m a new audience and the only thing that brought me to the film was the knowledge that I had 3 seasons worth of backstory to immerse myself in beforehand. There are very few scenarios in my mind that would’ve had me watching just the film and nothing else. So… help.

2. Similar to question 1 - SIX WEEKS?! Where was she for six whole weeks? How did she escape the train? Was it like a Bear Grylls situation out in the desert for a while or did she have to barter with local villages or something? Just again… 1-2 lines of dialogue and I’d be good. Instead, I’m just sitting here confused like, “okay cool, I’m super glad you’re alive and stuff, but um… HOW?!”**

(**acutely aware that this is how Jack must feel all the time) (and he deserves a pint from the pub for his troubles ‘cause omg)

3. SPEAKING OF JACK - *r2d2 screech* This poor man. Jesus. How many times does he have to grieve the love of his life? It’s kinda rude at this point.

I’ve read articles with the writers where they talked about wanting Phryne to be strong and independent without emasculating Jack as a character. And I remember thinking, “Yes! They do such an excellent job of finding that balance in the show and it’s really satisfying. It’s one of the things I love most about their dynamic - the freedom to be themselves while still having this very strong collaborative connection.”

^These scenes, though? Whaaaatttt happened? 🫠 I don’t think it emasculated him, but Phryne’s almost non-reaction to him being there… grieving her... it comes off kind of insensitive and perplexing at its bare bones, to me.

Upon a few rewatches of that scene, I’ve been able to slowly formulate potential justifications for her behavior - i.e. she did tell him to come after her and he didn’t, so maybe she lost hope on her end and dove into the first perilous mystery she could find to help herself get over him. Thus, when she finds out he’s there for her memorial service, I could see her inwardly going, “Okay wow, it took me dying for you to make any moves whatsoever. Cool. Good to know I’m only worth the trip if I’m not here anymore. (Hence, the ‘And I’m very sorry that I’m not dead!’ line later.)”

Which would be a fair point, imo, and they do have a track record of just… infuriating miscommunication, but ultimately… it’s all still hypothetical. We aren’t given any actual, spoken insight into her motivations or feelings in regards to Jack (the smallest glimpse we get is her teary eyes outside the door at his guesthouse along with the “damn it, Jack” line). So, without any further follow-up clarification in the film - at face value, that scene is harsh and almost callous imo. And, despite their many conflicts in the show, there was never once where I felt they weren’t at least making an effort to understand each other. Like there is never a point in the film where they take a moment to acknowledge the time lost between them. They don’t get to have that (necessary) release of emotion and mutual understanding (there’s no nightcap moment), so it just feels incomplete.

4. I promise not to make all of these redundant, but the quicksand scene. Obviously, I love it ~*for reasons*~, but I found myself once again choosing a side (Jack’s)???? Which, throughout the entirety of the tv series, I never chose a side between them ‘cause I could always understand both of their perspectives. In this scene and the reunion scene, I’m left confused both times about Phryne’s perspective. Maybe because Mac isn’t there to pull the full truth out of her just afterwards? That’s probably it.

But her lumping Jack in with “any other man” she doesn’t need to explain herself to - either that was a fear response or a flat out dishonest one. Girl quit playin’… we all know he’s not just any other man and we all know he has never tried to change you or take charge of you. Please, the bottom-leaning switch vibes that come off that man… he LIVES for you telling him what to do. He doesn’t want to control you, he just wANTS TO BE BESIDE YOU. GOD.

I so didn’t want to be frustrated with Phryne (I love her**) and I was honestly upset that I was, but there was just something… missing in both these instances for me (vulnerability maybe? idk) and I can’t quite get it to add up. It really probably was a lack of Mac, though.

(**again, Me 🤝 Jack, complicated feelings for a complex modern woman, we’ll both be at the bar if you need us)

5. Last one - “Is this your idea of sweet nothings?” “I thought they were out of the question?” “They are. Continue.”

Did I miss a scene where they laid ground rules for their partnership going forward in Shirin’s case? Or was that something that was cut/not included? Because… if there was a scene of them discussing that before Jack agreed to stay… that would have taken care of most of what I said above in and of itself.

(But no fr… did I miss a scene? Is my copy broken? Help?)

Gonna Leave on a Positive Note, because if you asked me if the below scene made it all worth it, I’d have to say yes:

[dk-wren]

Week 4ish - 30 Days of Buddy Daddies

Welcome to the final round of my responses to the 30 Day's of Buddy Daddies tag! Thank you for all your support on these posts and @yuraamar for creating all these fun prompts. Let's do this one more time!

Day 22: Favorite Drawing from Miri's Diary

I love how this diary entry either suggests Miri woke up later in the night and got to properly celebrate Papa Rei's birthday or this is what she had planned (before she got too tired to wait for Rei).

While it might be more an expression of surprise, I also kinda love how Miri drew Rei with a big smile.

Day 23: Which Actor/Actress Would You Have Liked to Voice the Characters

In all honesty, I don't know.

Yes, I really enjoyed all the voice actors' performances and couldn't imagine anyone else voicing these characters. But also, Buddy Daddies was I think my 5th or 6th anime, so I have yet to really identify and/or follow any particular VAs to say I would have liked them to voice this character.

Just for a further Yuri on Ice reunion, maybe Junichi Suwabe as Kyuutaro(?), but again idk.

Day 24: Crossover

Not so much a crossover, but rather, something I hope exists in the Buddy Daddies universe is Animal Crossing. (There's Mario Kart/Morio Kart in the Buddy Daddies world, so I think it's possible) This just feels like a game the whole family would love and could somewhat play together.

I can totally see Miri loving to talk with the villagers, decorating her house, and catching bugs/fishes. Rei enjoys doing these things too, but I can also see him grind for hours just to make sure Miri has all the bells/supplies she needs when she plays to buy whatever she wants (perhaps this is how Rei spoils Miri?) or make any furniture she wants. I could even see Kazuki casually playing Animal Crossing. He may not be a gamer, but I think even he could learn the basics and not be too overwhelmed.

Just something about Miri, Rei, and Kazuki playing Animal Crossing together seems like a really cute idea.

Day 25: Things You Would Like to See in Future Projects

Something I would like to see in future projects is Kazuki, Rei, and Miri actually finding the place that became the Dining Nest. Did Kyu or someone else find the place for them, did they hunt for this place on their own, and when/why exactly did they choose to open a diner rather than like a shop or some other business? I'd also love to know if the first time they entered the space, if there was an immediate feeling of "this is our home" or did it take some time for them to adjust to the place and make it feel like truly their own space.

As many people have said before, I fully want a beach day story too. The art Lily recently posted of Rei and Miri finally bringing home a cat also makes me want to see this storyline further fleshed out. Gosh, there's probably a bunch of other things I would like to see, but honestly, I just want to see more peaks into Kazuki, Rei, and Miri's daily life as Miri grows up and as Kazuki and Rei fully(?) leave the organization behind them

Day 26: Playlist

I would like to start by apologizing for my music taste because it unfortunately (for you probably) means that this playlist is basically show tunes. Either way, hope you enjoy the songs and my very brief explanations.

Kazurei Vibes:

Rei Vibes: (Trust me on this one, pls)

Final confrontation vibe (Rei singing, but replace "man" with like "dad"):

Day 27: What Made You Watch the Anime

The first anime I really got into was Spy x Family. Because there were a lot of initial comparisons between the two series, that grabbed my attention. I thought to myself, well I quickly fell in love with Spy x Family, so why not give Buddy Daddies a try since it seems similar.

The two animes I had previously gotten into and watched in the fall (SxF and Chainsaw Man) finished their seasons right before Buddy Daddies began airing. This was another reason I watched since I no longer had a weekly anime/show to watch and to help me keep my sanity because of school.

Funnily enough, I really do think it was because Buddy Daddies kept coming up in the SxF tag here that I watched this anime. Like I legitimately do not remember watching the trailer for Buddy Daddies until way after I got into the series.

Day 28: What Would You Change About the Story

Maybe not change, but I really wished more of Kazuki's past with Yuzuko could have been explored or touched on.

For reasons made clear throughout the series, her death, as well as the death of their unborn child, clearly left an impact on Kazuki for a long time. The circumstances alone are tragic, but to have even a little more information about Yuzuko I feel could have made her death even more emotional and tough for the audience. We really only know Yuzuko as Kazuki's ex-wife, so I kinda have to agree with those who have discussed her death really just being a plot device.

Given Kazuki's sorta self-deprecating humor/behavior and past, he definitely seems like someone who does not view himself as highly as he should. And this behavior is likely not a new development after Yuzuko's death, but a habit he’s had for most of his life. So, to see him be open with Yuzuko would be really sweet because she seems to love him as he is and not what he could be. Also, just to see Kazuki be open/vulnerable for the first time in his life, which we see happen again with Rei and Miri, would add to the parallels and give the audience more information about what make Kazuki feel safe.

Day 29: What Message Would You Leave to the Creators and All the Anime Staff?

Thank you thank you thank you!

This series was such a fun watch. I fully went into this show thinking it was a comedy, but loved the emotional and serious moments. The blending of the two tones was really well done and almost felt complementary. Like it's talked about in the show, light and dark walk together and coexist with each other.

Maybe it's just my nature, but I fully and easily fell in love with Rei, Kazuki, and Miri. The development each character went through, especially Rei, in 12 episodes was really incredible. With Rei and Kazuki, their growth felt earned and natural. I also appreciate how their growth is not linear. They learn and make mistakes and keep trying to figure out what it means to be their individual self and a papa.

And going off of that, the central idea of change and if people can change was just so well done. I feel that "can people change?" is a question many ask and you all did such a great job of illustrating yes, you can change, but again, it's not going to be over-night or easily earned.

If it's not been made clear yet, my love for this show is just so big and it’s really got a firm grip on my mind/thoughts. Like literally, this show was life altering since it caused me to develop another interest that I have just so much love for and am deeply obsessed with.

I hope you all return to this story in the future and add on to it. But if not, I appreciate all the work and love you put into these 12 episodes. Truly incredible stuff.

Thank you again for bringing this series and these characters into my life! - Dakota Wren

Day 30: Incorrect Quotes (Free Day)

I've been collecting a bunch of random "incorrect quotes" for a dnd campaign I'm currently in and had a bunch of fun pairing them with those characters. So, now just gonna bring a few of them over here to further create some Buddy Daddies madness.

Kyu, knocking on the door: Kazuki, open up. Kazuki: It all started when I was a kid. Kyu: That’s not what I- Rei: Let him finish!

Rei: Surgeons just stab people to life Kazuki: Please never become a surgeon...

Kazuki: Bold of me to constantly use the phrase 'no worries!' when I am, in fact, constantly full of many worries.

Kazuki: How did none of you hear what I just said?! Rei: I've been zoned out for the past two and a half hours. Miri: I got distracted halfway through. Kyu: Ignoring you was a conscious decision.

Kazuki: Why is Miri crying? Rei: She saw a leaf on the sidewalk and- Miri: IT LOOKED SO CRUNCHY! Kazuki: Please don’t say what I think you’re going say- Miri: AND WHEN I STEPPED ON IT THERE WAS NO CRUNCH! Kazuki: NO, NOT THAT!

Day 31: Episode I Wish I Could Rewatch Again for the First Time (2nd Free Day)

If I could rewatch any Buddy Daddies episode again for the first time, it would be the finale.

The first time I watched the episode was while I was working (yes, I was that impatient I couldn’t wait until after my shift ended), so I had to split my attention between doing my actual job and watching the episode. I would love to just sit and watch the episode again for the first time with my undivided attention. Not being at work would’ve also meant I could’ve fully lost my cool throughout the episode because there were several moments throughout that I was fully screaming in my head.

Not only that, but to just relive so many of the moments again. Rei and Kazuki driving up to the Suwa Manor like maniacs, bursting through the front door together, the kitchen scene?! And also seeing Miri be so indescribably happy to see her Papas wall into her concert. I’m not sure if I ever talked about it, but during my first watch through, I fully thought the episode was going to end with Miss Anna taking the family’s picture, which is followed by the title card. So my shock to see a grown up Miri was through the roof. I didn’t ever want to see how much of the episode was left because I just wanted to enjoy it. It made me so unbelievably happy that the epilogue kept going to show more glimpses into the lives of Miri, Rei, and Kazuki several years into the future. To watch the epilogue again, with that same feeling of oh my gosh there’s more?! would be amazing.

And that’s a wrap for me on the 30 31 Days of Buddy Daddies tag! I had so much fun and loved that this allowed me to continue to show my love for this anime. Can’t wait to see what’s hopefully next for this family, but like I said above, if we’ve already seen the end of their story, then I’m happy with that being so too.

Thank you again for coming along with me on this tag! It truly means a lot to me!

-Dakota Wren

[original-orbus]

Argo chapter 3

This takes place about 2 weeks after the events of the last chapter, skipping over the Meeting. JSYK. And yes, it is in a new characters perspective, because I love my little blorbos and will keep adding more perspectives until I blot out the sun. Several Characters in this Chapter belong to my ex Husband, however its my weekend so they get to appear in my story.

This takes place at camp Jupiter.

Being a Child of Zeus is honestly not all its cracked up to be, Sure you may be Top dog among demigods, Reigning supreme over most demigods you meet. However this means that you will always be held to a higher standard, elevated above it all and left to exist all by yourself, without anyone to support you.

For Ashara, This was how she lived her life. Always having to be the strong one, the protector, the 'King'. Of course for those she had to protect, she would always go the extra mile, never abandoning those who relied on her. But she always wondered as to who there was for her to rely on? Sure she could always talk to her brothers, but would they really understand her Problems? Would they be able to provide anything other than just someone to vent to? It didn't seem so.

And so Ashara continued to Lock in, Fighting, and Sacrificing, and supporting, all the while feeling the Storm rage more and more inside her. It was only a matter or time until it overwhelmed her.

As the Storm grew louder and louder, Ashara would begin to distance herself to protect those she cared about. After all, she couldn't bear the thought of harming her family during an 'outburst'. She began throwing herself into her training and battles to forget her woes, become more and more acclaimed for her performance in battle. And before she knew it, she was being considered as a future Praetor candidate, having stacked accolade after accolade in the first cohort.

Today of All days, Ashara had been taking a rest day when she received a summons from the Fourth Cohorts Centurion. To her surprise, upon arriving to the meeting, she would discover a familiar face. Her baby brother Sebastian(Son of Athena), having grown into a fine young man. Upon seeing her now matured brother, for the first time in years, she couldn't help rushing forwards to embrace him.

Sebastian, as if expecting this, let out a gasp as his sister slammed into him with force of a big three. He would return her embrace, leaning his head on her shoulder like he used to do, before they separated all those years ago.

"I missed you too.." Sebastian would gently whisper, letting the embrace last until they were both ready to let go.

It would be almost 2 minutes of silence before Ashara would pull herself away, her eyes still moist with her tears of joy. She would once again take in the sight of her brother as if for the first time, taking notice of all the small signs that her brother was doing well for himself. Soon, she would force herself back into her prior state of calm, suppressing the storm threatening to break free.

"I apologize for that little outburst, We can catch up later." Ashara's voice would resonate through the meeting room, filling the space as was her birthright. "I believe you probably didn't summon me just for that."

Sebastian would shift his demeanor in response, switching into business mode. "That would be correct, I don't know if you've heard anyone else talking about it, but a group of people from Half-Blood have recently begun formulating plans to build another safe haven." After finishing this first statement, he would grab a folder from the top of his desk, and opening it to a certain page. "This group of people have proposed purchasing and repurposing an old boarding school on the outskirts of Chicago. They have extended an invitation towards me, hoping to make use of my particular skillset to further develop this project. Argo, they call it."

Ashara would listen intently to the information recited by her brother, connecting them to some rumors she had overheard from others in her cohort. She hadn't really taken the rumors to heart, since it wasn't something that really affected her at the time. Now, it was a different Story.

"Do you plan on accepting their invitation? It could be a gamble whether it all works out in the end." She was trying to think about it logically, sure the concept itself had potential, but gathering a group of demigods to somewhere without sufficient protection from monster might just end up backfiring.

"Well, that's the thing, I was hoping to accept, and bring you and Aaru(Son of Hypnos) along for the ride. I don't think this place is all that good for you, I've seen the effects its had on you, and if you came with me, you could practically guarantee safety for the group, and perhaps even find yourself somewhere to truly call Home?" Despite Sebastian's business tone, there was hint of hope to his voice as he voiced out his thoughts. While he and his sister had been unable to meet for awhile now, he would occasionally hear and see news about his sister, and the role she was expected to uphold, as a daughter of the King of Gods. Perhaps it was a foolish wish, but he hoped it would be enough.

Ashara would contemplate her brothers words seriously for a couple moments, weighing the pros and cons, when she would feel a pair of unknown presences begin to approach the room. Without saying a word, she would swivel on her heels and turn to face the door, preparing herself for to defend her brother if she needed.

After a few moments, the Presences would stop outside the door, and knock gently, a woman's voice speaking up as the knocks came through. "Excuse us, we are looking for Sebastian Bellona, we were told we would be able to find him here? We're here for the Argo Project."

"Oh yes, just one moment." Sebastian would perk up as he heard the feminine voice ask for him, and would give a look of assurance to his sister as he stepped past to open the door.

Two demigods would be visible in the doorway as the door opened, a man and a woman, both seeming to be in their 20's."Oh hello there, you must be Sebastian? Its a pleasure to make your Acquaintance, my names Josephine, and this is my partner Kenneth." The young woman named Josephine would offer a gentle smile towards the child of Athena in front of her, before tilting her head slightly to catch a glimpse of the person waiting deeper in the room. "Oh, apologies, I didn't realize you had a guest."

Ashara would perk up upon being addressed, before speaking up in a tone that once again filled the room. "My name is Ashara, I'm Sebastian's Older sister. Daughter of Zeus, but something tells me, you aren't surprised by that." Ashara would step forwards to get a better look at the two demigods. At a glance, she would try to take in the two's aura, however Kenneth's aura would be too feint for her to catch. "I didn't realize I was going to come face to face with a Poseidon child today. Perhaps this Argo project will go better than I expected."

The Daughter of Poseidon would give a quick glance back to her partner, before offering another smile to the kingly woman in front of her. "Argo is a project me and Kenneth have been working towards, for quite a while now. And while I will take a good chunk of the credit for its eventual success, it would be unfair to discredit my partners contributions. If it wasn't for Kenneth's help, I do not believe this project would have progressed quite as efficiently."

Kenneth would remain silent as Josephine spoke, before making a small gesture with their hand, seemingly releasing a seal on their aura, causing a pulse of darkness throughout the room for but a moment. "Sorry, my power likes to keep itself hidden. I'm Kenneth, Son of Hades." As Kenneth spoke, Ashara could feel a subtle shudder down her spine, as she unconsciously began to reevaluate them, her kingly aura growing in response.

