Been 2 weeks and not a damn thing wrong

Okie dokie! I am officially 2 weeks and one day without an actual cigarette! Yeay! Go me! My cigarette of choice was Camel Wide Menthol Light. It's still a little weird for me to not have to buy cigarettes. This is probably the best choice I have made for my health in a long time, though.

So, I bought this kit to start with:

http://www.totallywicked-eliquid.com/products/electronic-cigarette-starter-kits/tornado/wicked-tornado-e-nic-or-electronic-2-2-product.html

If I was an awesome blogger like my friend Lindy, http://onecraftyme.blogspot.com/, I would have taken pictures of everything, but I'm not- so deal with it. LOL

A big thanks to my friend Tom because he's the one who got this first. It worked for him, so I decided to buy it as well. Without that I would have been fumbling through the gobs of products out there without a clue as to what was actually a good product. So a big thanks to Tom!!!!!!

So there are a lot of great things about this product:

1- My family loves it! My husband says he loves that I don't stink any more and my daughter says she's so happy that I decided to get one.

2-The kit was awesome! Plenty of product to get you started and keep you going! It's pretty high quality, too. It's nice to try something and be happy with it!

3- It comes with 2 batteries. Great! I don't have to sit here and jones out while the battery is charging.

4-I can smoke it anywhere! In the bar! In my home! In my BED!

5- I can smell EVERYTHING! I smoked cigarettes for 15 years and never really realized all the smells I was missing out on! I like that I put on perfume in the morning and can still smell it in the afternoon!

6- I no longer stink, and I notice how bad cigarettes really do smell!* My car no longer stinks too! Yeay!

7- The liquid comes in different flavors! Originally I bought the regular Tobacco and Menthol. I recently purchase Apple and have tried Strawberry. The flavors remind me of Swisher Sweet Cigarillos but without the good taste left on the lips. Still, a pretty nice option!

8- When I eventually reach my goal of no nicotine liquid and finally quit I have the option of keeping the e-cigarette for when I am drinking. I know that I cannot drink without smoking. They just go together for me. So which the no nicotine liquid I can still feel like I am smoking, but without continuing the filthy, disgusting, dirty, stinking habit I have loved for years.

*I always thought I would be the kind of non-smoker (if ever) that would still love the smell of cigarette smoke. I always have loved it, even when I was a kid. I think quitting makes a change in you and the smell never the same.

There are a couple of things that I have been thinking about though. They might be downfalls of the product, or my personality, but i haven't fully decided to call them that.

1- I can't tell if I intake more nicotine than I would if I was still smoking. I'm sure I could if I had a mathematic mind, but I don't. The level of Nicotine in the bottle is 18MG, and there is 10 ML of liquid in the bottles that I buy. I got this from Wikipedia*- an average cigarette yields about 1 mg of absorbed nicotine

So, my issue is.... is there more nicotine in the liquid I have than in a cigarette? Is the 18MG the total amount in the bottle, or the total amount in each drop? I have to believe that it's the strength of the whole bottle. If not, then wouldn't I have nicotine poisoning by now?

*And hey! I found this little gem while I was looking that up: According to the American Heart Association, nicotine addiction has historically been one of the hardest addictions to break, while the pharmacological and behavioral characteristics that determine tobacco addiction are similar to those that determine addiction to drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Sweet huh?

2- I can't tell if I smoke this damn thing more often than I did cigarettes. I used to smoke about a pack every day and a half. Usually (when not at work, and not drinking) I would smoke one cigarette and wait about 45 minutes to a hour and a half before having another cigarette. With that I had the benefit of smoking the cigarette down to the filter and that's how I knew I was done. With this there is no actual smoking of a cigarette. I find that I most often take one drag and put the e-cigarette down for awhile. That's not always the case, and I can't really keep track of how long I put it down for, especially when I am drinking. I can't tell if the reason I feel like I am constantly smoking is because I am or if it's because I can't really tell how long I am smoking it compared to a regular cigarette. I have been told it seems like I am smoking it more than I would a normal cigarette. I think a lot of this has to do with me being able to smoke ANYWHERE and the fact that it's new. So I have been trying to pay attention to how long I am using the e-cigarette for and how long I go between putting it down and picking it back up. It's a hard thing to pay attention to!

