The Road to Recovery- Celebrating the Quitter in Me

Every Breath I Take
I quit smoking. I feel pretty confident about it, so I hope it's really for the last time. It hasn't been as difficult as some of the other times I've quit. I think there have been a couple of key things that make this effort different and hopefully, more successful.

Picking the Right Holiday
First of all, I didn't try to do it for New Year's. I think the biggest jinx I could put on something is to try and tie it to a resolution. I wanted to quit before my birthday, but I didn't really have a day in mind. Things just worked out that it happened to fall on Father's Day. I was cutting it close to the birthday, but close still counts. It also helps being away from home since I don't typically smoke when I'm traveling. Having been on the road for several weeks before "the day" helped get me into a good routine and get used to not smoking for several days at a time.

Triggers
My biggest triggers for smoking, aside from working from home are stress related. If I were ever going to crack, it would have been today. Long hours, technology problems, and just minor irritations that kept building on each other all day long, would generally have driven me chain-smoke. I thought about it. I really did. But I thought about it more from the perspective of "that's what I used to do" rather than what I was going to do.

The other typical trigger would be alcohol. So far, that hasn't been an issue either. It's a heck of a lot harder though. I'm not a heavy drinker, but even one drink is enough to make me feel like I should be holding a cigarette. I miss it. I mostly liked it. If it wasn't going to kill me or bankrupt me I'd be hard-pressed to find a good reason to quit. It's just as well that I don't drink often, I suppose. I guess if I get to a milestone where I feel like celebrating this, I'd better stick to my new addiction: coffee. I'm definitely not ready to give that one up.

Salem and Carpet Fresh
One of the changes that my sisters are going to need to get used to is the different smell. I typically send boxes of various things to them throughout the year. On more than one occasion, I have heard remarks about how the things in the box seem to smell like a mix of cigarette smoke and my carpet freshener. Yuck. I'm still addicted to the carpet freshener, but at least now it should only be competing with my fabric softener and not my ashtray.