Meeting a child of Poseidon was rare enough at Camp Jupiter, but to meet a child of Hades was no small thing either.

"I see.. Its nice to meet you. I am certainly more confident about joining this project of yours." Ashara's thoughts would be running about a mile a minute as she looked at these two powerhouses in front of her, Perhaps feeling a little bit of hope towards these two? Could it be that maybe they were like her? She would have to learn more to confirm.

"I suppose you and Sebastian probably have quite a bit to discuss, so I think I should leave you to it." Ashara would have loved to be part of the discussions, but she could feel the tempest inside begin to roar as her aura acted up, and decided to step away to calm it down.

"If you don't mind, Ashara, would you mind showing me around?" Kenneth would speak up as Ashara made to leave. They were hoping to take a look at some of the campers at Jupiter, but felt it would be better to go along with someone who had been established at camp, so as to not disturb the status quo.

As Kenneth spoke up, Josephine would give him another glance before looking towards the son of Athena. "It looks like its going to be up to us to iron out these plans, I look forward to working with you." Josephine would speak politely towards Sebastian, before coming closer to the desk and to the folder laid out upon it.

"It would be my pleasure." Ashara would respond politely as the two began walking towards the door, her mind already running through the best places to show off.

And with that agreement made, the two would step out of the room together, to embark on a tour of the premises.

For most of their walk together, Kenneth would mostly stay silent, just observing and listening as Ashara described the various places they visited, only really breaking their silence to ask clarifying questions, as well as inquire about some of the campers they saw. It was only when they began climbing the Temple Hill that Kenneth really broke their silence.

"If you were to join the Argo project, what do you hope to achieve? Me and Josephine have our own goals, but surely someone like you has your own motivation?" Kenneth would come out of the gate swinging with their question, planning to get straight to the point since they were further out of the way and less likely to be interrupted.

Ashara would be caught slightly off guard at the question, though at the same time she felt it was bound to come up. She just hadn't expected him to bring it up so suddenly.

"What I hope to achieve huh?" She would ponder the question for a few moments, letting out a breath as she sorted through her thoughts. "To be honest, What I hope to gain isn't all that unique or special. I spent all of my demigod life here at Jupiter, but most of that time has just been spent fighting, and training, and leading, Perhaps maybe I can create a new home for myself at Argo? Somewhere where I can actually live a life, if that makes sense?"

Ashara's words would seem to spew out once she began, unable to stop herself. Maybe it was because she saw a potential partner(?) in Kenneth, that she said more than she had intended, more than she had really told anyone, even her brothers.

Kenneth would nod along to her answer, tilting his head to the side as he thought over her reason. All things considered, it wasn't that much different that Kenneth and Josephine's reason to start all this. Though her answer did give him a flash of inspiration, as he suddenly pulled out his Iris Phone and typed out a quick message towards Josephine, Simply writing out -Argo Academy- and hitting send.

"I think your answer is pretty respectable, and it actually might have helped us come to a decision as to the direction to further develop Argo. I'll have to talk with Josephine about it once I get back, but it might pan out. We've actually been at a bit of crossroads lately, unable to figure out exactly what kind of place we want to make, weighing the various options." Kenneth would offer her some sorta praise as he slid his phone away to give his attention back to Ashara.

With that, silence would once again overcome the pair as they climbed the hill towards the temples, having passed a couple already. In the silence, Ashara would once again be thinking over what had just been said. All the while she would sneak a couple glances towards Kenneth, still trying to figure out what lay beneath that calm exterior.

Honestly, I didn’t have a very good concept or ending in mind when I started writing this back in December. However i feel like this is a good place to call it. Our third main character, and final part of the trifecta has entered the main stage.

As always, thanks for reading and please comment your thoughts.

[gsohb]

Hip-Hop Royalty: Capital Steez

"Dear diary, what a day it's been." - from Free The Robots

Prior to 2023, if you had asked me who Capital Steez was, I honestly would've drawn a blank.

This isn't a note on the ferocious talent of this young man, but more so an admission of how much of an old ass, I actually am.

But sure enough, in 2023, I became familiar with the music of Steez, and needless to say, I haven't stopped listening, since.

STEEZ was born Courtney Everald Dewar Jr. on July 7th, 1993 in Brooklyn, New York (city). He attended the well known Edward R. Murrow High School.

According to his wiki, STEEZ was a happy kid. Always with a smile on his face, he would don a short afro and skinny jeans.

During the late 2000's, STEEZ co-founded the PRO ERA rap collective with childhood friend and fellow rapper Joey Badass.

Have you ever heard of the Beast Coast Movement? Well, it was (and is) a thing.

Beast Coast Movement

Apparently it was a term that STEEZ used to describe the musical conglomerate that was PRO ERA, Flatbush Zombies, and The Underachievers.

Unfortunately, on December 23rd, 2012, Courtney ended his life.

But, I don't want this entire to piece to be about his passing. I would like to discuss his talent and legacy left on hip hop.

Lol! Apparently, he had a sense of humor, too.

His Music

I always know when a song, particularly a rap song is good, because I'll be listening to it, and say, "This is what I'm talking about!"

It's like when you've been looking for a particular brand of butter for months. Yeah, the others are good and get the job done, but THIS kind of butter makes food fun and nutritious.

That's the feeling I got when I first listened to Apex.

First what I love about this video is how fun it is. I appreciate the jovial, fun energy that's only complimented by half serious, half jokey lyrics.

Maybe I'm biased, because this is one of my favorite types of rap styles.

Also, do you hear that beat?

Another one I really enjoy listening to is Free The Robots.

Okay, first of all. THIS VIDEO.

This video definitely is giving me liminal space vibes. Anyone else? No?

I really appreciate how there's different clips, and videos from different sources. Feels like STEEZ was trying to convey a message with all the clips arranged like so.

Now, with the music: I feel hypnotized. Just listening to this makes me feel dreamy, but also really really dreary. You ever seen Requiem For A Dream? | Yeah, that kind of dreamy/dreary.

Which is coincidental, because throughout the song, STEEZ mentions how destructive drugs have been to him personally and the world at large.

Free The Robots

STEEZ also touches on politics, very heavily here, such as 9/11 and certain ways he'd like past presidents to be dealt with. :)

AmeriKKKan Korruption | King Capital

STEEZ posing with left hand over left eye, while draped in a large American flag.

So, there is an album.

Or rather, a mixtape.

Capital STEEZ had released a solo mixtape titled AmeriKKKan Korruption, on April 7th, 2012.

The mixtape contained a total of 14 tracks, although a number of other rappers, producers and PRO ERA members have graciously contributed to its track count.

After his passing, in 2013 there had been an announcement by friend and fellow rapper Joey Badass that a posthumous album, titled King Capital would be released. While a song did come of it (King Steelo), the album King Capital would never actually be released.

On January 2nd, 2018, Joey Badass stated to fans that due to legalities, the album's release would be delayed to later that year.

As of 2024, the project King Capital is still unreleased.

His Legacy

I'm not sure what things would have looked like for STEEZ had he survived throughout the years.

What I will say, is that a talent and voice like he had is desperately needed now. In fact, maybe STEEZ's energy is still alive and well in some other rapper who just may have the talent, but hasn't been tweeted about by XXL.

Maybe we need to begin searching out talented artists, and boosting them up ourselves.

Also, it goes without mentioning, that it was said that STEEZ had been dealing with some emotional battles. I want to say that if you find yourself dealing with emotional, mental issues, getting help doesn't make you weak.

But taking your life doesn't make you weak either. It just means the help you needed didn't arrive on time.

God bless everyone, and long live STEEZ.

[dr-futbol-blog]

The Storm/The Eye, Pt. 2

They start prepping for the coming storm.

Sheppard continues to have perfect trust in McKay. Again note that he's masking it in flippancy; when ever he talks about McKay to other people (and he seems to do that a lot; when you have a crush on someone you naturally want to mention them by name all the time because you are thinking about them all the time, but you try to be smooth about it like it's no big deal), he's downplaying it, he gives off the impression that he both cares for and regards McKay as less than he actually does. He tells Weir: "You know McKay'll come up with something. He's just setting himself up to be a hero."

I discussed McKay's brand of heroism and Sheppard's view of McKay as a hero previously in connection with Hide and Seek (S01E03). Sheppard does actually view McKay as a Big Damn Hero, and while here, talking with Elizabeth, he's making it sound like he's ribbing on McKay and his big ego, he does actually honestly believe those two things: that McKay will save them, and that he is a hero.

The episode lampshades this later:

McKay is frustrated by the fact that everyone seems to be placing finding the solution to the problem squarely on his shoulders which is a lot of pressure to put on one person, no matter how brilliant they may be. He attempts to communicate this, and makes a reference to Superman.

Sheppard is a comic book geek. I mean, we actually see him reading comics in his room multiple times. He, of course, just has to comment on that. He flippantly questions McKay's comment and his tone of voice, again, indicates that he thinks McKay is about as far from Superman as one can be. This sentiment echoes around the room:

The thing is, not only does Sheppard not think that McKay is not a hero, McKay is very much a hero to him. He's just not Superman.

Later on, in Irresponsible (S03E13), an episode that hearkens back to this particular episode as this is where Kolya is introduced and that is where he is killed, the topic of heroes again comes up. Sheppard -- not McKay -- brings up the fact that McKay's hero is Batman:

Like, he brings this up completely unprompted, just throwing out another fact that he just happens to know about McKay. So clearly they've had a conversation about the superheroes of the DCEU at some point (and we do see them discuss Batman in particular a bunch of times). They have a lot of discussions about their shared geeky interests, so that tracks.

So. Sheppard isn't saying that McKay is not a hero here, he's saying that choosing Superman to describe him makes no sense. If he was a DCEU superhero, he'd be Batman. But Sheppard actually thinks that he's more like Mr. Fantastic of the Fantastic Four from Marvel Comics.

Yes, in First Strike (S03E20) Sheppard describes himself as Mr. Fantastic but that is a classic case of projection. Nothing about him is Mr. Fantastic. He even says that McKay is not really like the Human Torch as Teyla complains that she's not invisible (it's actually Sheppard, the person who discovered the cloaking technology of the jumpers and is able to cloak a whole ass city, that is the Invisible Woman).

Mr. Fantastic is a scientist who holds multiple PhDs and frequently uses his mind to save the day, so even if McKay hadn't literally been wearing a Mr. Fantastic T-shirt (in the SG-1 episode Moebius), he would still resemble the character much better than Sheppard ever could. Also, they are having this discussion, initiated by Sheppard, during the bombardment of Atlantis so clearly "situations of certain doom" are exactly the kinds of times that Sheppard wants to debate comic book characters.

So, he's not saying McKay is not a hero, he's wanting to debate comic books because a Batman vs. Superman discussion would be a whole lot less stressful than what they're actually facing right then. He also very obviously noticed that McKay was upset when he first walked in the room, so the intent was probably to cheer him up and lighten the mood by playful teasing. And everyone else's reactions, including Rodney himself who takes offense at this because he has terrible self-esteem, just shows us how differently Sheppard views McKay from everyone else. This very thing is also lampshaded in the episode:

Granted, Zelenka does seem to be on the receiving end of a lot of the more charming sides of McKay's personality, deep down he does have a lot of respect for his colleague and is just airing out some frustration here. But this is not at all true of McKay, even if he actually agrees here that he can be a pretty horrible person.

He is not always like this. With Sheppard, in the past several episodes, we've seen him both want to and try to be a better man.

And it is not that Sheppard doesn't also see this side of him. Even by this episode, we've seen Sheppard hurt by things McKay has said multiple times, even if he didn't really mean it or do it on purpose. Sheppard just accepts the bad with the good.

Ever since Hide and Seek Sheppard has been observing McKay with such a keen eye that he has a pretty good idea of what he's like. It's just that... by this time, he's in love. With the guy that he fully believes should use his brain, not his brawn, to save the day.

Continued in Pt. 3

[iviarellereads]

Full TLT series to date thoughts on rereading Harrow the Ninth, chapters 50-Epilogue

A probably semi-regular weekly bonus to my reread blog, since sometimes you realize things on reread that just make you need to yell in a full spoiler space.

The whole unraveling of Dios Apate, Major in 50 is beautifully played out.

Frustrating that I have to label that chapter as "Gideon the First" in my character tags, though, because the Pyrrha reveal doesn't come til a bit later.

But, grabbing the sunglasses. She has to hide her eyes, G1deon's long-thought-lost eyes. I think she knows, at this point, that Gideon is in Harrow's body. Especially at the sight of the gold eyes when she takes the sunglasses. I wonder if she felt a moment of surprise before she played her part in the unwinding of the story. I wonder if she wanted to get to know Gideon, her best friend's namesake, the daughter she could never have of her own, the child who could have been from her other-half's seed. I just love her so much even though she started out as a cop (if John's pieces are to be believed) and I love her making this little moment of connection with Gideon. ;~;

All my questions in the footnotes of my chapter 51 post about how can the Lyctors know about John's power draw go double in this full-spoiler space. I'd love to get my hands on whatever notes may exist on this subject… or about the whole series honestly, but let's not get too ambitious all at once.

Seeing John talk about the Resurrection era with the chaos crew gives me big feelings like… I don't think I believe that John's dream-version in Nona is 100% truth, but I feel like Alecto's book is going to contextualize that versus all of this, everything all together. There's too much about John's existence and relationships with his empire for this not to be an important part of the unraveling process. And I can't wait to reread chapter 51 in particular after reading Alecto.

But Mercy suggesting that John erase her memory with brain surgery… oh honey, he's got better tricks than all that. I'm still convinced he's done it so many times. Something about the interaction with August, just before this, maybe it's just me projecting my expectations and theories but it really reads to me like John knows August doesn't remember, can't remember what he would have said or done before the Resurrection. If John's accounting in Nona is true, then why wouldn't he want his friends to remember? He can tamper with their memories, why couldn't he leave them all intact?

(I still think this supports my multiple resurrections until he got the result (closest to what) he wanted.)

So, John tells us in 52 when he reforms himself from the dust that Dominicus stabilizes with him and there's a chance Sixth got hit badly by a solar flare. I'm still curious how his connection with Dominicus works if Alecto is "only" Earth.

Pyrrha swore loyalty to John as if she were G1deon… Will this come back on her in Alecto? I feel like John's exactly the sort to remember every detail when it comes to betrayal.

This feels like a good place to put my theory on what happened after Harrow 52 with regard to bodies. See, Gideon's body was with the BOE, we know this from As Yet Unsent. Nona, in Harrow's body, is with the BOE, but as we learn later in her book, Gideon's body was sent back to John somehow, or at least into the River where he could collect it again.

My theory is that Gideon's soul, in Harrow's body, was drawn to her own body. The River is everywhere and nowhere, travel through it is an accepted part of the universe of the story. So she dragged Pyrrha and Harrow's body up there, and then… something.

See, Cam/Pal and Pyrrha get real concerned about what's going to happen if Nona makes contact with Gideon's body when they find it again. What I think happened is that Gideon-in-Harrow touched Gideon's flesh-body, something happened (maybe an explosion, maybe a light, maybe just a small pop) and Gideon's body disappeared, along with (obviously) Gideon's soul, leaving behind Harrow's body, with the nascent Nona personality fragment of Alecto, and Pyrrha in G1deon's body, on BOE territory.

Gideon's body is harder to trace after this point, but I assume the pressure of contact with her body made her soul, still partially submerged in the River, drag her body in and merge with it again, leaving Harrow's body, already on the way out of the River, to pop out whole, with Pyrrha as well. I think Alecto's appearance might be Nona-Alecto asserting as Gideon's soul transfers back into her own body, and the resuscitation might be John, or Ianthe. I'm not 100% on what "the wrong voice twice over" could mean in this context unless it's John, as he's linked to Alecto.

Without being able to form mental images it's really hard for me to understand what the scene transition is in Harrow 53, if it's staying in a new, consciously constructed River bubble like Pal's or an actual movement from one place to another. I assume the coffin she ends up in here is the same one that the sneaky preview reading from Alecto featured her waking up in. I'm still curious how she was there and in dreams in Nona. Unless this was more "you're already in the River and nobody has established physics in the River therefore you can do whatever is narratively convenient" which I would honestly respect more than a half-assed explanation in the end.

Unless, this really is a big game of swap-the-bodies. If Gideon swaps back into her own body, and Harrow and Alecto end up swapped for the duration of Nona, since Harrow was present and conscious (somehow??) at the end of Nona. Hmm. This bears thinking about as I continue rereading.

[jodilin65]

SUNDAY, JULY 31, 2016 Had what I thought was a real period starting yesterday but all has been clear so far today. Forget “erratic.” This has gotten more like crazy. When they first became erratic there was still a degree of predictability in them, but not anymore.

Changed the rats’ cage and went to Goodwill. Got some incense and a cute squirrel figure to decorate the patio with.

Trying to figure out why the people next to the Twenties have a movie projector screen in front of their place. I’m guessing they’re using it to shade a particular plant.

Going swimming in a couple of hours. Right now the brats have the pool.

Got two more necklaces, one pink gems and silver, the other blue gems and silver. Both are beautiful but overpriced.

Ran into Virginia and gave her our new cell numbers. I asked her if they’d ever had woodpecker problems, and they haven’t. She says she doesn’t go to the pool, but Bob sometimes does. This doesn’t surprise me.

Had some interesting dreams last night. In one, we lived back out in the country. One of us left the door open and a big black bear wandered in. At first we were both holed up in the bedroom terrified. Eventually, Tom decided to go out and try to sweet talk it back outside. I stayed in the bedroom trying to listen through the door, terrified for Tom. After a while, I slowly opened the door to find both the bear and him sitting on the floor with him gently cooing to it.

“Do you want me to call 911 now?” I asked.

He said no, not yet, and that was the end of that dream. He got a kick out of it when I later told him about it.

Then I had this really cool dream about a house in which a river sort of wrapped around part of the living room. I don’t know if we lived there, but what was cool was how the walls raised up like a garage door at the push of a button, turning the living room into a dock and giving the feeling of having a floating living room. The river was greenish in color and in a heavily wooded area.

I also had a dream of running super fast down a curvy path in the woods. I began to wonder if it was worth going to wherever it led to (a friend’s place?) because it was not only getting dark but there were patches of mud that I didn’t want to slip on.

Later…

Oh, that felt sooo good! So good to get it all out after 3 years of sitting back in silence. Well, almost all of it out, anyway. Yes, we have finally voiced our opinion of life in this park in an anonymous survey. Finding brats at the pool yet again during hours they weren’t supposed to be was what prompted us to speak up.