3- It's high maintenance. I don't mind it at all but it's definitely not as easy as taking a cigarette out of the pack and lighting it. I have to make sure the tip (filter) has the liquid in it because if it doesn't it starts to taste funny. Also, if it gets dry it doesn't last as long as it should.

4- I have to find a new way to relax. I have always, ever since I can remember, used smoking to relax. Not only when I was stressed out either. I used to go and sit in the backyard, light up a cigarette and pick up my book and read. I have books that I am trying to read now, and It's hard for me to find a new place to read and an excuse to do so. It sounds weird, I know, but reading and smoking were what I used to do! So reading has been a new experience for me. I could probably do it the same way since I have the e-cigarette, but it just doesn't feel right. It feels like I should make a new habit for reading .

All in all I have had success with the e-cigarette. I know that I can stick with it for now. I am wary of what will happen when I change the amount of nicotine in the liquid down to the next lower level though. My hubby suggested that I get a mixed dose; One bottle of 18 MG and one bottle of the next level down and remove the labels. That way I don't know what i am getting and I can't freak myself out that way. I think this idea has potential, but what good does it do if I end up mixing the 18MG and the lower level? Am I just prolonging the quitting process? Only time will tell I suppose.

Fear not though! I will be sure to update my ups and downs with this fantastic new invention!

Thanks for all of your support!

Hmm... will it work?

Wow has it been too long since I have updated!
Life has been crazy, as usual, but good. Great friends, great husband, great daughter! I even have a better job! As for my last post… No school… nothing but the run around again!

The real reason I am updating is because I am going to try something new. What better reason to update, right? This very minute I am waiting for the delivery of my electronic cigarette! YEAY! I have always been the type of person to try to recognize my own shortcomings. With smoking, I have never tried to quit because I knew that I would not succeed, I would only succeed in making myself and others around me miserable! I figured why put myself and others through that just to start smoking again? Well, the time has come! With the invention of the FANTASTIC E-Cigarette I feel like I can actually attempt quitting. It may take me a long time, but I feel like I have a better chance of actually quitting this way! For those of you who don’t know or haven’t heard the e-cigarette is a healthier version of a cigarette. I can gradually decrease the amount of nicotine I intake. I will no longer smell, I will feel better without all those toxins in my body, and I no longer need to worry about slowly poisoning my child with second hand smoke. Also, I can smoke ANYWHERE! I am very very excited! So I will try to keep up with the updates because I would like to be able to look back at them and see all that I went thru with this “experiment”. Wish me luck!

Le SIGH

I started the process of looking into going to an Online College today. Last time I tried to do this I got the run around and really no straight answers so I just quit looking into it. I feel like I have to do something to better my life and do it before it's too late. I feel like if I don't do it now I'll never do it and I'll just continue wasting away at crap job after crap job. I also think about the fact that if I had started this a couple of years ago, I would be done already and my life would be a lot different. So I have a phone appointment with a counselor on Friday to discuss my options for grants and loans and what it's going to take to get me on my career path! WOOT! I am excited and scared at the same time. It has been over 10 years since I have gone to school. Well, if you don't count getting my insurance license.

So I will update you, my few readers, with my progress and my blood sweat and tears on my journey to better my life.

And away we go!!!!!

Busy Busy Busy!

We have been so busy lately! It seems like every weekend there is something we have to do or something to celebrate! I'm lovin it!

My 30th Birthday came and was great! I chose Salty Seniorita as the place to have my party and had a great time. I got such great gifts too!!!


This is the cookie I got from Val and Wayne. It was SO TASTY!


I got a Tiara that was hand made by Lindy: (actually almost everything was made by Lindy! Thanks Girly!)

This is my hand made Birthday Card Envelope! Made by Kristin:

My ABSOLUTE FAVORITE GIFT EVER!!!! Golden Snitch Earrings and a Necklace made to look like the Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban book.

This is a Necklace made by Lindy and the Scrabble tile I won from her Blog Contest:



This is just a far away shot of all my goodies!

I got this Balloon Hat from our Waitress at the bar! Fantastic! It was her own idea too!


This is ME double fistin it!


Jamie got me candles for my 30th birthday and snuck them on my cookie. So sweet!


Me in all my Birthday Gear:

Lindy and Myself, So beautiful!




