I've had some friendships where I've held on longer, even when things have not always been looking super great. One of my memories is a college roommate. She was getting catfished. That was before we knew what that was, before the show, but it was somebody she was talking to on Zoom all the time, and I was convinced that she was getting catfished. And I kept telling her, this person's not real. And of course like, you know, every time that she would want to have a Zoom video call, they were not interested. You know, their voice didn't match who they should have been. It sounded like a teenage girl, but they were supposedly a 19 year old boy. And a lot of her friends were starting to really - like, she was getting into fights of people defending this person and we were roommates so I didn't want to fight too much but I stayed, you know, as even keeled as I could. And she was annoyed with me. I think she could sense that I also didn't believe that [name] was [name] and we had a little bit of a tiff, but I kept telling her “I’m gonna love you and be here no matter what. Like if I'm wrong, I welcome it, but if I'm not, I want to be here for you.” And lo behold, [name] fell off a ladder and he was in the hospital and his sister called her, and what do you know? His sister sounded an awfully lot like him, but it's his sister, right? And I think that's when [she] got wise and so I was there. Other friends had been really, you know, condescending about it or “I told you so-y” and I really just felt bad because I could see why you'd want to believe. I mean the conversations they had were really good and they felt really connected, but it was definitely not a boy and it was somebody that just wanted connection and I think [she] understood that too and that it was hard to be angry when somebody was lonely, sought somebody else over the internet and then got so deep into it, but was also so connected emotionally. We both could see why it happened, and I didn't think it was right to shove that in her face, like that individual served a…

For about a month and a half, we've been aware of some fleas in the house and on the cats. And all of a sudden, that mushroomed at the end of last week, to the point that last Monday, we had to leave the house. We had to cede territory to the fleas. We had to admit defeat. We'd been like putting powder down and spraying and vacuuming like crazy, and we still had not successfully defeated the fleas. And it got so awful that like we were finally using Tyvek suits to get into the house and like my husband would just walk through the house and would come out with like a dozen fleas on him. So just like, completely out of control fleas. It's very stressful to have fleas in the house, so we put down like an absurd amount of diatomaceous earth. Like, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. And like we were using a branded kind that had like a few other things in it too, but it was mostly diatomaceous earth. And one of the things they saw fit to put into it was perfume of some sort. It smells like grandma bath powder. So the whole house smells like grandma bath powder now, and like we had to put this stuff like literally everywhere. So, the house - whole house - smells like grandma bath powder. We're gonna have to - well, at least this will - my husband and I were discussing this, but at least this will get us to finally rent a - like, one of those carpet shampooer steamer things. Which we'd always planned on doing before we moved into the house, seven years ago. And then it didn't happen, and our rent ran out on the place we were living, and we had to like, real fast move out of there and into this house. So we didn't end up ever shampooing the carpet and the guy who was there before us had dogs. They weren't like - they didn't leave messes, that he didn't clean up or anything like that. Like, it was “broom clean” as they say. But we - this will get us to finally shampoo the carpets. Maybe the carpet will look better.