As I learned the hard way from past experience… if you complain, people can’t handle it and they retaliate, no matter how legit and reasonable your complaint may be. Thanks to the freeloaders in Arizona, I often find myself hesitant to speak my mind. You just never know what kind of connections they may have. Then I realized that as a paying customer, I not only have every right to speak up when something bothers me but not doing so would really be letting them win. Like a rape victim is essentially letting her rapist win if she crawls into a shell and never lets herself out of it, I’m only letting the desert shitsters win by keeping my mouth shut. Oh, I don’t expect my two cents’ worth to change anything. It’s just that I can only keep quiet so long before I feel like I’m going to explode. I may be anti-revenge/vengeance (unless anyone ever harmed us), but I believe one should always have the right to say what’s on their mind if they can do it in a civilized manner.

Not wanting to overdo it, we agreed to mention no more than 3 things, so we chose the top 3 annoyances. The motorcycles roaring in and out, sometimes as early as 6am, was number 4, and the live band they sometimes have that penetrates these walls and my peace was number 5 on our list, so we left those out.

Number 1 is definitely the way too frequent landscaping and project sounds, especially the landscaping. It’s a big park. We get that. But restricting this racket to 2-3 days a week instead of near-daily in the summer and daily in the winter would be nice, so we can at least count on enjoying a few days off from it. The park’s gas-powered blowers are insanely loud.

Number 2 is the frequent water shut-offs. When we were told they sometimes have to turn the water off, we thought that meant a few times a year. Not twice a month.

Number 3 is finding screaming brats in the pool as often as we have after 1pm when they’re supposed to be gone. We didn’t sign on for that or else we’d have stayed in an all-ages community. Seriously, I’m sick of all the rules people break around here. We’ve got kids living in at least one house (though I never said anything because it’s not near us) and at least 2 households that we know of that leave dogs out overnight.

We still rate this park a 7 on an overall basis and understand that no place is perfect, but for the fortune we pay to live in an upscale luxury park, rules should be better enforced and the place should be quieter.

OMG, talk about a hilarious typo that auto-corrected quite incorrectly! Until I caught it, the last part of my last sentence read: for the fortune we pay to live in an upscale luxury park, rules should be better enforced and the place should be queer.

LMAO!

SATURDAY, JULY 30, 2016 Now doubting that account is Aly. Another account with the same name was created, and this one has an actual bio that’s definitely not Aly. Still think she and Kim will be back sooner or later, though. What amazes me is the lack of contact from Molly. If she still reads me, she’s doing a great job of hiding herself.

Even though it was a pointless waste of time and I should totally move on and forget those that don’t give a shit about me (I guess even I have a touch of Molly in me) I did reach out to Aly on Skype. I told her I miss her at times and that if she can be honest, I promise to keep my opinions to myself.

I tweeted that I went to Walmart and got those Fruit of the Loom boy shorts I like so much. How long do you think it’ll take Fruit to notice and tweet a hearty thanks for wrapping my ass in their cottony comfort? ;)

The AC had me worried again the other day. As I’ve learned, it’s not good to lower the temp right after it’s cycled off. I had to stop it and restart it and it got up to 83° in here before the compressor kicked in.

While I still think the statins did in fact make my throat sore, it’s official… the Squigle definitely was what prolonged the soreness. I stopped it for a while and restarted it as a test, and sure enough, my throat got scratchy again. Now the question is… would the soreness caused by the statins have eventually gone away? We read reports that were all over the place as far as that goes. Some said it was gone in a day or two, others said it never went away. I still need a break from anything other than my usual 75mgs of levothyroxine, so I’ll pass on finding out for now. I just knew that whatever was causing it wasn’t anxiety as the doctor tried to tell me she thought it was. I’ve been 99.9% anxiety-free lately and I’d like to keep it that way. One way to help do that is to stop the medication drama. This doesn’t mean I’m not making an effort to eat foods with low or no cholesterol, though. I am!

My new skier is to be delivered on Tuesday. Knowing it’s going to get boring after a while, I’m looking for a new show to watch since I’m caught up on Criminal Minds and Bates Motel till new seasons are added. I started Scream, though only 1 season is available right now.

Tom’s heading into work at 11:00. Oh, the OT he’s been wracking up with the changes going on at work. We love the money as it will help get shit paid off, but the poor guy has no life. The extreme OT shouldn’t last much longer, though.

FRIDAY, JULY 29, 2016 Was very unhappy to see some guy measuring The Twenties’ carport. Obviously, a garage is going to be put up and I’ll have to listen to that probably all next week since I’ll be on days. Again, amazing coincidence, huh? That Jackie just happens to get her hot water tank damage fixed right after our vacation, then it’s off to relandscape the house next to them, then Jackie moves out, the Twenties move in, and now they want a garage. So they can work in it? Tom said they’re not the kind to work in it. No, but they sure do a great job of hiring others to work for them and annoy the shit out of me while they’re at it.

It’s common for at least my neighbors to start off civilized, then get noisy a few months in. Besides, once the fall sets in the project frenzy is going to start back up on a regular basis. I just wish everyone could leave their walkways, roofs and shit like that alone for a while! These people obviously have money. We could tell that the day they moved in. So I’m sure I’ll be in for more than just one home renovation project. Really, why is it that I do a project and no one hears about it? Others do a project and I gotta know they’re every move.

It pisses me off every time I hear a motorcycle go by, another “coincidence” that became allowed when we moved in. I can feel AND hear them. They rumble so loudly I can feel the vibration in the floorboards beneath my feet.

Finished my 34th novel (that I didn’t trash). The Interviews is 10014 words before the final edit.

Made a 14-minute homevid for Tammy. She said she loved it as it made her feel closer to me. She wants to connect on Skype where I considered contacting Aly and Kim just to fuck with them, but said nah. I gotta let go. Besides, if they’re not already doing so, they’ll just run and block me from every account they create there.

I did contact Maliheh and Alyssa just for kicks, though I know I won’t hear about it if they get the message.

Yesterday I left Stacey a message to see if she could bump me up earlier, but she’s to be out of the office till the first.

Started using the Squigle toothpaste again to see if it messes up my throat. That and the dizziness have been much better. I still think it was started by the statins and prolonged by allergies.

THURSDAY, JULY 28, 2016 Looks like Aly rejoined Prosebox, just as I knew she would, so it’s a good thing I went back from MO to FO. The only thing that’s a little strange is that she’s listed as being a year older than she actually is and doesn’t have a bio or a profile pic. But the account name sounds totally her. I hope it is so I can enjoy knowing she looked for me to block me, and probably the “dream” account I used to have as well, only to be unable to find either account.

Love my new necklace with the purple roses and gems, and I love my new necklace holder just as much. It’s way better than my other one. It’s rose gold-colored and has 24 hooks. I have all my necklaces and bracelets on it, plus a few extra hooks. I could easily put 2-3 necklaces/bracelets per hook, though.

It was so hot out yesterday that my HR soared to the 120s just getting the mail. Looks like the “Twenties” (can’t explain how I gave them that nickname) are back to being a one-vehicle household.

Might have to reschedule my appointment with Stacey. I should’ve scheduled it 3 weeks out instead of 4. I’ll call later this morning and see if she can bump me up a week. If not we’ll just keep the appointment for the 10th and I’ll reschedule a day or two in advance if need be.

I’ve remained anxiety-free, but there’s no way to know how the EMDR is going to affect me unless something bad happens, but of course I don’t want anything bad to happen in the first place in order to find out.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 27, 2016 Walked a half-hour with Tom in perfect weather conditions. My hips are fine, but who knows how they’ll feel later? To think that I’m getting too “old” to run kinda pisses me off. I’m 50, not 80. Still planning on getting a skier to replace the treadmill with on days I work out indoors.

My little king (Burke) had fun going up and down the ramps to get treats, but his roommates don’t quite get that yet. They beg upstairs. I hear squeaking now, so they’re probably cleaning each other.

Yesterday proved that even us 50-year-olds can have some mischievous and immature moments. I wasn’t ready for bed but didn’t have enough energy left to do anything productive so I decided to do a little Aly retweeting and let my sarcastic side fly a bit. She basically bitched about her feelings being trampled on and I was enjoying seeing that karma bit her in the ass and I wasn’t afraid to say so. I could never hate her so bad as to wish she’d get hit by a bus or something like that, but it was kind of nice, even if two wrongs never make a right, to see someone have absolutely no regard whatsoever for how she feels.

She keeps saying I hate her. Wrong. I hated the lies and the phoniness. I hated being thrown away like yesterday’s trash. That’s what I hated. I hated making a point of checking in with her from the hotels in Florida, knowing she was suffering from depression, just to come home to be insulted by finding that she tweeted how she was looking forward to not hearing from me during my vacation.

A part of me even hoped she’d want to resume the friendship, not just because I missed the positive side to what we had, but so that I could feed her a taste of her own medicine and dump her. But I don’t think I could bring myself to do that because then I’d be just as bad as she was if I led her to believe I cared and would always be there for her, just to eventually claim I was tired of our differences and then cast her aside like trash.

Naturally, she ran and told Kim of the RTs and Kim went on her blocking spree before I got a chance to change links. No problem though. I just dumped that account and created a new one. Then I took the honor of blocking two of Kim’s accounts, even though I’m not going to let either one of them know about this account. It’s not private, but I made sure it can’t be found easily.

In regards to my tweet about finding it strange that she hasn’t tweeted about cancer or chemo, she tweeted that she no longer shares personal info. I found this when I got up.

She did a little RTing of her own, too. Some tweet about getting that you don’t like me but not caring.

She said it wasn’t so much that she didn’t care, but that she was over the “childishness” because there was nothing to gain from it.

No, I think she truly and honestly doesn’t care. If she did she wouldn’t have dumped me.

Last night I dreamed it was late at night. I might’ve just finished watching a movie in a theater somewhere. I was supposed to call my parents to come and get me, but couldn’t find their numbers in my phone and couldn’t remember them off the top of my head either. I began to really worry when some guy said I missed the last bus.

Then I was shopping with some woman and just had to have an encyclopedia for some reason. It was one big book that I got rather than a set. The woman bought it for me and I assumed it was just $10. She shocked me by saying it actually cost $100. Then I was pissed because I noticed that a few lines on each page were overlapped.

In the last dream, I was following Alyssa on Twitter who blew my mind by saying the pics from her latest trip were a present for her 48th birthday. In reality, she’s 35, but in the dream, I was flabbergasted to learn she was that old.

Later…

A tiny part of me is tempted to pray my ass off every single day for Stacey to one day befriend me if I can stop needing to run to her for shit that happens to me, but I know better. I know exactly what’s going to happen and that fate cannot be changed through prayer, even if there is a God. Only what’s meant to be is going to happen to us whether we pray for it or not. I totally believe that. That’s why some prayers go unanswered. We can’t just ask for whatever and always get it or else everyone would always have everything they wanted.

Again, I know what’ll happen… I’m going to see her one more time. Instead of dropping small hints and exhibiting body language (though not on purpose) that at least makes me think she might like me, she’ll come off as oh-so-serious and professional as ever and will probably give me just 20 minutes instead of 45.

Then I’ll go home and miss the shit out of her while I think of her every single day just as I have been with her and with Alyssa until they slowly begin to fade a bit by being replaced by someone else I can never have a friend. In 5, 10, and probably even 20 years from now, I’ll still remember her name, but she’ll have forgotten mine.

That’s what will happen, probably to a tee.

I went info diving on her again. I don’t know why I’m such an info whore, but I guess it’s like a fun game… sort of like a treasure hunt. The object of the game is to uncover whatever tidbits of information I can. Well, I got more than I expected to find and that includes Stacy’s exact address in Auburn. I even know that she has a three-bedroom, two-bath house that’s almost 2000 ft.² and was built in 1988. I looked at it via satellite, and to be honest, it doesn’t exactly look like anything I picture a clinical psychologist to live in. It looks like a regular neighborhood, though it is certainly nicer than average. I’m sure she could get a lot more for the place than we could get for ours. It’s much nicer than our old neighborhood in Phoenix where everybody had one floor and little box houses about 1200 to 1400 ft.² Some of these houses had two floors. Stacey doesn’t have a pool, but then when would she find the time to use it? Anyway, they’re what I describe as “tooth houses,” but they’re not jammed as tightly together as we were in Phoenix and many neighborhoods in the west. The driveways also don’t run alongside the homes but go right up to the house instead. I’m surprised that the house only has a single-car garage being as big as it is.

Stacey is also said to be the “most famous” psychologist in the area. Well, she’s the best I’ve ever had.

TUESDAY, JULY 26, 2016 Gonna make a home vid for Tammy only. The “tour” I’m going to give her is going to be as close to the real thing as we can get, just in case she never makes it out here.

I made a quick 40-second rat video to test sound and visuals and shared that with everyone on Facebook, plus a few other places.

Training the rats to go up and down the exit ramp using treats as bribes and rewards. So cute. Right now they’re enjoying the curtain scraps I cut out earlier and getting ready to bed down for the day.

Two years ago I got 3 sets of scenic curtains. I hung a beach scene by the front door and a garden scene in the dining area. The forest scene never got hung anywhere until today when I decided to replace the sheer lace curtain in the laundry room for extra privacy. It looks awesome in there! I’m amazed at just how great it looks. I just had to trim the bottom half off. The brown “window shutters” which open to the scene match the brown trim framing the window. The blue “sky” goes well with the blue walls, and the pink flower trees mixed in with the spruces add a nice contrast. I love how it adds privacy to that room while allowing me to still be able to see what’s going on in the street.

My throat’s been better and I’m wondering if the special toothpaste I got could have had anything to do with that, though I doubt it. Most likely the statins gave me a sore throat and then allergies kept it going for a while. But now that it’s really hot again it’s been better.

I gotta stop saying how much better I’ve been sleeping, because every time I do, I end up sleeping shitty. I woke up in pain a few hours after crashing. My whole body hurt. My hips didn’t hurt after my last long walk, but at this time my hips and my right shoulder were killing me. I don’t get it. How can Bob and Jim walk a mile or two each day being in their 80s with seemingly no problem at all, and I can’t? They’re skinny, though, while I’m 30 pounds overweight. Could that be a factor? And am I really getting arthritic? I read that it could be that or tendinitis or bursitis, and even less likely would be gynecological problems.

Anyway, I went back to sleep, then woke up with a stiff neck and now even my knees ache a bit. I don’t know what the hell’s going on for sure. Just gotta try to ignore it and make sure I don’t overdo things.

I first noticed joint issues in the early 2000s, which could’ve been connected to my thyroid crashing. So, since I may very well be getting too old for running and even such brisk walking, I’m looking into one of those non-electric no-impact skiers. I’m giving myself a break today from all workouts. No running, no walking, no strength training. Just some housework is all I’ll do today, along with my writing.

MONDAY, JULY 25, 2016 Went out walking together for an hour. No hip pain, so maybe I was just getting a little too inactive there for a while. Tammy said to ice it if it hurts. Still have my Bowflex workout awaiting me, and a house to clean. How did I once swim all day and dance on heels all night?

I’m wondering (and definitely hoping) if I’m getting toward the end of perimenopause because I haven’t had as many symptoms. I’m not dizzy all the time like I used to be, I’m sleeping a little better overall, I haven’t had anxiety, and I’m not hot flashing as much. I even had to turn the fan off the last two times I slept because I was actually chilly. In the middle of summer! Been keeping the house at 78° and it’s comfy. I used to keep it at 82° down in Arizona. I like the warmth. I drop it to 76° when I sleep, though, and if I’m doing anything physical like cleaning or working on the Bowflex, I set it at 77°.

When we were out walking we noticed these cute little umbrellas set up in front of someone’s house and thought they were strange but interesting decorations. Then we realized that given the angle of the umbrellas, they were probably shading what appeared to be little tomato patches. Bob and Virginia’s own tomatoes that they have growing in the front corner of their place look ripe and ready to pick.

I briefly read about the waitress who was fired for bashing Mexicans on Twitter and was like, you gotta be kidding me? Now your employment is based on your social life? I just think it’s really sad that people will waste the police and media’s time on such petty things, disagreeable or not, when they should be focusing on more important things. No one’s forced to read anything they don’t want to read, after all. What is it with this country claiming it has free speech anyway when your only “freedom” is to say what most people want to hear? I just think it’s a real abuse of law enforcement to go running to them because of what someone says or writes and not what they actually do. Hearing someone you disagree with isn’t like being assaulted or robbed. The cops should be putting their time and energy into rapists, robbers, arsonists and murderers and not someone that pissed you off or hurt your feelings.

Looking so forward to seeing Stacey! Yes, I admit it. I have come to have feelings for that brown-eyed brunette and I love our little get-togethers. A great guy… a great woman… how did I get so damn lucky?

Got some fun stuff coming from Amazon: A toe ring, a couple of swimsuits, a couple of necklaces, and a necklace holder.

Other than finding out where Stacey lives in her 3-bedroom, 2-bath house in Auburn that’s almost 2K square feet and built in 1988, I dreamed of sleeping on an airbed somewhere last night.

SUNDAY, JULY 24, 2016 On Friday I crashed early and ended up sleeping 11 hours. I was just really tired for some reason.

Then yesterday I couldn’t fall asleep to save my life. So after being up 19 hours, I took a lorazepam. Then it hit me… why not try warm milk next time I have trouble sleeping?

I’m just tired of being tired every other day or every few days if I’m lucky. I really have to make a point of getting all I can possibly get done on days I have enough energy to do so. It’s frustrating at times when I want to do things, but my body would rather not.

Today my mind and body agreed on a nice long 44-minute walk. I would have made it an hour if it weren’t for that damn left hip of mine acting up. I don’t get it. Bob’s 36 years older than me yet he walks two miles every morning without fail. I know it’s pointless to play the comparison game, but still… what’s causing it? Age? Am I becoming arthritic? Could it be tied to my thyroid? I enjoyed my nice, peaceful walk just the same. A little warm out there, but nice. Only one vehicle drove by.

Tammy said to ice the hip after working out.

My throat was good yesterday but worse when I got up. Tom said others at work are complaining of a sore throat that comes and goes. Ironically enough, it got better after my walk. I’m still getting sick of it. Sometimes I feel like I’m coming down with a cold or running a fever, but every time I check my temp, it’s fine.

Again I was ignored by Aly when this time “Meagan” tweeted to her instead of “Emma” (this is definitely it. I swear!), so yeah, she either knows it’s me or she simply doesn’t care to respond to strangers.

Gonna change the rats’ cage when Tom gets up. Cappy’s already been sent back to his old home.

SATURDAY, JULY 23, 2016 “Knowing that someone is around but not knowing why they’re being selective in who they talk to… Frustrating.”

Another Aly riddle on Twitter after I “liked” something of hers just to see how she may react. The first 5 words of this sentence had me thinking she was referring to me, but once I read on I wasn’t sure.

