After a few days of pleasant weather, it’s back to snowing again. It’s so freaking cold. We went out to get milk late this afternoon and it was hailing. We should have just stayed home, but we left anyway. Bad idea, it started getting icy just a few minutes later, and Pittsburgh is a city of hills. After we got the milk we couldn’t stop to eat, and we took the street car downtown, then caught the bus back, instead of walking. By that time it was snowing so hard it was practically blizzard conditions. We got back a few hours after leaving, and then the snow decided to calm down. I am so pissed off. I was hoping to get to South Hills Village tomorrow to get my headphones and Visa gift card, but that’s most likely not happening now, and if this weather doesn’t cut it out soon I don’t know when that’ll happen. It’s been at least a month since my headphones broke and this is driving me crazy. The old ones my mom found stopped working a few days after she gave them to me.

On Friday I went out with mommy dearest to the library to help her get her taxes done, then she took me to see the new CVS, and then to Eat n Park with an old gift card Cynthia gave me. She’s such a freaking liar. She says she’s hardly been drinking or smoking anymore, and that at most her an Walt share a pack a day. Yet when I called her later that day she was drunk. Like she is most times I call. A couple weeks ago she said he is an ex-Marine. And she’s said in the past that Walt couldn’t get on welfare because he isn’t disabled, which was a lie itself, you don’t have to be disabled to get on welfare. I found out that not only is he on welfare, but he also gets food stamps. Basically everything she says is a lie. And anything you say to her goes in one ear and out the other, she doesn’t listen to a word you say. If I say something to her most often she starts talking about something else, and doesn’t even look at me or acknowledge that I spoke.* But anyway, later that night I got an email saying the IRS had rejected her tax return because of some error with her pin number. She said she’d call them again on Monday, but I don’t know if they’re working today. It doesn’t matter anyway, because Cynthia’s phone isn’t working for some reason so she can’t contact me. She could have used the IRS online system, but she refused to go to the library again, instead having me do it on my computer, with her on the phone talking to me. When I’m at the computer trying to do things for her it always ends with her yelling at me because she doesn’t understand something. That’s not my problem, all I can do is read to her what it says. I wasn’t going to go through that again. So I didn’t bother telling her she could do it online.

On the night of Valentines day, and the early morning on the 15th my heart decided to go one strike. It was protesting long working hours and little pay. First my arms were aching, the kind of ache like if you exercise too much. When I get that it’s awful, it starts in the inside of my arm and goes down into my hands and fingers, and up to my shoulders and into my back. I try to stay as still as possible when it happens, because even the slightest movement can cause excruciating pain. It wasn’t so bad when I first when to sleep, but when I woke up an hour later it was horrible, the worst it’s ever been. And, I had started getting chest pains too. I also get them sometimes (not indigestion), but this continued to get worse and wouldn’t go away. I got so bad I had to go ask Cynthia for aspirin. I can’t swallow pills so I crushed it, and Cynthia gave me some arthritis cream for my arms, and put me downstairs on the couch. My heart was appeased by the sacrifice of aspirin, and went back to work. I slept off an on until dawn when I went back upstairs, and my arms were feeling a little better. Later that day my legs decided they wanted to cause trouble too, but it wasn’t as bad as my arms had been.

Edit: Cynthia does this too, except instead of just ignoring you she’ll talk over you if she disagrees with something she said. Just start yelling to drown out what you say, like a little kid putting their hands of their ears and going “nah nah nah I can’t hear you.” Most often it happens with me drying my hands. She’s always yelling at me to dry my hands. I can have a napkin in my hands drying them, and she’ll still be yelling at me to dry my hands. So, I think she must have the intelligence of a monkey or a baby. Both think if they don’t see something, it’s not happening, or it’s not there. A couple days ago she walked into the room while I was drying my hands, and she said “oh, you’re drying your hands for once!” I told her I always dry my hands, every single time, but she started yelling over me that I need to start drying them so they don’t crack, and to use lotion as well. Today it’s because the telephone started working again today, and whoever she talked to said it was because of her computer (translation: “we don’t know what the problem is, so we’ll blame it on something most people have.”) She says I had my computer hooked up to the phone line or that was I recharging something (WTF, she knows nothing about computers, recharging what?) She wouldn’t listen to me that my computer not only doesn’t connect to a phone line, it can’t. And why would I? What would the purpose be. But when I said that the computer physically cannot be hooked up to a phone line she just started yelling over me, like she always does, not to use the computer during the day. The laptop wasn’t even on or plugged in when the phone stopped working, and hadn’t been for hours, and I’ve been using it here since June without any problems with the phone, but she can’t explain to me why the laptop would make the phone stop working, just that she knows it does because that’s what someone decided to tell her, and because computers are scary newfangled technology, and she loves to talk about things she knows absolutely nothing about.

Edit2: Ha, I’ve been vindicated, next door’s phone wasn’t working either. Now Cynthia’s complaining that it smells, because my mom made me Tuna Helper, which Cynthia apparently thinks is “disgusting.” She says she hates noodles, but likes pasta. She won’t accept that they’re the same thing. She also hates Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and thinks it’s disgusting too. So anything she doesn’t like to eat is disgusting. My mom says she’s just disagreeable, which is true.