We did have one window into the outside world: penpals. Sarah had scores of penpals, all of whom she wrote back to promptly. I had relatively few, but I tried to get around to writing them back on a timely basis. Between us, we used a lot of postage. Occasionally we got to watch TV, but Daniel had been opposed to television, writing me several pages explaining why he felt that way. At first I chafed a little bit at this; all we ever watched were harmless things like Little House on the Prairie and Star Trek. But then, while going through the old Mother Earth News magazines yet again (I just reread the same stack of magazines over and over after awhile), I came across Jerry Mander's book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, which was split up among several issues. I read all of it, and became convinced that television, while not evil in and of itself, was a waste of time and an artificial method of relating experiences and ideas. I began to worry that I had damaged my brain irreparably with the amount of TV I'd already watched in my lifetime.

It wasn't like we had a lot of time to blow anyway. I treasured any time that I could use to indulge in reading a book. Even after the chores with the animals and the firewood, which accounted for most of the day, there were still inside chores. Mom was constantly angry with me because she felt that I wasn't keeping up with my end of the housework. My household chores consisted primarily of emptying the garbage and doing at least one load of dishes per day. People kept throwing voluminous stuff like empty milk jugs into the garbage, so then she would yell at me that the garbage was full. I would compress the empty jugs so that the can was only half full now, and she would yell some more. The thing Mom didn't ever realize about the garbage was that space to put it was really limited. I wasn't doing that to be a pain, we had to be very conservative about filling the space in inside of the crew cab truck, which was where we had to put the garbage. Only so much would fit in there, and if Dad didn't take it to the dump, Raphah and I still had to find room for more garbage somehow. If we put it anywhere else, the cats would get into it and scatter it everywhere. Then we'd have to pick it up again. What was even worse about the garbage was that there were often dead animals in it. When puppies and kittens died, as they often did, they got bagged up along with the litter and other trash, and left to rot in the warm cab of the truck. So Compressing bags after they were in the truck in an effort to fit more in wasn't something I wanted to do. It stunk really bad in there; I just wanted to be able to put a bag in and leave quickly. Which I couldn't do if I carried space hogging items like empty milk jugs and fluffy wads of newspaper. This was a major bone of contention between us. She just couldn't seem to comprehend that space to put garbage in was limited. She just wanted it gone every time it reached the top of the can, even if there was hardly anything in there.

The dishes were another battle. When I'd been doing them nearly blind, I'd found a way to cope with the piles upon piles of dishes: by organizing them by size, shape, and type, and washing them in a particular order. This way, I didn't panic and do what they called "spinning". "Spinning" was when I couldn't cope, when I just stood there overwhelmed, couldn't think, couldn't talk coherently, just sort of flipped out internally and couldn't handle what was going on. If I could control and organize the dishes before I washed them, they seemed more manageable to me. But they thought this was silly, and just threw them all in together in a big jumble, and got mad at me if I pulled them out again so I would know what was in the sink, so I could do them my way. I could not see why it mattered to her how I did the dishes, as long as they were adequately washed in a timely manner. Why should they care if I washed only glasses and cups, then bowls, then plates, then spoons, then forks, etc?

Luckily, we only fought about these things after I came inside at the end of the day. She spent half the day holed up in her room, receiving prophecies and dream interpretations from Yahweh. The latest news from Yahshua was that Mom was his personal bride. He loved her more than any other woman in the world, and when she went to heaven, they would be husband and wife, lovers in every sense of the word. She told Dad plainly, in front of us, that whether he made her happy or not didn't matter, because things were going to be fantastic with Yahshua, because he would cherish her and treat her as a woman should be treated. The whole thing was getting stranger by the day.