Here’s mine: Knowing I should move on from those who are dishonest and phony, but not being able to… Frustrating.

At least I haven’t contacted her as myself and likely never will. But maybe “Meagan” can and we’ll see what she says if anything.

I find it rather odd that she hasn’t spoken of cancer and chemo. She hasn’t even mentioned nannying.

Anyway, I haven’t a feeling she knows I’ve been lurking. I just don’t know how she knows it. She can hack accounts, but not without the alerts wired into their system alerting me. So… not sure what I’m doing to be so obvious.

I don’t think this “riddle” applies to me, though. She doesn’t give a shit about me. Therefore she wouldn’t care if I were selective about who I talked to. It’s probably a follower she’s trying to send an indirect message to. Something like, “Why don’t you pay the same attention to me that you pay to others?”

Waited for the temp to fall to the 70s so I could go out running. At 79° just after 11:00, I went out for 22 minutes. I walked more than I ran, though. My right hip was slightly annoying the last two times.

Looked at tips to lower cholesterol before lipid panel checks and they say to do 30 minutes of cardio 5x a week for that, and 60 minutes for weight loss and to raise “good” cholesterol while lowering “bad” cholesterol. They also say not to exceed 300 mg a day of cholesterol and to start two months before labs. Whole-fat dairy, eggs, organ meat and red meat are the biggest enemies, and I guess salt and sugar aren’t good either. The foods most recommended are oatmeal, apples, blueberries, raspberries and flaxseed.

These aging hips could never take an hour a day of cardio unless it was something like swimming.

High LDL or not, I can’t live on beans, potatoes and soup. Gotta get some variety in there. I’ll just be sure to stay away from Atkin’s.

Had dreams involving my parents and brother, but don’t remember what they were about. Also something about an outdoor event we attended and not wanting to park by the local loons when I recognized their vehicle nearby.

Here’s an interesting observation. Although we were all born in different months, between my parents and two siblings, our birth dates almost go in order. I was born on the 4th, dad on the 5th, and mom on the 6th. Then my sibs were born on the 15th and 16th. So a group of 3 and a group of 2.

Now get this. The dates of my parents’ and brother’s deaths, although also different months, are the 22nd, 23rd and 24th. So if Tammy dies first and she dies on something like the 12th, will I then die on the 11th or 13th?

FRIDAY, JULY 22, 2016 Tom scared the shit out of me when I got up after 7 to find he still wasn’t home. But then I quickly found out why on Skype. The battery died on the car. So he stopped at Sam’s, got a new one for $140, and they even put it in for him.

Got a message from someone in which Facebook said the message was temporarily removed because the sender had yet to verify their account. I could still see it, though. They wrote: Hello how are you doing today angel??

I ignored the message and they later verified the account, which has just one friend added and a few, likes. One is a rat group I follow. The profile pic appears to be that of a younger man in Italy that’s decent-looking.

I doubt our local nuts are behind it, as I would think I’d get something nastier than what I got. Doesn’t seem like anything any former friends would pull either. Probably just some old, bald slut looking for X-rated attention that found me through the ratty group.

We went walking after 3am and passed two vehicles and a couple getting into their car. I still can’t believe how active this park is, even at night, though there’s no comparison between daytime and nighttime noise. At night you almost always never hear anything while you almost always hear something during the day.

We almost got blasted by a skunk on our walk. The skunk must’ve been asleep behind a bush we passed. When we startled it the thing ran across the street, but for a minute it looked like it was going to head toward us.

The dizzies are back, but fortunately, it’s been mild and hopefully, it will stay that way. Still have ear and throat irritation at times, though my mouth is already improving since I started eating yogurt again. This time I won’t be dumb enough to stop that. Or my antibacterial soap.

I was hoping to get a little B&E on in my dreams, but instead of having fun breaking into the homes of hotties or enjoying the beach, I went to a large party. People of all ages were present. This included what I knew to be my lawn statues of children that amazed me by trading in their stone for flesh and coming to life. They tore through the place, laughing like hyenas.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 20, 2016 While I like this phone better overall, the two things I don’t like about it are that you gotta swipe to answer calls instead of tap, and the fact that when it dies it really dies. The other one would flash a low battery indicator and I’d charge it up, but it would still work and not take a year to charge. Well, this one died so bad it wouldn’t show me its progress when I first plugged it in, and took an hour just to get to 30%. Shouldn’t the thing be fully charged in an hour or less? From now on I’ll throw it in the charger before bed.

Had to choose between convenience and quality when it came to voice blogs on Tumblr and in the end I chose quality. Calling Tumblr’s line directly was quicker and easier, but Vocaroo sounds much clearer. It’s just a pain in the ass to have to convert it to an MP3 and then uploaded it to Tumblr, but when I’d call Tumblr directly, they wouldn’t always post the blogs and they had a two-minute limit per post. You can ramble all you want with Vocaroo, which I doubt I’ll use every day. I decided to make it a text and a voice blog. I’m sharing monthly blog posts there, but not daily stuff. It’s where I’ll discuss those darker things in life that some may find more depressing, hard to comprehend and controversial. I’ve chosen not to share it with anyone I presently know.

Yesterday I had no throat irritation but today my mouth feels gross. Wonder if it’s that flush thing. I’m gargling with salt water. Time to go back to yogurts, I guess, which can cause this if you stop eating them. I was just trying to avoid literally all cholesterol, even if it was something with a tiny amount in it.

Still no visual views from our local nutjobs. They were definitely afraid to contact me in public or else I think the harassment would’ve spilled over onto Blogger. Even though it seems incredibly unlikely, could they have served me without serving me? IDK, maybe someone’s been by to attempt to serve me and I never heard the door, so just like in Phoenix, maybe I dodged being served, though in Phoenix I knew it was coming, thanks to the black bitch’s threats warning me. Plus, Tom asked if I’ve had any nightmares, though when I asked if everything was ok, he said yes. Either way, I still don’t see how anything I did could’ve been even remotely illegal. So if I’m not expecting anyone, I’m not answering the door, though I have received some summons in the past via regular mail.

As usual, I woke up several times but slept better than I did the last time around. I had ocean dreams. I seemed to be on some excursion off of a small ship or yacht that was nearby. I asked a guy (the guy running the excursion?) how deep the water was where we were swimming and he said it was probably less than 20’ and that the water would be colder where it was deeper. Suddenly I felt the bottom beneath me as we neared this tiny little island.

Then there was something negative about Stacey. “We talked about that,” I either said or wrote, and I’m guessing it had to do with how we could never see each other outside of her office. More signs not to hope for a friendship later on down the road? Then again, do I really need any signs? I think common sense is enough. Even if it were ethical, and I think it would be after a year, past experience has taught me that the women I want in my life are always to be forbidden. I just don’t know why. Is there something about me that gravitates to the forbidden? Or is something up there guiding me to them as a tease or a form of punishment?

Hell, I still think of Alyssa to this day. Again, I never wanted to jump in bed with her any more than I do Stacey, being as old as I am now, but I still regret that we never got to be friends, as much as I understand why. Just to be a part of these women’s lives would’ve been nice, though. I’d rather impress them with something I’m good at than pleasure them or be pleased in bed, not that I could imagine bedding down with Stacey.

At the same time, I wouldn’t change a thing about my life (though it would be nice if Tom didn’t have to work so hard), I long for something to break up the monotony of things and spice up my life a bit. I crave interesting changes at the same time I hate change. Therefore, I’m not really sure what it is that I want. I’d love to have a pleasant-looking woman with a great personality be the icing on my delicious cake. But in my 50s I think of us chatting happily over coffee, and not the more X-rated things I’d have had in mind in my 20s. Like it or not, though, I should never see Stacey again after August 10th.

Tom said to ask if I could see her every 3 or 4 months if I wanted to, but I don’t want to hog up her time if I’m doing well, and then that 1% chance I may have of hearing from her later on down the road may be shot to hell for good.

Speaking of Alyssa, I hadn’t seen what she was up to for a while, so I ran her name. She’s marrying Donté Smith (so she didn’t just change that to be her last name on Facebook for how common it is), the black guy she’s been with, on September 15th. I figured she would eventually. She’d probably make a good mom too, though she doesn’t strike me as the mothering type. I think like many of today’s women she’s very career orientated.

Not surprisingly, they created a wedding website through The Knot, and have set up several gift registries. Also, not surprisingly, the weddings going to be a big to-do at a park in Tahoe.

First she wrote their story and it was very well written, too. Tae and Lys met as freshmen in college at 18 and 20, but since they were young and had lots to do, they went their separate ways for 7 years. Then one day she got his number through a mutual friend and she took it from there.

He proposed to her at their favorite spot overlooking the city by spelling out “Will you marry me?” with rose petals.

As I figured, he’s also in the health and fitness field. So… like most couples, they’re a carbon copy of each other except for the pigment of their skin.

One of the things they have on their registries is a Roomba vacuum. Smart choice, even if I find it strange that a couple that probably makes around a quarter mil a year would request gifts.

It was funny how she said that while they love kids, please don’t bring them unless you’re breastfeeding because they didn’t think the events would be appropriate for kids, and provided links to sitters.

LOL, really? Or could it be they don’t want the loud, destructive brats hanging around? And just what are these “events” going to entail? I know they have a hike planned for the day after the wedding. Don’t the happy newlyweds want some time alone? Just how in the world do a couple of doctors find the time to set all this stuff up anyway? And where do they get the money? If Alyssa’s parents were teachers, how did she get the money to “travel the world” and go to med school? Also, why did they wait so long to get hitched? After that 7-year break, Alyssa would’ve been 25. Well, she’s 35 now, so why did they wait a decade to decide to tie the knot?

Anyway, I’m happy for her. They do seem to be happy and despite the odds, I’d say they’ll always be together. I just wish I didn’t still think of her at times and have that “left out” kind of feeling. Then again, does it hurt anything if I do think of her?

Back to Stacey…if there’s absolutely no chance of meeting in the future, why didn’t she stop me and say something when I said certain things about her? Like how I like to hang out with calmer people, how I never would have met her if we hadn’t come to Cali, how great she looks, etc.?

Also, if she thinks she might consider contacting me someday, then why did she want to make sure I didn’t stop seeing her too soon? I mean, as a good therapist I’m sure she wants to make sure I’m stable regardless, but could she be hoping not to have to deal with me in the future, or could she hope to get me stable enough for a future friendship? The latter’s probably just a dream. Watch… she’ll seem just the opposite next time and maybe in a hurry to see me off, thus crushing any signs, however faint they may be, of us as friends later on. That’s how it usually works.

TUESDAY, JULY 19, 2016 Mr. Rattitude and the newcomers go nose to nose with each other through the ramp blocking the passage between levels, but no one’s gotten their noses, feet or tails bitten off, so that’s good.

Just when I thought I was sleeping better, I wake up a million times throughout my sleep. I feel well-rested, though, and that’s what’s most important.

I had loads of fun breaking into Alyssa’s house, even though she lived with her parents. Yeah, I had some fun and interesting dreams last night. No one was home (of course) and I’m not sure how I got into the house or why. I just knew it was where they lived. I looked around the place curiously, but of course I didn’t take anything. The longer I spent snooping around, the more I feared someone might return, so I went to leave the place. Just as I was heading down the driveway, I realized I had forgotten something I wanted to see, whatever that was, so I reentered the house. It was a good thing too, because I’d left my jacket inside which I’d taken off so I could look around more comfortably. On my way out I twisted the knob on the door handle behind me, not wanting them to find an unlocked door or suspect anyone had gone roaming around their house. It then occurred to me that I should’ve worn gloves because I’d left my fingerprints on that knob as I turned it. I moved quickly down their driveway in hopes of two things… that someone else’s fingerprints would override mine, and that no one had witnessed me coming or going.

In another dream Andy and I were exchanging voice messages, then we were talking live.

MONDAY, JULY 18, 2016 Still have occasional earaches and throat irritation, but it’s been wonderful not being dizzy. I’ve had more energy, too. Not sure what the story is with my lungs at times, though. Most of the time they’re crystal clear, but sometimes I get tight and even a bit congested. Wonder if it’s due to the unusually cool weather we’re having once again. The last two days haven’t felt like July here.

I woke up after about 5 hours of sleep. I was tight then. I laid there for about an hour till I fell back asleep (haven’t taken lorazepam in days). Then I had a slight wheezing and coughed up whatever crap had gotten stuck in my lungs.

The spotting I had stopped and I’m hoping this is it. I won’t start really getting excited till I go more than two months without a real period. Then a year later I can have fun using leftover pads to wipe down the shower walls or something. :)

Took a walk this evening down to the lake. There was a full moon visible and the moonlight reflecting off the surface of the lake was absolutely beautiful. Beautiful homes to the left, ducks afloat to the right… sometimes I can’t believe I live here. It may be noisy, expensive and too cold most of the year, but it is gorgeous. Love some of the sounds the ducks make because they almost sound like they’re laughing.

I did something I never did before and I circled around the entire lake for variety in my route, but I’m not sure I would recommend it to Tom because he doesn’t have good balance. There were some muddy sections and if he slipped on the ice up in Oregon, he would probably slip on the mud. On top of that, I picked up some sand behind me as I walked and it lodged inside my sock and rubbed against me with my movements, irritating the skin in that area.

The babies are now taunting Cappy, LOL. There’s a little section of their floor, which is also his ceiling, that’s not solid and they can peer down/up at each other. We locked the ramp, preventing the babies from going downstairs and Cappy from going upstairs. Both sections are so big that there’s plenty of room for numerous rats on both first and second stories. Anyway, they’re taunting him by sticking their noses down through the wire, knowing that they’re safe and probably frustrating the hell out of Cappy, now unable to pick on them as close as they are.

Tom brought up a good point. He wonders if the babies were so timid due to being so confined. Pretty sure they were in 10-gallon aquariums, and now that they’re in a huge wire cage, they might’ve felt overly exposed in ways they weren’t used to.

We got wood shavings from Walmart but it’s too dusty. I’ve got the air cleaner on high now. If they bother my lungs, they might bother the rats’, so we will stick with paper because we hate pellets. The pellets are way too heavy. We change the cage every week so there’s no way it’s going to “shorten their lives” as the loonies tried to claim. Almost all our rats have lived between two and three years and that’s the norm.

I’m just glad the psycho who wants her “grandbabies” back because I’m “hurting” them by using paper bedding and stirring up her PTSD because of my honest and legal, though negative review, has stopped harassing me by phone, email and Facebook. I don’t think they’re reading my blog anymore either, and as much as I know I was/am innocent of any wrongdoing, I will admit that the two times I saw them on my visitor list was a bit creepy. So… closed chapter of my life.

Last night I dreamed I was on a cruise ship. I’m not sure where we left from, but we were on our way up the East Coast to see my parents in New England who were alive in the dream. They’re always alive in my dreams but at least it’s only my dreams. At one point in the dream, Tom was off doing whatever and I decided to go get a bite to eat. Only a few scattered people were around because it was between meals.

Suddenly realizing that I was in my pajamas and not feeling very comfortable about it, I doubled back to our stateroom. On the way, a few women were commenting on a large doll one of them made in some type of class they offered. One woman asked another if she had enough room in her suitcase to pack it in since the trip was almost over.

I went back to the room and decided to wait there until our name was called for dinner. When they finally called our name, Tom hadn’t returned.

Then I overheard some cops aboard the ship talking about Caroll Spinney, the guy who plays Big Bird. I stopped by to let one of them know that I personally knew him even though I hadn’t seen him in many years because my childhood friend was his adopted daughter, which is true and real life. I wonder if he still has his awesome house in Connecticut.

SUNDAY, JULY 17, 2016 My babies are nocturnal so they’re pretty active now. They’ve grown noticeably since receiving them.

Went out walking the last couple of evenings. Weather’s gorgeous, too. What surprised me was the house where the kids live. An older guy and a girl of about 10 stopped me along the way to ask if I’d seen their dog. He said he usually goes out the doggy door and comes right back, though the kid said he usually goes to the neighbor.

A doggy door and a dog allowed to run to the neighbors in an adult community where dogs are supposed to be indoor pets only??? I still don’t get how they could have kids living there these last few years like they have either.

Had throat irritation yesterday, but it’s better today. I honestly don’t know what to make of it. Or my period for that matter. Hoping this is it and I’m at the end of the perimenopause phase, but can’t say for sure just yet. I’ve had spotting since the 14th, though, and I usually only spot for a day before it takes off full swing. Oh, the joys of being a woman.

Had a couple of funny and interesting dreams last night. In one I was in a hotel room with Mark and Tammy. It looked more like a suite actually, but anyway, I heard Mark enter and I ran through the place and into the kitchen where Tammy was. He placed a large pizza box on the table, which was to be our dinner, then he complained that it cost $85. He said that was ok, though, because it would feed us for days. LOL

Then I was with Nane. I looked in on her Facebook account last night so that probably triggered the dream. She still looks smoking hot, too. Her age only shows in her face.

In the dream, some guy was harassing us. He looked at her and said, “What are you… six-one, six-two?”

She remained quiet, though in real life she’s five-eight. I knew she wanted me to run, but I refused to leave her alone. Not sure what happened in the end, though.

Later…

Damn you, Cappy! We tried moving him in with the 3 rats we adopted as rats almost always get along with other rats. But sure enough, the bastard picked a fight with poor Burke, so he’s now carrying out his life sentence in solitary confinement just as he would prefer. So it wasn’t Hoodie, after all, to start the fights he’d have with this shit rat. I don’t know what this guy’s problem is or why he’s so vicious. We’ve never ever had a rat like this before. He hates to be handled. He hates humans. He hates other rats. The only thing he doesn’t hate is food. I’ve regretted getting him from day one, but Tom insists we keep him. Thank God rats don’t live as long as cats and dogs! He was born around December of 2014, so he’s still got another year left in him, but hopefully less.

But now Burke is a bit traumatized and who knows how long he’ll take to loosen back up. I was making such good progress with him, too. I feel like Cappy’s undone all I’ve accomplished with him, though Tom doesn’t think so. For now, Burke is still giving me a rat’s version of the silent treatment, and Cappy’s lucky I don’t beat his ass.

Tammy’s having surgery tomorrow. She said something about them cutting nerves in the middle of her spine. It gives me chills just thinking about it. Really hope this helps lessen her pain so she can toss aside the cane!

My ear is aching again, but I haven’t had any dizziness recently. It’s been wonderful. Maybe I’m almost done with the perimenopause. I hope so! Never got a real period this time around; just some spotting. I’m even sleeping better.

Got the phones set up, but still have to copy my MP3s over. It’s definitely easier to use than our other phones, which will be mailed in for $25 each once we’re sure these phones won’t have any issues.

My brainpower has definitely improved since we first got our last numbers because I memorized the new numbers fast.

Is the crazy war vet still peeking in on me and did she see last night’s posts? Don’t know and don’t care. How fucking dare they make the demands of me they made, though. And fuck their threats, too. Seriously, if they really are connected to law enforcement and can push this petty shit and make the same mountain out of a molehill the freeloaders did, I totally meant it when I said I won’t fall for it. Never again will I have someone “order” me to court as if I were a child, and all for speaking my mind. If I’m ever in a courtroom again, it will be to sue someone or to testify as a witness or something like that.

I had a dream that Tom appeared to be signing to Miss Perfect, though I knew it wasn’t really “signing.” Then he said we were going to file suit against Evelyn for $275.

In another dream, we moved into a condo in which my bedroom was attached to the dividing wall. I liked how quiet it was, but knew the peace wouldn’t last long because the adjoining place was empty and it was just a matter of time before it sold.

Then Tom was making these sexy female figures appear that were about 6” long using some high-tech computer program.

Lastly, I was meeting with Stacey when my mother of all people suddenly appeared, making me feel like I couldn’t talk with Stacey as openly as I’d like. Stacey seemed more distant too, just like I’m guessing she will be the next time I see her.

SATURDAY, JULY 16, 2016 OMG, what a whack job! I just noticed this crazy message that came in at 2am last night in my “other” box on Facebook from Mommy Dearest. She must’ve lost Tom’s number because she hasn’t called him.

Some of what she’s saying is bullshit and some of it I don’t even understand. She’s not only highly delusional but such a shitty writer that a lot of what she says gives me a WTF? moment. All of it, however, is positively insane. I had no idea she was this crazy. It’s sad when people like this have kids. What a great example she’s setting for any kids/grandkids she may have.

I reported her message as harassing and insulting and blocked her.

Really hope these nut jobs back off real soon. I refuse to feed the trolls like I stupidly did with Kim and Molly. I’m not mentioning them in the blog at all. But will they come after us be it by themselves or through the law? Innocent of any wrongdoing or not, I know how twisted our laws can be, and people do tend to side with those with kids.

I don’t get the part about “you pop up on her face” or “in court you can invade my daughter's life of living with autism, and about why I’m a disabled vet.”

I don’t know why she’s a disabled vet and I don’t care. That has nothing to do with being promised calm rats that are really skittish. They’re getting better, but still have a ways to go.

The crazy signs were there from the start; I just didn’t see them. It’s probably not only been her and her alone that I’ve been talking to, but when we met in the parking lot, the first thing out of her mouth was being a disabled vet. Again, like we care? Like it matters?

Then she put one of the rats up to my ear and said to listen to his breathing cuz he was having problems. I heard nothing.

“Check their breathing every night,” she told me.

And what am I supposed to do if they make any funny sounds, give them a shot of my inhaler?

Again, this makes no sense because she claims to use bedding that can’t mess with their lungs. It’s the stuff we’re going to try to see if it’s worth it. We’ve just been anti-wood shavings due to the dust in them, but these Eco-Shavings are said to be triple-screened for dust.

When she mentioned what’s probably her fictitious sheriff friend seeing pics of her grandbabies and me insulting her grandbabies, I was like, WTF? Just WTF? What grandbabies? And then I realized she was referring to the rats as her grandbabies. Tom and I were ROTFL over that one!

She makes like I’ve sent dozens of messages to them when in fact it wasn’t even half a dozen exchanges after I told them how I felt about them, and that was days ago. They’re the ones still hanging onto me… calling, emailing, messaging, etc. Hope they keep it up, though. It doesn’t make them look very good. Meanwhile, I’m the one that’s had to block them on Facebook yet they want me to leave them alone?

“The sheriff is reviewing our stuff.” This contradicts what she said before. She can’t keep her story straight. They got all these orders they want, and then they’re looking to get them.

The “I hope your period gets better” is a little funny. But they’re starting to scare me. These nuts aren’t in CT or TX. They’re right here in town! Made a post about a friend having a stroke and thinking of flying out to see her. Hopefully, this will get them to back off, but that will depend on just how crazy they really are. Here’s Dee Dotson’s little rant:

Just to let you know, we took pictures of all the slander. Also looking at the cage due to you not using right litter that we asked you to buy, within 2 weeks your babies will start getting sick, and the felt, when they per on it, they chance getting merca, a respiratory illness that will shorten their lives. They are not potty trained yet. Due to the stress you caused my autistic daughter, and your post showed I told you and you don’t believe it, I am seeking a restraining order and a cease and desist. When you know someone has a disability, and you pop up on her face, And send slandering remarks to her about the one thing she loves, there’s a crime,crimes against the disabled. You also criticized my grandbabies. I’m also a veteran and you triggered my PTSD. So you may have changed your blog, but I had my daughter print them out right away. Sadly,your rat’s will be sick because you chose not to listen. I feel sorry about your neighbors you blog about, and I hope your period gets better. Yes, I read all you sent to my child. The sheriff is reviewing our stuff, and in court you can invade my daughters life of living with autism, and about why I’m a disabled vet. I feel sorry for you. Don’t point fingers till you look at yourself. I’m asking you to leave us alone. Im printing this for the sheriff, and I will keep calling for Tom to get back the rate that you lied about. Our sheriff friend also knows these rats, and saw pictures of my grandbabies They were scared from the move. Let Tom know I need to reach him, and I would like him to see the 14ths morning post before you changed it. We copied it all. We love our rats,as do my grandbabies. We will take them back and you can go to a pet store.

Later…

Written for the nutjob:

Oh, crazy war vet, you are a persistent little one, aren’t you? Yeah, it’s playing peekaboo on me now. Yeah, peekaboo… I see you… including your exact location. But since you’re just full of silly threats and senseless words as of yet and haven’t hunted us down to beat us up or anything, I’ll refrain from sending an officer to your door to talk to you about how being in business may not be right for you. You see, all businesses are bound to get negative reviews at times. It just goes with the territory. But if you can’t handle honest and legal reviews, then perhaps a career change is in order? Just something to think about. :) People aren’t “lying” to you. They’re giving you their honest opinion about doing business with you.

Also, do be informed that I’ve been blogging regularly since 2008 and always keep on blogger’s rights/laws. In no way shape or form have I broken any laws. If I had I’d already have been arrested or summoned. This country is very word-sensitive and takes written material quite seriously. I never use last names. Ever. But first names are legal and so are businesses that are a matter of public information. Comprendeme? So subpoena away, Mommy Dearest, but do know you’ll never get that day in court you so desire. Nor will you get these adorable, lovable rats back who are adjusting nicely, are potty trained, and are learning a host of other things as well.

As for whomever it was that said the autism was no one’s business… then why’d you tell us in the parking lot?

Ok, you have read the last you’re ever going to read about yourselves so long as you don’t ever come to our door or harm us. I have given you the benefit of removing your daughter’s first name and the abbreviated business name, even though I don’t owe you that much and it wasn’t illegal.

Now, here’s what you can and cannot do in the future. You can read my blog all you want and print away to your little heart’s desire. But you cannot and will not ever again contact my husband or me by any means possible. There will be no phone calls. There will be no email. There will be no comments or messages on any other website, including this one. No contact means NO CONTACT. We want absolutely nothing to do with you and you have been a closed chapter in our lives and will stay that way. Now stop playing victim and move on!

FRIDAY, JULY 15, 2016 Happy 70th birthday to Linda Ronstadt. I wonder how much her Parkinson’s is affecting her these days.

Woke up to the tune of landscaping but no more than a missed call from New York after yesterday’s crazy calls from Leslie’s mother. No more online threats or harassment either.

OMG, if you can’t handle a bad review here and there, which any business would get from time to time, then why the hell bother to go into business in the first place? I’m so fucking sick of those that can’t handle the truth if it’s not what they want to hear!

I filled out a form that was on their Facebook page, and because the review was partly negative and they didn’t like what I had to say about my experience with them in my blog, they started threatening me with court, slander, and getting a cease and desist order to take back the rats because I’m “hurting” them. In the 2-question survey, I said “yes” to the rats being healthy and “no” to them being as sociable as expected.

Anyway, the mother is absolutely crazy. She left two LONG messages rambling on and on about the same things over and over again, one in which she spoke longer than the time allotted. She said to have Tom call her back and give the rats back to her because she didn’t wish to meet with me and she was sure he had “no problem” with them. Oh, and she was at the piggy station.

She claimed I was ruining their business, they’ve got years of great reviews, etc. Well, if that’s the case and I’m the only bad review, then how can ONE bad review “ruin” their business?

I also got an email from Leslie who said not to bother replying, as I’m to go through her mother from now on.

Both of them demanded our address and threatened to have the cops get it if I didn’t provide it, but of course neither of us called them back or replied to their bullshit email. As I learned 16 years ago, if you don’t succumb to threats (and possible court calls), then they can’t burn you. So unless the pigs kick our door down over a review and ultimately end up making us very rich because of it, I’m not going to play legal games with these overly sensitive emotional wimps who can’t handle a negative review.

In the one view that I can see that they made of my blog yesterday afternoon, my tracker pointed out their exact location. Good to know in case I need to do to them what I should’ve done to a few people in Arizona, though confronting them face-to-face is the last thing I want. That’d only be as a last resort if I were backed into a corner or something. But unless she was just bluffing about going to the pigs, the pigs actually did the right thing by informing her that I broke absolutely no laws and they weren’t going to waste time taking back a few rats over a bad review. Besides, Google and Facebook can back up the fact that I didn’t do anything illegal.

She went on and on about how I was stirring up her PTSD and that she would have to be medicated along with Leslie… how dare I say anything about an autistic child… she’s got papers from Kaiser to prove she’s autistic… it’s a crime to state an autistic child’s name, state and business, etc. Lastly, don’t get scared but someone will be by to serve me for slander.

Number 1, Slander is spoken defamation of character. When it’s in written form it is called libel.

Number 2, I only use the rattery’s initials, though there’s no law that says I couldn’t have just spelled it out as I simply gave my opinion on them and didn’t threaten to blow them up. There are many blogs for just that purpose; to review businesses.

Number 3, I never mentioned the state in conjunction with anything I said in my review.

Number 4, I only used Leslie’s first name while THEY have Leslie’s name and state right on their site.

Number 5, If Leslie is a minor (though I was under the impression she was a young adult) then the business can’t be hers. She’s got a hyphen between two last names. Wouldn’t that make her married?

Number 6, If what I said was illegal, then every negative review on sites like Yelp would be also.

Number 7, My review/blog does not “endanger” them in any way as Leslie claimed in her email, and I didn’t “do a lot of assuming” about them. I only wrote what I experienced firsthand.

Number 8, What do Leslie being autistic and the mother (I don’t even know her first name), have to do with my review? That’s irrelevant and has absolutely nothing to do with anything I’ve said. My review was about the rats I bought from them. Not their personal lives. I have nothing against autism or any other disability and hate it when people abuse or insult the disabled. I also hate when people use their abilities as a crutch or an excuse. Just like I hate it when blacks use the race card in their favor when race was never the issue, these people are obviously using Leslie’s autism and Mommy Dearest’s war vet status as a weapon against my honest and very legal review.

Leslie signed off with, please take it down (what I said in my blog), give us the rats back, and let’s forget we ever met so you can continue blogging about your hatred of things on Facebook. She also threatens to get their lawyer involved if it’s not down by the end of the day.

LOL, I don’t blog on Facebook, though I do sometimes enclose stuff in notes for Tammy. She’s the only one I’ll share this entry with. Don’t want to give them any negative attention they may crave. You know, as in “Don’t Feed the Trolls?” If there’s any more harassment on their part, then yes, this may go public. They’re never going to get these rats back, but I did at least give them the satisfaction of deleting past blogs, even though I don’t owe them shit. Again, it’s not illegal. It’s just not what they want to hear. But I deleted them if only to stop the fucking emails and phone calls. They don’t have more than a few days to call us, though. As I said, we’re getting new numbers with the new phones so we can have the proper area code.

I’m surprised they only viewed my blog once. I’m guessing they disabled cookies? Other than that one local view, no one in my state has been in that I know of.

Meanwhile, if you feel you have to medicate yourself because someone gave your business a negative but legal and honest review, that’s not my problem. So serve, serve and serve away because I’m not going to court. I wouldn’t answer to some bully on the streets who demanded I do this or go there, and these people are no exception. I doubt I’ll hear from them again, but let’s hope not for their sake.

I could kick myself for letting their fucking phone calls get me anxious enough to call Tom. After what happened in Arizona, well, it’s to be expected just like medication will always make me anxious. But yeah, my heart raced and my hands shook much in the way the medication made me do. But this was different. It’s just a lot less scary when an external force is causing it, but once I calmed down enough to realize I had absolutely nothing to fear from these assholes, I was fine.

Still have traces of throat irritation and I just don’t know what to make of it at this point. Did the statins cause permanent damage to my throat, or was the doctor not kidding when she said she thought it was anxiety?

I also had that strange sensation in the left side of my neck just now while sitting here reading what I wrote. It’s like a pulsing or “moving” sensation. It was like what I woke up with a week or so ago. I don’t usually get that sitting upright while in a calm mood, but Tom’s probably right about it just being my ear draining.

Chatted with Lori on Facebook for the first time in a while. I’ve got her crazy cousin blocked, though. I deleted Lori for a while because she can be a bit of a pest at times, but if loneliness is her worst crime, so be it. She can pester me every now and then.

In last night’s dreams, I was in some airport wandering around by myself and trying to figure out where the gate was that I was supposed to board. It seemed no one would help me and that I did a lot of walking. I told myself I would at least have a long flight in which to get off my feet, just as soon as I could figure out what gate to go to. I passed Christine along the way but wasn’t sure she recognized me.

Then I was in a room with 3 lights. I could only get one of them to work. Then two other women were in the room and one tried to convince the other to have the carpet cleaned. I said, “That would be better than having the other lights fixed because I play on the floor with my rats all the time.”

THURSDAY, JULY 14, 2016 Met with Stacey today in Rocklin. I’m going to miss the hell out of her when I’m “cured,” so to speak, LOL. Seriously, is it possible to have a “crush” on someone you’re not attracted to? Stacey’s neither attractive nor ugly, but she sure has a helluva personality you can’t help but admire and feel comfortable with. It’s almost magnetic.

The waiting room there is huge but always empty, and Stacey’s never late.

One of the first things she asked me was whether or not I thought doing more EMDR would be helpful and I told her that I was already feeling more confident about things in general and so I wasn’t sure. So instead of doing more of that she basically asked me what next? What do I hope to accomplish next in life? As I told her, I don’t have any grand plans. Just to live in peace without any serious drama going on would be plenty good enough for me. Part of that should come from not having them give me different drugs/doses. I told her about the sore throat I had both of the times I started Pravastatin.

“My doctor blames too much, as many seem to, on anxiety. I could break a leg and she’ll tell me it’s anxiety,” I told Stacey, and she asked if I thought the doctor was a good match. Don’t see how I could really do much better, though she’s definitely better than my old doctor was.

“She was only good as eye candy,” I told her. She laughed at that one.

As for Doc A, eh, at best I can at least throw her in a story and kill her, haha.

I also had to admit it was kind of funny to end up seeing her because I was pretty much terrorized by the same drug she’s on. She’s on 50 mcg. That’s exactly the dose I would expect her to be on being that she probably weighs what I used to weigh… about 100 pounds. She was shocked when I told her how much I weighed. Muscle is heavier than fat. Her face is a bit dull and in some ways, she’s almost too skinny (we’re about the same height), but her skin is amazing for pushing 60. It’s flawless and void of wrinkles and sagging. I look like a roadmap on the other hand with all my veins and shit showing through such pale skin, but I absolutely cannot take the sun. Not without a pool and not for long even with one.

As I pointed out, what happened to me can and does happen on levothyroxine, but it’s not very common, so she need not worry about any racy hearts and emotional twisters of her own. Besides, she’s postmenopausal, so she doesn’t have the hormonal changes going on to help fuel that effect. “God help you if it ever does happen to you, though,” I told her, “as it will probably be your worst experience in life.”

We talked about family and I gave her a quick crash course of the main highlights of my life. Once she had a basic bio, she asked about Tammy and I told her she was pretty much the only family I had left after telling her about her health problems. She asked how her death would affect me and I told her that despite our past problems, it would definitely be an emotional thing for me. Although I think she still has a lot of life left to live, I can’t deny that I can’t “see” her here just like I couldn’t see myself ever seeing my parents again when they walked out our Phoenix door in 1997. Still got a bad feeling for when she’s about 62 – especially 63 – but hopefully it doesn’t mean anything.

I told her I never did or will forgive my mother, but my dad I’m kinda torn on. I hate how he let her control things so much, but it might be hard not to want to run into his arms if he suddenly materialized before me.

She asked other things like how long I’ve worked at home, and I told her about that and how I was on disability before I met Tom. She didn’t know that one till I told her. She asked if I considered myself disabled, and well, I’m pretty much disabled without being disabled. The sleep disorder keeps me from working, and not driving doesn’t help, but that doesn’t mean I can’t “work.” Just look at all I do here at home, after all. On top of that, I’ve written over 30 books and studied over half a dozen languages. So as long as I stay away from numbers and a few other things, disabled isn’t how I’d describe myself. She agreed.

She said she would guess I was very bright in school. That’s flattering, but it was actually the opposite. I did ok in science and English, but given the issues I had at the time and the fact that I catch on quicker if I teach myself things so I can go at my own pace, I didn’t do that well overall. These days I thirst for knowledge and I love to learn.

She asked about Tom’s health and my overall physical activity. Well, I skated around New England, twirled across the stage naked in Arizona, ran along the ice and snow in Oregon, and now I ride the hills of Cali on my bike. So yeah, I keep active.

She has family in Florida too, and she talked about how the summer humidity is a real killer there. That would be something that might stop us from moving there, but we’ll see.

After listing the states we’ve lived in, I said I sometimes wish we’d skipped Oregon and Cali and just gone to Florida from Arizona, but then I would always be wondering what it would be like to live here if we’d done so. Sprinkled in with the disasters were many fun and interesting adventures. “Batman,” Liz, Estella, Jane and Jan are definitely some of the most memorable people we met up in Klamath.

“But had we skipped K-Falls and NorCal, I never would’ve met you, Bob, Virginia, and others,” I told her.

“What did you used to do before the Internet days?” she asked me.

Uh… hang out with the wrong people and cause trouble. I told her I wasn’t very choosy back then and would pretty much be friends with anyone and put up with a lot of shit I wouldn’t put up with now. Yes, I’ll miss Alison at times. We had some good times. But I could never resume our friendship even if she wanted to because the trust is completely and totally gone.

Then she asked me if I ever got lonely working alone at home. Not usually, but sometimes I do. I told her why I’m hesitant to meet new people, and that friends can’t be forced any more than love can be. Tom wasn’t “planned,” and the best of friends that I’ve had, even if the friendship didn’t last forever, wasn’t sought out or planned in any way.

And then there’s my uniqueness to consider. I’m ordinary but not so ordinary at the same time, as I also told her. What many may find weird or even crazy is simply me just being me. Yeah, I do weird things. I don’t decorate “normally,” I don’t dress my age, and my brash ways can really put a lot of people off and I know that. But it’s just me being me, not meant to offend anyone. Many people would rather hear what they want to hear than the truth, as was the case with Aly. I tell people what I’m really thinking and that’s just not always acceptable in our society.

There’s also the fact that most people are running around looking for duplicate copies of themselves. It’s fine to have some common ground, but Tom and I are just one of the few people who believe in the “opposites attract” thing. As he once said, he brings a little calmness into my life while I bring a little wildness into his. We balance each other out nicely.

“You like people that are calmer, huh?” she asked.

“I’d say so, yes. People tend to either hate me or love me,” I told her, “and there’s very rarely any in-between.”

I also told her that I’m tired of being the one to usually reach out to people be it for the first time or to patch things up with those I’ve had problems with in the past. It hasn’t always been me, but most of the time it’s been on me. Look how many people I’ve looked up and contacted on Facebook compared to those who’ve looked me up. If that many people have looked me up, then they sure kept quiet about it. Seriously, I’m tired of being the one to reach out and apologize for my part in any past problems with whomever and hope they do the same and are willing to move on with me. Let’s see someone else, be it that I already know or that I’ve never met be the one to come to me first for a change.

Smart and calm is the type of person I usually gravitate to. You don’t have to have money and you can even have a dry sense of humor, but I like an overall decent and nice person who’s trustworthy and reliable. A mature person who’s just nice in general.

“But all the nice people are usually out of the question,” I told her. “They either end up being my therapist or halfway around the world.”

“Maybe I’ll be surprised,” she told me, and she does have a point. “Tom sure was a surprise.”

It isn’t that there aren’t any nice people in the park, but they just don’t “feel” right. At least not anyone I’ve met as of yet. Being friends with just anyone is like taking just anyone as a lover, and that never cut it for me. I honestly can’t see myself being “friends” with any of these people so much as just “friendly” with them. Since being in this state there haven’t been many people I’d consider being friends with Josephine and Michelle from the hotel, Doc Hottie, Shannon and Stacey. So basically, the ones that appeal to me as potential friends are the ones I do business with while the ones I live with are the dull ones. Go figure.

At the end of our session, she said something about how my childhood could affect and be related to many hardships I’ve had as an adult. Yeah, I figured that out decades ago. So if I didn’t think I needed to work on any past issues, did I want to see her again or not? she asked me. She said I could always come see her if I needed to, of course, or I could make an appointment.

I asked her what she thought would be best. Things have been up and down and unpredictable, but I’m hoping that things will finally stabilize for more than just a few months and that the past won’t return to haunt me. As Aly mentioned the other day, just when she thought things were going great, bad things happen.

Then she goes, “Well, the last time you thought it’d be best not to make an appointment…”

“…And look what happened,” I finished for her.

We both laughed and stood up. I visually scanned her tiny, windowless office as she made me an appointment for August 10th (OMG, a whole month off from appointments?!). Then being the nosy, curious person that I am, I asked if the cards she had on a pegboard were from patients, and she said yes.

My nosiness spilled over to the Internet and I did some more digging once home from the KFC we stopped at on the way back.

So Stacey’s Jewish and she’s been to Israel. Sometimes you can dig up more info if you run the names of people related to a person. When I was telling her I was named after my grandfather, she told me her sister Benne (pronounced Bennie) was named after their grandfather Ben. Found pics of her and other friends and family in Israel. Benne’s fat like me but better looking than Stacey. You almost wouldn’t think they were sisters.

On the ride home the answer to her question hit me. The one where she basically asked, “What next?”

Take back the park. Take back the enjoyment of living in a gated community, which my health issues had stolen from me, and not be afraid to go on the 2-mile runs I used to go on alone, weather permitting. Now that my anxiety has backed off, so has the fear. I’ve been able to circle close to home for quite a while now, but now it’s time to run the perimeters by myself. No more waiting till Tom can go with me.

Later…

The rats were hilarious this morning when I got up. They now know that they get a sliver of bread and lettuce when I get up. So they all raced excitedly to the upper doors of their cage. They practically tackled me playfully when I opened it and leaned in against the cage, especially Burke. He’s the definite leader of the pack. Anytime Simon or Dumbo tried to climb on me, Burke would nudge them aside, determined to get the most attention. He nips when he gets playful just like Romeo used to, but he’s harmless. Rats get bouncy and jump up and down when they get excited, and it was so cute to see. Although they’re still a little skittish, it’s nice to see them get more and more relaxed and to see them happy. They have an awesome cage in an awesome home. Next weekend is when we’re going to move Cappy in with them. This cage is so big it could easily house a dozen rats, though 4 is plenty.

Our new phones arrived but we probably won’t be able to use them till the weekend. Tom is going to pick up the cards to activate them tomorrow on the way home from work. They’re at Walmart. He’s working on Saturday, so he’s going to be pretty busy. Yeah, vacation’s over for both of us, LOL.

I hope that the new phones are easier to use. We’re going to get new numbers. We’ve been in Sacramento 3 years now and a Sacramento area code would be nice instead of an Auburn one. Besides, we’re going to be here for several more years. It shouldn’t be too much of a pain in the ass to update the number for those who need it. It’s simple enough, thanks to Facebook and email to give friends and family the number, and I can update it on Mercy’s portal, and on important websites. Tom can stop by and give it to the park, too. I like the idea of Andy, Paula and Aly not knowing my number, not that I expect them to ever call me, especially Paula and Aly.

My throat is better today, but I still feel traces of irritation. I wonder if it would be worse if I sat talking for 45 minutes to Stacey and then even longer to Tom like I did yesterday. I just hope it goes away and that it’s not the start of a whole new problem.

Eight days late on my period finally showed up. I figured it would. Really hope they stop soon. I’ve got to have less than 4 years to go because I’ve been irregular for a year or two now.

Later…

Was too tired to write any more about Stacey yesterday. The one thing I didn’t write about was that I think she may actually like me. Maybe not necessarily in a physical way, but it was just something I sensed. Not sure how much I trust my gut feeling, though, on this one. I once thought a therapist that came to see me on Oswego Street in Springfield back in my twenties had a thing for me with the way she would promise to show me her biceps and shit like that, but then I found out I was wrong. I would like to think that 25+ years later I’m a little smarter than I was back then, though.

It wasn’t so much anything Stacey said but her body language instead. Again, I’m probably reading her all wrong. After all, wouldn’t she have remembered that I went on a cruise, had a heatstroke, and hadn’t seen my sister in 25 years? Unless she just realized that she likes me - and yes, sometimes these things do take time - I would think it’d only be natural to remember more of what they said. She doesn’t take notes, though, while we talk like other therapists I’ve had do.

Another thing that doesn’t support my so-called “gut” feeling is the fact that she said she hasn’t been to my blog. Well, wouldn’t she be curious if she liked me? I don’t think I could have that kind of self-control and restraint. I would be curious about what info and pictures I could dig up on the person, but I’m an info whore regardless of who it is. Still, the more you like someone, the more you’re curious, right?

I wouldn’t be surprised if she acted just the opposite the next time I see her. I’ve had various people in various places and situations give me what I think are these hints only to be the exact opposite the next time I see them. She may even appear kind of cold, but we’ll see. It’s hard to imagine such a calm easy-going person being cold, but she might seem more distant in a sense.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 13, 2016 I don’t believe it. I just don’t fucking believe it. I have had a sore throat for much of the day. WTF? Just WTF? I still think the pravastatin affected my throat because it’s too much of a coincidence that I got a sore throat right after both of the times I took it. Also, others have complained about the same thing, and the pharmacist knew what I was talking about when I mentioned it. But what the hell is going on now? I even had what I describe as the partial runs where it’s not solid, but not liquid, as gross as that sounds, though it was only once. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see how often it occurs.

I also had a headache come on late last night, but I’m happy to say I’ve been less lightheaded.

I got the ivory Egyptian sheets today. I’m such an idiot, though. I looked online and they said it was delivered, but I didn’t see anything outside either door. So I went next door to see if they claimed the package for me. As I approached their storm door (the inner door is always open during the daytime when it’s nice out), I could see Virginia on the couch watching TV while Bob was asleep in his recliner. She came to the door and I asked her about it, but she was clueless.

She asked how I’ve been and we talked for a little while. I told her I was worried something happened to them when they disappeared and she said that they had to go to Denver on a family emergency. She said next time they would tell us when they took off.

Then Tom came home and found the sheets placed behind the broom in front. Duh! Never thought to look there cuz they always leave stuff on the other side of the door and not behind anything.

I rejoined Tumblr last night. Even though I always found that site a bit difficult to use, I rejoined because it’s the easiest way to make a voice blog, which I thought would be neat to have for variety. It’s where I’ll pour my thoughts out, both personal and not. And while there will be no sensitive information, as usual. I’ve decided to keep this to myself. Only Tom knows about it. I live a pretty ordinary life, so I won’t be discussing much that others don’t already know, and I doubt I’ll update it as regularly as my text blog.

TUESDAY, JULY 12, 2016 Where Andy was obsessed with food and celebrities, I’m definitely obsessed with these designer nails. This time I’ve gone zebra. :)

As of early yesterday, all the side effects caused by the Pravastatin were gone. Sure wish I could’ve recovered that fast from the uptick of levothyroxine.

Other than a dozen or so bouts of project noise in the 3 years we’ve been here, Bob and Virginia really are fantastic neighbors. Best we’ve ever had. They have a quiet vehicle and they have no loud company. In fact, they rarely have any company at all.

Was worried for a minute there when I awoke to find a total of 4 vehicles at the new people’s place yesterday that an awful lot of people had suddenly moved in. But it was just out-of-towners visiting. Only one vehicle and two people live there.

Given the epic levels of violence by blacks on blacks and blacks on whites, I have never felt such disgust for blacks as a whole. I can’t stand to be on Facebook cuz I am just so sick of the whole BLM thing which is nothing but a legal hate group. Still wondering how much more violence and race-card playing it’s going to take before people finally trade politically correct for common sense and stop making excuses for these monstrous criminals. Seriously, did blacks ever stop and think that maybe they’re making some of their own haters just with their appalling and despicable behavior? Yeah, some people were just born to hate. But others hate because we give them reason to.

Got into it with Leslie online about the rats last night, because, like many people out there, she can’t handle people’s honesty very well if it’s not what she wants to hear. But as I told her, the rats are incredibly skittish and I could’ve gotten the same thing or better for so much less at a pet store. Why say you breed calm loving rats if you don’t? They’re just out to make a buck, and I wonder how many of their testimonials are even real. The rats aren’t vicious, but they’re not friendly. Burke is kind of loosening up a bit, but the other two still run like we’re going to kill them.

Leslie offered to buy back the rats, but Tom wants to keep them. He’s optimistic while I’m realistic. I don’t know why he doesn’t see this after all the rats we’ve had, but while guinea pigs can calm down in time, for example, rats are pretty much always who they’re going to be. They can improve somewhat, but basically a calm, sociable rat has always been that way, just like a timid one has always been timid. It would be like my mother adopting my father’s personality or vice versa when they were alive, and that just doesn’t happen.

This now makes only 2 good rats out of 10. I swear it’s like Tinkerbell knew she was queen and is jealous of any rat we get and is somehow keeping them from being good enough rats to really enjoy (assuming she really is still out there somewhere in the afterlife). Tinkerboy was a fairly decent rat, and Sugar was an outstanding rat, but look at what happened to Sugar in the end. If this is even remotely true, then maybe she would make sure that any kind of pet of any breed didn’t work out. Simone sure didn’t.

They added S11 of Criminal Minds on Netflix, so I’m watching that and looking forward to S4 of Bates Motel. Couldn’t get into Bones cuz it focused too much on the scientific aspect of the cases and not the cases themselves.

We had to cancel our eye appointments for this Saturday because now the stupid insurance company is saying we can’t go until August. Going to have to call and find out what’s going on, but I swear it’s like something up there doesn’t want us getting new glasses.

Last night I dreamed that I was staying someplace for a week in which I was either working or attending some kind of activities. As I rolled over in my bed that night trying to get comfortable, I realized that it was only Wednesday and I still had a couple more days to hold my schedule.

Then, while in the same place, I was getting lunch from the cafeteria. I asked some guy if we were swimming that day and he said we were. I was glad to have my suit on underneath my clothes.

There was a long buffet-style table set up and before I went to take a plate, I reached for a younger woman’s hand to check out her designer nails (black and white zebra?), and she pulled away as if she didn’t like me or something.

Haven’t looked in on Becky’s wall, though I looked in on Sarah’s wall. Becky’s wall is probably similar with all the “good daddy” crap, though she isn’t obsessed with selfies. Sure enough, almost every single post of Sarah’s is about her shit father, and the latest selfie was 23 hours ago.

I was right to unfollow them both. The Sarah selfies get old, as lovely as she may be, and the good daddy shit is beyond old. Definitely doesn’t bring back great memories. Good daddy? Yeah, probably. Good husband, stepdaddy and BIL? Hardly!

MONDAY, JULY 11, 2016 I am saying no to drugs… Literally. I have absolutely HAD IT with side effects and I’m done with the Pravastatin! After backing off to the point where I thought it was gone for good, the throat irritation returned with a vengeance and I had flu-like symptoms, which you can get on Pravastatin. Didn’t have much of a cough, but I had a little tightness in the chest. Not the OMG severe tightness I had when my thyroid meds backfired on me, but there was some degree of tightness, and it only made sense to assume that the side effects would have worsened had I kept taking the stuff. It really sucks too, to have gotten all excited about not having any stomach or anxiety issues on the stuff, just to end up “sick.”

When I asked the pharmacist about it, she knew exactly what I was talking about and said she doubted the sore throat would go away. She recommended I treat the sore throat and give it a little more time since Pravastatin is said to be highly effective with lowering cholesterol, but dangerous or not, I can’t live that way. A dry mouth and a few aches and pains… ok. But a sore throat and feeling like you’ve got a cold or the flu? No way. It wasn’t scary like levothyroxine can be, but damn was it annoying as hell!

Finally fed up after two years of dealing with side effects on and off, I’d had enough. I’ve simply and totally had my fill of driving myself crazy to keep trying this and keep trying that. I need a break! No more new drugs, no more raising doses on old drugs. Besides, no plaque was found in my arteries and I’m not in imminent danger, so why suffer to prevent a heart attack or a stroke I may never get? Unless it’s a case of do or die, I’m not taking shit. My thyroid is different. That’s not a case of maybe it will die on me. It has died, so levothyroxine is important and needed. I’ll just be damned if I’ll suffer needlessly anymore for the sake of “perfect” numbers or to prevent what may never happen.

Decided not to tell Doc A of my decision till I see her. She’s not my mother. I don’t have to “report” to her.

I gotta die someday anyway. I may not be old yet, but I’m not young either. If a meteorite fell to the earth and killed me, or I died in a car accident, or by a homicidal maniac, or from a disease… then it was obviously meant to be. I have no kids to leave behind, and just like I managed to live alone for many years before meeting Tom, so did he. He’s a big boy. He’d miss me, of course, but he can be self-sufficient, even if that meant he’d have to keep up the house, pets, laundry and other things on top of his job. :)

Why was he wheeling a cart full of groceries alongside the freeway, though, in my dreams last night? LOL, I was watching him from behind a fence or something. There was a cluster of people nearby. He stopped the cart, turned around and walked several feet to talk to some guy. I was worried someone would steal the groceries while he wasn’t paying attention, so I hurried over. I got the impression he was paying the guy to help us somehow, and for some reason, I didn’t feel the guy deserved the money.

SUNDAY, JULY 10, 2016 We’ve now been in this house for 3 years. Yesterday was noisy, but today is peaceful. We went out walking by the lake after I talked to Tammy.

Last night I had a dream that Tammy acquired a lot of money and was looking to move, not that I can imagine she would in real life if she did obtain a lot of money. Her place is plenty beautiful and spacious enough and she lives in a gorgeous area. I’d love to live there if Hawaii’s out of the question. I’d be a little worried about the humidity, but it definitely wouldn’t be economically smart to stay here for the rest of our lives. Cali’s too expensive.

Anyway, I wondered if the dream meant that Tammy might be suing her surgeons since the surgery she had to help alleviate her pain was a bust, but she was told up front that it might not work. Maybe Mark will find work then, but who knows?

She described another procedure they’re going to try since her leg and back pain is really bad. On top of the fibromyalgia, she’s got bad arthritis, but not typical aging arthritis. It’s some kind of autoimmune-related thing. She said something about them trying a “big drug” that’s been used for cancer and things like that. She’s had a lot of shakiness in her hands too, she also said. It sucks that she’s still suffering. Hopefully, the next step will help.

I have now taken 4 Pravastatin doses and the throat irritation that had backed off has picked up again. I asked her about it, but she said she’s never heard of those on this type of statin having sore throats.

According to some research we did, it can last a few days, a few weeks or even longer. One person said they took it for two years and had a sore throat the whole time. It’s not a scary or dangerous side effect, but it’s annoying at times. Gonna give it a little more time, though, since I’ve only been on it a week. I just hope it doesn’t get worse! I’m just glad I haven’t had any anxiety or issues with my stomach or muscles. Still, I’ve had enough of the medication issues. Since no plaque was found in my arteries and I’m in no imminent danger, I will stop the statins if my throat doesn’t improve soon enough.

What’s weird is that in a study they did, the same amount of people given fakes complained of throat irritation as did those given the real thing. So they couldn’t really prove a connection, but since nothing has changed but the fact that I went on statins, I think it is related and not anxiety like Doc A thinks. Hell, if I broke a leg she’d tell me it was anxiety, LOL. I agree that the facial tingling could be anxiety as she said, but I haven’t had much of that. Also, I got a sore throat the first time I took these statins last month. Hard to believe that’s just a coincidence. I’ve never had a sore throat when being anxious before, though I have had that lump in the throat kind of feeling. I’ve never even heard of anxiety causing throat irritation.

I just might’ve been on the verge of panicking this morning had I been alone. I don’t know what the hell happened, but as I was waking up it was almost like I heard this strange roaring sound in the left side of my head and neck, but I was fine as soon as I stood up. Probably just that ear draining.

The rats are still shy, but not crazy shy. I can handle them easily enough whenever I want to. They’re using their “poop pan,” too. I didn’t think they would, but yes, they do most of their turding in the triangular plastic poop pan that’s in a corner of their cage. They piss everywhere, though, so as to mark their territory.

I’m 4 days late for my period as my body struggles to produce enough estrogen to turn on a period. It’s like my body just doesn’t quite get how to make periods anymore, but I don’t think I’m done with them yet. I think within a week I’ll get one. I got all watery and bloated, but now it’s backed off a bit. It’s like it can’t make up its mind.

Got up at 6am and it was down to 71° in here, that’s how mild this summer has been for the most part. Of course I still hot flashed the night away, LOL.

Besides money coming Tammy’s way, I also had a dream my old endo became a dentist and then a counselor.

SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2016 So Aly was in the hospital the other day wanting a “hug and a friend.” Well, if Kim isn’t cutting it for her then maybe it’s time to rethink who she dumps/keeps as friends. She never tweeted at all yesterday so maybe something else happened, which wouldn’t surprise me.

Even though I haven’t heard the woodpecker, we’re going to sweep off the patio roof today. The vacation has made me lazier as far as exercising goes, but more active in other ways. I’m doing things I don’t normally do. Like going through 40 years’ worth of papers to file in our new file box.

Tom is also replacing the brake light that went out. On our way in from one of our many outings, we had just entered the park and were about to turn onto the street before ours when a car raced up alongside Tom. He hit the horn, thinking they were trying to pass him cuz they thought he was going too slow over the speed bump, but instead, the woman was trying to tell him about the brake light.

Now some pig’s in trouble for threatening a black girl from his Facebook page, no doubt spawned from the Dallas massacre. Oh right, so they give him a slap on the wrist or something. Big deal. I understand the police’s frustration with the black community as they become increasingly violent, but are the cops really much better with the way they seem to think they’re above the law… making threats, kicking ass and lying to people? Believe me, even though it’s been 16 years, if that black pig came to this door right now…

Later…

Decided that I would keep my FO book on Prosebox, but create a MO book since it’s been a while since Kim and Aly have used the site. Oh, they’ll be back. They just won’t be able to find my old account, of course, when they go looking for it to block it.

In the MO book, I won’t mention names. Tom will just be “my husband.” Tammy will just be “my sister.” If they read around enough they would probably figure out who I am just by the things I say and the way I write, but I’m tired of letting them deprive me of the fun of “meeting” new people, risky or not. I may not be sociable in real life because it’s harder to meet people offline when you work at home, but I’m usually pretty sociable online. Oh yes, I’m coming back, Prosebox! Wonder how many others will realize who I am that I blocked on my old account, LOL. I just miss the fun of mingling with different people from different states/countries and seeing what they have to say about the things I write about, etc. I’m still going to write for myself first, then be selective about what I share in public second. Too many emotional wimps out there that I don’t want to deal with. It’s not just a matter of people’s sensitivity, but also a matter of some things simply not being anyone’s business but mine. The only thing I didn’t like about Prosebox is that the more followers you gain, the more you’re kind of obligated to follow and comment on them in return and that can get kind of old and time-consuming.

No, I don’t want another Molly stalking me for nearly a decade, and no, I don’t want another Kim going ballistic on me if I decide I’ve had enough of her lies, and no, I don’t want another Aly who I think really cares about me and then dumps me after 8 years of what I thought was mostly a good friendship despite the lies and other shit. But life is about taking chances and I’m not about to hide forever just because of a handful of shitheads.

I’ll still keep my FO book in case I decide to return to FO mode.

Later…

So Aly tweeted something about how she and Bri (a long-time cyber pal) talked things over and Aly’s hoping that this time she really understands just how rude she sometimes is. Fingers crossed!

Did she ever think that maybe the problem is her? And let me guess… Bri doesn’t know about this account, right?

I’ve never talked to Bri but recognize her name both on Twitter and Facebook. I also couldn’t resist myself. I just had to warn her. Even though I have absolutely no right to do so and know it’s not my place to stick my nose in it, I couldn’t help but feel bad for her. Just like Aly did with me, she’s basically saying things behind her back that should be said directly to her, and she’s doing it in public for the entire world to see except probably Bri herself. Bri’s no doubt going to get dumped next.

I have no idea what kind of person Bri is. She could be a rude asshole that deserves a good talking to and maybe even a dumping. But the more honest she is (in a way Aly doesn’t agree with) and the more her personality differs from Aly’s, the more likely she could be dumped. Aly likes crazy. Crazy, dishonest, forgetful, selfish, stupid, unreliable… that sort of thing. Anyone else she’ll always have a problem with.

Again, I don’t know Bri, but I have a feeling she too, is about to go from thinking she’s had this really great friend for many years that she’ll probably always have, to being shocked, hurt and angry to find she’s been tossed out like yesterday’s trash.

The more I see Aly’s true colors shine… her thirst for drama, her dishonesty, the way she lies and blames others for her problems… the less I miss her. I used to see through the bad and right to the good in her, but not anymore. I know without a doubt I’ll never hear from her again, but if I did there’s no way I’d be dumb enough to forgive her and resume our so-called friendship. I would simply ignore her. Sure hope I would, anyway.

All morning long I had to listen to chainsaws (outside the park), woodchippers, lawnmowers and blowers. It fucking sucks.

Survived my fourth statin and still not too worried about his return to work. Maybe knowing I’m seeing Stacey again on Wednesday helps, too? Either way, I feel much more confident. I even had a few wonderfully familiar moments of wishing I had more space to concentrate on things around here.

I noticed a second SUV in the Twenties’ driveway this morning and thought, great. They got a second vehicle or someone moved in. But then Tom said they had a housewarming party last night and someone probably stayed over when it got late. Said there were 3-4 cars there, but they were quiet. Yeah, right. I’m sure the door slamming was a nightmare, but he wouldn’t have noticed or cared, LOL. Glad I wasn’t awake for it.

Later…

Last night I dreamed that we were swimming at the beach in Maui. Tom dove down under a wave as I stood on the shore and felt myself begin to worry when he took too long to resurface. When he finally did I told him I was about to panic and he laughed like it was no big deal and said, “What? I could stay under longer if I wanted to.”

Then the night before I dreamed something about borrowing a mop for a pretty big bathroom that had 4-5 stalls. Some guy told me I would be taken into custody if I didn’t return the mop when I was done with it.

Tom took a peek at the patio roof and said he didn’t see anything for the woodpeckers to be interested in, but a few twigs. He said the roof looked in even better condition than it does from the street too, so they haven’t done any damage that we know of. This may explain why I haven’t heard from them lately. They’re supposed to be active in the spring anyway.

I guess now I can get to the bad news. These are our absolute LAST and final rats ever. Some other breed of animal will one day live in this cage that I never would’ve spent over $200 on had I known I’d get the same timid crap I’ve been getting from pet stores. Maybe some kind of exotic bird or chinchillas will live in this humungous cage after the rats are gone in 2-3 years from now. Seriously, I’d rather a loud lovable pet than a quiet shy pet.

These rats are horrible. Insanely adorable, but horrible. They don’t bite but they act like I’m going to kill them every time I go near them. They’ve gotten a little better, but they’ll never be anything like some of our best rats have been. Bleu Royale Rattery is obviously not about what they say they’re about. No wonder they wanted to meet us in public. Plus, it was the mother that met us, not Leslie. Leslie’s her daughter, who she says is autistic. That’s not the issue. The issue is that they lied on their site and on Facebook about their rats being handled since birth and oh so calm. Trust me, these rats weren’t handled regularly, and if they were it was by the wrong person. I’ve had rats since 1998. I can tell these things.

I thought about saying something to them, but what good would it do now? What’s done is done and it won’t change anything. They would never buy back the rats, and even if they did, we’d still be stuck with this mansion of a cage. Might as well let them live their lives in it. But if you want rats, save yourself a fortune and just go to a regular pet store. Maybe not all ratteries are the same, but you won’t get anything special from this one. They’re just people breeding and selling rats just like the pet stores do and that’s it.

They’ll let me handle them (sometimes without a fight) but they clearly would rather interact with each other as opposed to people. I miss having people-loving rats! But it’s like it’s not meant to be in this state. Other than Tinkerboy and Sugar, that is, and look what happened to Sugar. After his stroke, he was severely disabled for half of his life.

FRIDAY, JULY 8, 2016 Doc A says she thinks the throat irritation and tingling are due to anxiety and recommends I keep taking the statins. Well, since my symptoms have improved I will, though I doubt the throat part was anxiety alone.

About a dozen cops were shot and half a dozen killed last night as a protest. Damn blacks. Just damn them. I’m by far no fan of the police. Many of them are corrupt bastards high on power-play. However, this has given me a newfound disgust for blacks. The more violent they are, the less people are going to accept them yet they just don’t seem to get this. Seriously, how can they do shit like this and then complain that no one likes them?

Over the years I have watched so many blacks ruin so many lives without much, if any, provocation, including that of my husband and myself. I refuse to be “politically correct” and side with them or any other troublemaking group in society.

The Twenties are just as racist as I am, LOL. They threw a Trump sign outside their place. If Hillary wasn’t a female and I wasn’t more sexist than racist I would hope Trump got elected. Really think Trump is a closeted gay as are many who hate women that much. Just like bullies are often feeling just as worthless as those they bully, well, many times one can hate someone (or a group) because they see themselves in that person/people, and it’s a part of themselves they’re not able/ready to accept. So they go and they marry women for show and cuz it’s the “right thing to do” as they’re usually able to at least stand to have sex with them. Of course fatties like my mother and her mother picked on my weight. They were even fatter and they were seeing a budding image of themselves in my few extra pounds.

Anyway, I found the Twenties’ Facebook profiles. She’s from Cali, he’s from Iowa. She worked at a place called CoreLogic. He was a census worker. Sure enough, they showed support when the Muzzies attacked France, but nothing for the gays in Orlando. So they’re probably even bigger haters than I am, but as long as they’re quiet they can hate away!

Later…

I had been hesitant to share much of the anxiety I’ve dealt with on and off for the last two years in public so as not to confuse or bring down those who don’t get it. I get that many don’t get some things they haven’t experienced firsthand and therefore can’t relate to. Instead, they will remind me to “smile” and “think positive.” Not that they’re wrong for saying so as it’s always good to smile and think positively. But sometimes things are a little more complicated than that and they take a little more work and time than just positive thoughts and phrases. Even I wouldn’t be able to comprehend how a grown adult could have bouts of being afraid to be alone in a gated, upscale community if I hadn’t been one of those adults. Well, take it from me… sometimes our logic doesn’t go with our emotions and this can be due to medical reasons and or medications. I know. It happened to me and now I’m willing to share more of my story in public, and this is a copy of that.

Thanks to meeting with Stacey yesterday, I don’t feel so anxious about the idea of Tom returning to work next Monday after restarting the statins which restarted my anxiety. I even told her I almost wished I could see her every month for life since I always feel better afterward, LOL. To say she’s been the most helpful counselor of any that I’ve ever seen is quite an understatement!

“I’m only going to see her once just to make my doctor happy,” I had said last year until I was reminded that some things really do take time to get over and heal from. The horrifying event may be over, but it’s not “over” for those who experience the horror. At least not right away. And while we may never forget a certain event, we really can overcome things, just not usually as fast as we’d like. I will probably always have a fear of medication in general, but it was nice when I could finally take the painkillers once again that I’ve always taken for cramps and whatnot without fearing something bad would come of it.

I met with her alone, which not surprisingly, she said she’d prefer. Tom would have been a distraction. And so the EMDR sessions have begun and Stacey has helped get me to see that I wasn’t so weak and helpless after all (the day I was traumatized two years ago). I did manage to dial 911, and I did get the back door open as well. Our ultimate goal is to make it less likely for me to panic in the future if something scary happens.

She waved two fingers in front of my face as I saw done on some YouTube vids, only she moved them faster than I expected. Keeping my head still, she had me follow her fingers with my eyes. I found it much harder than I thought it would be to move my eyes so fast from side to side, so she switched to up and down. During those times I was supposed to think of a negative trait I believed I had at the time, then later a positive one. In between these hand movements, which would only last about 10 seconds, I was to walk myself through the event…

My heart suddenly booming in my chest.

Running out of the bedroom.

Running down the hall.

Fumbling with the new phone I wasn’t yet familiar with and hoping I could call 911.

Finally getting through to 911 despite how shaky my hands were.

Next… getting the back door open in case I didn’t survive until the paramedics arrived.

Stepping out of the house and into the carport, phone in hand, trying to remember the space number for the dispatcher.

Seeing a curious worker across the street glance at me through the Cypress trees at the sound of my frantic voice.

Hearing the sound of the paramedics approaching.

Moving toward the end of the driveway.

Relief running through me as a young redheaded guy exited the passenger side of the fire truck.

A gurney wheeled from the back of the ambulance that was parked behind the fire truck.

The paramedics hooking me to a cardiogram.

Them assuring me that I didn’t accidentally take a lethal dose of levothyroxine and that I didn’t have a heart attack…

Then we talked about how my fear ultimately ended up turning into confusion and then to anger.

When I went back into the house after the paramedics left I didn’t understand why I still felt like such shit if I didn’t have a heart attack or OD. I thought I just needed a good night’s sleep, yet I still felt like crap the next day. My heart raced and pounded on and off. I would experience flashes of dread and a sense of things just not being right at all. I felt weak and as if my legs were made of concrete. The only thing I was sure of at the time was that it was somehow connected to my thyroid meds. Sometimes the anxiety was more physical (racing heart, shaking, tingling, throat lump, upset stomach) and other times it was more emotional (feeling fearful, suddenly bursting into tears, wanting to scream).

The team of doctors I had at the time was anything but helpful, insisting I was “just anxious” and I should keep on taking the medication, but instead I stopped both my thyroid and statin medication and began the hunt for a new team of doctors with a new medical group. Sadly, it would take about 6 months to learn what really happened that fateful day in July of 2014, which is where my confusion would turn to anger.

I was very angry that my first set of doctors didn’t take the time to warn me about what could happen on levothyroxine in conjunction with other things that may be going on… tachycardia, perimenopause… that can create the perfect storm.

I eventually got a good team of doctors who explained to me about pockets of activity flaring up within the thyroid before they burn out for good. For about 3 months I continued to have scattered bursts of anxiety and instances where my heart would start racing because that’s how long it usually takes for your body to adjust after your dose is lowered or you stop the medication altogether. I still have some anxiety; just not nearly as much.

Today I’m on a dose suitable for my body, though first we had to “overflow my tank,” as my specialist put it, in order to find what dose I feel best at. 88 mcgs is just a touch high and 75 is just a touch low, but still enough to keep me out of danger.

Another reason I was angry at the doctors was that they failed to tell me I was going through perimenopause. I thought you had to be in your mid to late 50s for that, and so I didn’t recognize my symptoms as being related to that right away. Anxiety, hot flashes and sleep disturbances have been my most noticeable symptoms of perimenopause and yes, perimenopause is WAY worse than getting regular periods, LOL. With periods, you get them and then you’re done for a few weeks. With perimenopause, some days are easier than others, but it’s an everyday thing.

Every. Single. Day.

As Stacey said, though, it’s counterproductive to hang onto that anger because it can have a similar physiological effect as anxiety. It’s not always easy to do, though I’m working on it.

Will see Stacey again next week. Meanwhile, she shocked the shit out of me when she told me she too, has hypothyroidism. I was shocked due to how thin she is, though it’s really only her arms and legs that are thin. She has tummy rolls same as I do. She works out and watches what she eats and is naturally thin and non-muscular while I’m naturally fat and muscular. She’d probably be as big or bigger than me if she weren’t.

What was strange was how I recently had a dream that some woman told me she was on levothyroxine and I was shocked because she was so thin. Only the woman didn’t look anything like Stacey.

THURSDAY, JULY 7, 2016 Our new babies are here!!! We met Leslie’s mother in Taco Bell’s parking lot. Because one of the dark rats turned out to be a hermaphrodite, LOL, they substituted him-her with a Dumbo rat. This worked out better because I think having two dark rats would make them hard to tell apart. Dumbo rats’ ears don’t rise above their eyes and his fur is a bit wavy and wooly compared to the smooth shiny fur of his roomies. This is our first Dumbo rat and while I still don’t think they’re as cute as top-eared rats, they’re not as ugly as I thought they would be. Dumbo is a cutie. Yeah, I’m just calling him Dumbo.

I’m calling the other dark one Burke because he’s a Berkshire rat, and Simon is our Siamese rat. He looks exactly like Sugar ratty looked, only Sugar has dark eyes, which makes him a Himalayan rat.

They’re a little shyer than I expected them to be, but I will work with them after seeing Stacey this morning.

The new cage is HUGE! It took us about an hour and a half to put it together. It’s very heavy but sturdy and is more of a dark charcoal gray than a true black. I could almost stand up in the thing that’s how big it is. The giant rat sticker looks cool behind it. We plan to add more accessories to it soon. We’ve got splatter guards on the way because the bedding pans are a little shallow. I’m surprised they didn’t make a big mess because certainly, they had to have been up all night while we slept. They’re nocturnal and they certainly would have been curious and wound up. After all, yesterday was their first car ride and they’re used to being in a small glass aquarium.

They kind of huddled together in the white-wired, magenta-based little birdcage we transported them home in, but you could see the excitement in their movements as soon as we assembled the cage and were able to load them into it. Rats will always tell you if they like something by their bouncy movements. When I got up real early this morning, Simon was on the wheel. They’re all asleep now.

They also have a hanging hammock and some wood chews on the way.

Tom printed some brackets with the 3-D printer to make it easier to attach the baseboards to the legs of the couch to keep them from nesting underneath it when they’re out and about. Oh, the havoc Little Buddy wreaked on our Arizona couch! LOL

We got a really nice white two-drawer file cabinet with a shallow drawer on top that we plan to keep in the utility room. It can be locked but we see no point in locking in it. One problem is that the folding bikes are in the way of where we want to it. The plan is to raise one of the bikes and hook it on the wall just above the other bike, which can stay at the side of the file box. Another problem is that the pedals stick way out, so we ordered folding pedals.

Yesterday, while awaiting the arrival of the new cage and then to pick up the rats, I began sorting through papers and the file box. I used to have one giant medical file, for example, but I think at our ages it’s time for multiple medical file folders, even though we’re still pretty healthy. Like a folder for Massachusetts & Arizona and one for California. Maybe someday there will be a Florida one. We mostly have the Boston records on my ear surgery, our eye exams, and my thyroid tests.

Yesterday I sent a message to Doc A letting her know that although most of it is gone, I had throat irritation and some lip-tingling, though no stomach or anxiety issues. She did ask to be kept updated anyway. I just want to make sure this isn’t dangerous, though I doubt it is.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 6, 2016 So these two teens were beaten outside a Brooklyn Mosque and even though I’m supposed to have a bleeding heart for them, especially if they didn’t provoke the attack, I just can’t. I know it’s the same attitude they had with the Jews way back when, deciding that all Jews should pay for what some may’ve supposedly done, but I just can’t feel any sympathy for them. Instead, all I can think is that it’s about time WE gave THEM a taste of their own vicious medicine. I mean come on! Jews didn’t do shit compared to what so many Muslims have done in this world any more than gays have. I still say Muslims, blacks and some Hispanics deserve what they get. It’s hard for me to have any empathy for groups that have been known to be so horribly violent and totally detrimental to society.

Still enjoying our vacation even though it’s going much too fast. We’re shopping, eating, relaxing and getting things done around the house. The usual annoyances can be heard along the way… Landscaping, hammering, loud traffic…

Speaking of loud, shopping at Target yesterday was almost a miserable experience due to all the screaming brats in practically every aisle. I can’t believe how out of control kids have become. Ever since the 90’s I’ve noticed this and it just gets worse and worse. I wonder if it’s mostly a Western thing because we ate with family in Florida during primetime and not once did I hear any kids. Even the stores were pretty peaceful. Never once do I remember screaming kids in stores and restaurants when I lived in New England either. You could never in a million years go to stores or restaurants here during their busiest hours and not have to deal with unruly kids. That’s why we make it a point to shop and eat when it’s not so busy. Seriously, it was just horrible… ear-piercing screams, five-year-olds left to run up and down the place without supervision, and a little kid pushing against me to get at the candy section (although its mother did apologize for that one). What is the world going to be like 20 years from now with these kids running it who aren’t taught a shred of respect and consideration for others?

We wanted to be out from 10 AM to 1 PM because as the newsletter warned, the water would be turned off during those hours for line repairs. As sick as I am of these water outages, at least they were punctual about turning it back on.

At Target I finally found the ideal handbag. It’s medium-sized and a bold shade of pink.

We also got a new file box, which is way overdue, and some folders to go with it. We have this small plastic one that is a pain in the ass to use because it’s not only too small but threatens to topple over every time we pull the drawer out.

We first went treasure hunting at Goodwill. It was pretty chilly in there. Where are the hot flashes when you need them? At least my period is late again. :-)

I grabbed a cute little pink plastic couch for dolls, a pink beaded necklace, a pair of really large barrettes that’s hard to find, and a cat toy for the rats since rats like to chase things too. It’s a pink and purple fuzzy thing dangling from a purple stick.

We stopped at Walmart to see if we could get eye exams but they were booked up until Monday.

We ate lunch at Carl’s and they charged us for bottled water, which we feel they shouldn’t have because we ordered combos that are supposed to include drinks. We would have preferred soda, but the soda machines were broken. Never had any problems with them in the past, but congratulations Carl, you just lost a couple of customers.

Said hello to Joe the mailman when I noticed he was pulling in right as we did. We have been getting a lot of things in the mail and are expecting more. I have received all the designer nails I ordered on Amazon, and right now I’m wearing a set I got from Raley’s.

Today’s to be a very exciting day. This evening we will be meeting Leslie to pick up the three male rats we have adopted! The timing is perfect because the new cage is to be arriving today. Their new water bottle has already arrived and so has the cage’s entry/exit ramp. The ramp is covered in a nice soft cloth that’s blue on one side and purple on the other.

The only thing that sucks is that they can’t meet us till the evening. Well, I’ve been up since 1am, so I may not be able to go with Tom.

The rats were born on May 13th. Haha, Maliheh’s birthday, huh?

Besides new Androids, we ordered a hammock made of the same material/colors this morning. I might eventually get splatter guards since the bedding pans are shallow. I love how this brand has accessories and parts you can order.

The ramp feels very solid and I can see what people mean when they describe the cage as being very heavy. It should be a very nice house for many rats to enjoy for many years to come.

As for our own house, it’s a little bigger than I realized it was. For some reason, I thought it was 1340 square feet, but it’s actually 1488.

Later…

LMAO at Aly’s usual rants… she’s alone, depressed and miserable and feeling oh so ignored. But wait! I thought she was supposed to be happier without me. LOL, wondering when she’ll regret not only dumping someone who actually cared but that she also didn’t have to repeat herself over and over again like she does with her very unreliable and forgetful “friend.” You can only be critical and judgmental of her when it’s in ways she likes and agrees with, though. But hey, Kim’s the type of person she prefers in her life, and she still has a right to pick and choose her own friends.

I just wish there wasn’t still a part of me wishing she’d contact me with hopes of working things out and resuming our friendship, even if I’d find it hard to trust her. No wonder Andy’s so distrustful of people that he’s denied himself a boyfriend most of his life, though I think part of that is also due to him preferring his solitude and not having a personality that’s overly appealing. Looks great for his age, though.

Nonetheless, I could kick myself for missing her despite some of the things she’s either said to me directly or that she didn’t think I’d see, be it the truth or not. I try to remind myself that if she were back in my life, all she’d do is bullshit me, whine that I’m not giving her enough attention, and complain about my honesty. I can change some of my ways to make various people happier (hey, life is about compromising after all), but I still need to be me and that means I’m nobody’s liar. I’m not going to tell someone what they want to hear if it’s a lie, but I can at least keep my opinions to myself more often.

I refuse, though. I refuse to be the one to reach out to either create or resume friendships with people. It’s almost always me who’s been the one to do this and I won’t do it anymore. Will Aly, Nane or Maliheh ever contact me on their own? Almost certainly not. So, therefore, will I be the one to take the honors? No fucking way. For now, I guess I’ll just try not to give a shit about those that don’t give a shit about me.

TUESDAY, JULY 5, 2016 Took my second statin dose before bed, and amazingly, I’m up now with a stable throat and stomach, and no anxiety. Could be too soon for the anxiety to kick in, but I’m pretty sure I woke up with it after my 2nd dose last month. If Tom was suddenly going to work, well, that could very well change things. So far so good, though, I’m not ready to twirl and squeal with delight and consider myself out of the woods. Gotta get to the 6th without butterflies or heart attacks.

I hot flashed in my sleep and sure enough, the racing heart was on, though Fitbit doesn’t show an HR over 100. I think there’s something about the microfiber sheets that causes me to overheat (besides perimenopause). I should be going Egyptian anytime after the 6th, though. The other Egyptian sheets are on the other bed, so that’s why I’m temporarily stuck on the micros.

Can’t believe we’re getting down into the high 50s at night in July. What’s wrong with this place? It was chilly just waiting outside for Home Depot to open yesterday so we could grab 4 long pieces of baseboards to keep the rats from going under the couch.

Also, why do stores and restaurants feel the need to blast music and make it hard to hold a conversation? I say if you’re going to force your customers to listen to music, turn it down!

We went to Mel’s super early in the morning to escape the crowds, but you’d be surprised how many people are still out and about at 4am. We like Mel’s better than Denny’s but it was absolutely freezing in there. My food and coffee barely warmed me up.

He got a ham and cheese omelet and I got a gourmet meal chock full of cholesterol. Prime rib, eggs and fries. The fries weren’t as good as Denny’s wavy steak fries, but the rest of it was absolutely delicious. Even the buttered English muffin was great.

Listening to what I hope is the last of the firecrackers. A week to celebrate July 4th is enough, though people may use up their leftover goodies to shoot off tomorrow night.

Saw the parade of decked-out golf carts go by today, including a couple of bikers and one in a motorized wheelchair. They don’t go by the house, though. You can see them from the back bedroom window turning the corner of the street a few houses down.

Started watching the series, Bones. I know it has a lot of seasons and is very popular. I don’t like it as much as Slasher and Bates Motel, but it’s still good. Even Law & Order and Criminal Minds were better.

MONDAY, JULY 4, 2016 Checked out Aly’s tweets when I arose to the sound of firecrackers. OK, NOW it’s getting old and I’m glad tomorrow should be the last of it. Four hours of firecrackers every night is getting a bit extreme.

Anyway, it’s depressed, as usual. Ah, but a delusional liar with no empathy can cheer it up better than I ever could, right?

My hair is getting thicker than thick and growing faster than fast. Definitely can’t say I don’t have enough thyroid hormone in me.

Tom and I have been like kids whose parents took off… running around the park in the middle of the night, sleeping odd hours, eating junk, shopping, and just having fun in general.

I wish I could say the same for Tammy, but the surgeries were a bust and now she’s stuck with a cane. I’m expecting to learn more later. She is definitely the strong one in this family cuz I’d have killed myself 5 surgeries ago.

Heard back from Leslie who shared a few pages of rat pics and asked that I pick out the ones I want and to be prepared to pay a reservation fee of $5. She didn’t say what the adoption fee is, but we’re prepared to pay both right away.

She had mostly Dumbos, which I don’t personally care for. There were 3 I liked, but 2 were reserved. Love the way she names each litter by a theme. There’s the fish theme, the Harry Potter theme, and the nut theme. The one I like that’s available is from the tree nut litter… Coconut.

Just heard from her again. She said she’s got 3 top-eared males available and would give them to me for $20 each with no reservation fee. Exciting! I told her I’m definitely interested. Two are black with white bellies (Berkshires?) and the other is a red-eyed Siamese.

New cage doesn’t arrive till Wednesday, though we could set something up until then if we had to. I asked her when they’d be available for adoption. She also had a couple of older rescue rats for $15, but couldn’t guarantee temperament like she could with her litters, so I think I’ll pass on those.

As for the statins, I’ve got about 12 hours before I decide if the second dose is worth it. No stomach or anxiety issues yet, though I might be borderline. Throat and fatigue are better but not perfect. The second dose, if I take it, is what’s going to either make or break the retrial. No earaches these last few days, but I do still get dizzy at times. Just not OMG kind of dizzy. The tapping still helps.

My heart’s been racing me awake again lately, but I no longer find it scary now that I’m used to it and know and understand that perimenopause doesn’t last forever. This time it was mostly caused by being chased by a madwoman in my dreams. Fitbit said my HR hit 118.

Although it was still a retirement community, I lived in a rural setting in the dream and walked down the end of our curvy driveway. There was a house, set slightly higher than ours on a small hill about 100 feet away. Supposedly I had said or done something that caused some guy in the community to lose virtually everything he owned. A woman living in the house on the hill wasn’t too happy about it either. Although I couldn’t see her from where I stood, she loudly expressed her unhappiness with me, but I pretended not to hear her.

Then she told someone else that she’d be “back to being an older adult in a minute,” and headed my way. I hurried into the house, trying to keep as casual of a pace as possible and not let on that I was now scared. I assumed she was coming to attack me. The instant I entered the house and shut and locked the door behind me, I demanded Alexa play some music which I blasted. That way, when the inevitable knock on the door came, the woman would think I couldn’t hear her.

SUNDAY, JULY 3, 2016 Starting off with some discouraging news. I took my first statin dose at 10am, went to bed, and awoke with the same sore throat as the last time just before 8pm. Looking back in my journal at the first time I took these statins, I also complained of the same extreme fatigue that I’m feeling right now, but that may or may not be connected to my cycle. The first round was on the exact same day of the month one month ago, only it was a Thursday instead of a Saturday.

Food and drink aggravate my throat, and if things continue not to go well, it’s going after my stomach next, then the anxiety will set in. At that time I’ll be letting Doc A know that whether or not she wants to believe me, I’ve had ENOUGH! It’s hard enough just dealing with perimenopause and earaches, though it should only take a week or less to recover instead of 3 months like when I had trouble with the higher dose of levothyroxine.

Seriously, I don’t care anymore what she believes. I’m not in imminent danger and she can’t force me to take medication I can’t tolerate if this doesn’t work out. She can, however, drop me as a patient if she sees me as “uncooperative,” but Tom says she won’t because that’d put her at risk of a malpractice suit. Like anything that might be up there would give me the honors of suing anyone and living happily ever after in Hawaii or at least even more comfortably for some time to come? No, instead I’d have to scramble to find another doctor, and we could only file suit if no other doctor would take me. How likely is that? Not likely.

Although I don’t feel anxious at this time, my HR is running a little high. I’m just so fucking fed up with the medication drama. If history continues to repeat itself, that’s it, I’m done. Done with everything but my thyroid meds and the lorazepam as needed. I know my body. I know what’s normal for me. I have NEVER had such extreme anxiety without it being caused by some drug. Yet even though it’s unlikely, I’m still hoping that all I’ll get is the sore throat that will be gone by tomorrow. I have until Monday afternoon to decide whether or not it’s worth chancing a second dose.

Late last night I heard back from Leslie at the rattery. She’d been busy helping her sister move. No problem, I told her. Things do come up. She asked for more info, but I haven’t heard from her since. Hopefully, that’s only due to the holidays and that she’s serious because we just spent a fortune on a huge and totally awesome cage. All our rat cages are 16-18 years old, so they deserve this overdue treat. It’s 63” tall and has a very different design than any other cage we’ve had thus far, which should make cleaning it easier. Bedding pans are a little shallow, but otherwise looks fantastic. It better be for $215. We got some accessories for it, too.

If we don’t hear from her after the holiday, there are other ratteries to try.

We also grabbed another set of those luxurious Egyptian sheets, this time in ivory.

According to the monthly Crier, Jon and Carolyn (Twenties), are the ones to move into Jackie’s place. Tom saw Jon and they waved at each other when he was on his way in from a quick run to Walmart yesterday morning. He said he doesn’t seem like the kind to be into doing projects at all. Well, I may not have to listen to him do projects, but instead listen to others do them for them. A plumbing truck that was running something loud and annoying was over there yesterday morning. What was weird was that Tom saw water tanks being installed. Didn’t Jackie do that right before she left?

Aly made additional tweets that now have me not so sure it was Molly she was having a problem with. She said something about sending her a follow request she never approved. Molly wouldn’t deny Aly a damn thing with the way she’s always worshipped her.

Last night I dreamed I was talking to Gloria Estefan, only it was the Gloria from the 90s. We sat at a small table in a diner or restaurant somewhere and I told her I still had a certain album of hers (all my music in real life is in MP3 form). She asked if I would be willing to have my picture taken with me holding it, and I agreed.

Then I was lying on a twin bed. Tom was in another twin bed just a few feet away. A nightstand was between the beds. My bed was up against a window. I peered through the blinds at a couple of houses that were so close that it was almost hard to tell if the little girl running into one of them ran into the one closest to us or not. I just hoped that since whoever lived there had a lot of guests over they wouldn’t wake me up.

Then I was in some hotel in the last dream where a shootout had recently occurred. I was afraid I’d somehow be implicated in it as I entered my room to find a female and a male housekeeper cleaning my room. The guy said he felt weird while the girl joked about “eating paint” as fine particles fell from the duster she was using.

SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2016 This is Aly’s new and highly appropriate profile pic/quote. Smiles sweetly at you, then tweets the nasty thoughts about you she doesn’t expect you to find.

SOS going on with her, too. She made several tweets to Kim about needing a friend right now and reaching out to her “big time” about something she didn’t want to discuss in public. I didn’t think it had anything to do with me, and I was right, so I saw once she eventually spilled the beans in public since she doesn’t follow the person from that account. Some drama with another Fitbit person that got mad at her for not accepting some challenges and being pissed about losing to her. Then she said, “Oh, I’m sure she’ll write to me or send me a postcard asking me to text her.”

Does that sound like Molly or what? Then again, she met some local Fitbiters, so maybe she’s referring to them. But why can’t they just go to her place if they know her address and live nearby? So… I’m thinking Molly. Then again, wouldn’t Molly know her email address or how to reach her by phone or Facebook?

Then there was the usual thing about how texting keeps her calm and makes her happy. Yeah, so do selfish people who have no sense of empathy and who are dumber than dumb, but hey, whatever turns her on. I’m missing her less and less but still getting a kick out of her tweets.

Despite missing her less, a part of me still hopes these nutjobs she calls friends will shit on her, dump her, and leave her missing the one real friend she threw away.

I can’t believe how long it’s been since I’ve at least seen Molly on my visitor list. She’s got to be either dead, coming in undetected, or they’ve literally handcuffed her to a chair to prevent her from going online.

FRIDAY, JULY 1, 2016 Slept shittily at first, then ok. I started off waking up constantly and ended up having a racy heart. Didn’t get scared, though, as I’m now used to these things. Fortunately, they don’t happen often, but I took my first lorazepam in days to help me get back to sleep and sleep sounder.

I wonder if the new flannel sheets heated me up more than usual, though I don’t remember feeling that hot. All I do know is that these sheets are really scratchy, even with repeated washes and fabric softener. The flannels they left behind were probably 20 years old and had seen hundreds of washings, so that’s probably why they were so comfortable. These need to be worn down a bit. I should’ve just gotten 2 sets of Egyptians, but I didn’t know the Egyptians would be so nice. I put a set in ivory in the cart. That way I’ll have a blue and ivory set of Egyptians while he has a set of pink and purple microfibers. The flannels and the shrunken jersey sheets will be backups (though they won’t fit on Tom’s bed) and everything else can be considered old junk and get thrown out.

An hour or so ago I heard some firecrackers that I’m guessing came from the cemetery. They sure do love to get a jump on the holidays here. I’ve heard a few scattered firecrackers for several days now, but I don’t mind. Because I’m at a high point in the park, I could probably see the firecrackers set off at the lake standing in the middle of the street like I did last year. Maybe I’ll even take a walk down there. It’ll depend on when I get up. I just hope the parade doesn’t wake me up on the 4th or the nighttime firecrackers if I sleep later.

I made two rounds around the circle before midnight and the weather was gorgeous. I could hear people still out and about chatting from their patios. Can’t blame them. This weather doesn’t last very long here.

The more I use our front loader the more I like it. With a top loader, so much water is wasted even with the water level set for a small load when you want to do just one or two pieces. With front loaders, it puts out just the exact amount of water needed, and of course it does a much better job of cleaning as well. It’s just a bit of a pain having to dry the seal after the last load, but it’s worth it.

Changed my mind about copying old journals to my new Prosebox account and editing them on LiveJournal for public view. Too much work. You’re talking nearly 29 years’ worth of entries. Instead, they are stored on a couple of sites (my Amazon drive and a private Blogger blog) with all sensitive info either altered or edited out completely (in case the sites are ever hacked). The day before I die I might publish them just for shits and giggles, even though anyone that may find them may not like some of what’s in them whether they knew me or not. IDK, I just find something amusing in “leaving my life” behind in cyberspace on my way out, but hopefully that’s way in the future.

I’m no longer using Prosebox for journaling for myself either. I’m just going to consider it a place I touch base with the few friends I have there and only every 2-3 days. I do have other things backed up there, though. I have 7 books. The one I keep in touch with friends with, then books for copies of tweets, the highlights of my life, my bio, dreams, stories, and a book for miscellaneous stuff.

Camp NaNoWriMo has begun and so has my project, The Interviews.