This past Sunday we had our 1st Annual All-Star BBQ. Jamie decided that he wanted to have a huge BBQ for all the clubs for a get together. It was a huge success! Here are a few pics:


This was my favorite shirt of the day. EPIC!







The BBQ caught on fire from the cheapy burger we bought and this is the result!








All in all we spent a little dough, but it was totally worth it. I had a blast and people really liked the idea. We will for sure be having it again!

Awesome

Things that I find awesome.

My daughter-
She is getting so big and growing into a young lady. She's still got a bit of that kid thing going on, where she doesn't listen sometimes. However, it's the little things she does sometimes that seem so grown up. She's starting to do her own laundry and recently she got a new dress. I told her that I need her to put her laundry in the washer, and picked up the dress to see how to wash it. I told her that it needs to be washed in cold water, and she said " Ok, but should I wash it individually??" I just looked at her for a minute thinking, where did my little girl go?

Getting to cuddle with my husband in the morning-
Jamie works a weird set of hours, so he's gone every morning when I wake up, except for Thursday thru Saturday. So the mornings that he is home, we get to cuddle in bed for a few minutes before the chaos of the morning ritual starts. It really makes you appreciate what you have, if you have to do without it for a while.

Great Friends-
I have to say I think Jamie and have have a really good group of friends. I know that not many people can say that. I don't have a lot of family, so having great friends is very important to me. Seems to me that we really lucked out. If you are reading this, you know who you are!

Catching nothing but green lights-
Red lights suck.

Tacos-
Cause Tacos rule!

Shoes-
SHOES!!!!! I HEART SHOES!

My birthday-
I love my birthday because it's the only day that its ALL ABOUT ME!

Books-
I am an avid reader. I love books of all kinds. I covet the e-reader but only because I can buy books for cheap and download them in 60 seconds. I think I would really prefer to have an actual book in my hands though. A book can't short out on you, a book doesn't need to be charged. Technology is awesome, but there is something to be said for the old skool method when it comes to books.

People with common sense-
It is a very rare occurrence when you meet someone who has common sense. I talk to idiots all day long so it's very refreshing when I get to talk to that .0001% of the population that has common sense.

Not being sick-
I feel like I am getting a chest cold. I hate being sick.

The Gremlin

Dear Fast Food Franchises and Employees,

I have a 30 minute break for lunch. I pull into your drive thru and I give you my specific order, and I give it to you very clearly enunciated. You read my order back to me and I verify that it is correct.

Somewhere between the buttons you are pushing, the printing of my order, my giving you money for the food, to the employee that makes the food, there must be an evil little Gremlin who jumbles my order around and gets everything mixed up. I can't figure out any other reason why my order, given and verified, would come to me incorrectly. I know that the employees can read because you had to fill out an application, right? So it can't be that. When I get my receipt I look at it to double check that it looks right and it does! There can't be that much difference between my receipt and your order up screen, right? It's gotta be the Gremlin!!

So please, please, please investigate this Gremlin that causes my order to come to me incorrectly. Save myself and my friends the anger of a wrong order! I beg of you!

5 years in the blink of an eye

So today is the anniversary of my mom’s passing. It’s been 5 years. It’s amazing to me that it has been so long, because it still seems like it was just a couple months ago. There are so many things I wish she was around to see. There are so many things that I wish she was around to ask her about. Things that myself, my brothers, and my daughter got robbed of.

I haven’t talked about how she died and why with a lot of people. Only my husband and my best friend know what really happened, and I’m not sure they even know all of it. I have mentioned the situation to a couple of other people, but it still makes me sad, so I try not to talk about it. I think that not talking about it, for me, is the same as trying to run away from it. So I thought that on this 5^th anniversary of her death (which I think is a weird way of saying it) that I would get it all out. Here goes…..

My father was never really a part of my life. Towards the end of my mom’s life she admitted that she pushed my father out of our lives very early. Part of me agrees with that and there is another part of me that thinks if he really wanted to be a part of our lives, he would have fought for it. That’s neither here nor there though because it is what it is.

I don’t really remember a lot before I was 10 years old. I remember bits and pieces. I remember when my mom was diagnosed with Lupus, in 1987, and how she was pregnant with my brother Mason when it happened. I remember her being very upset about it. They gave her 2 years to live. She survived for just about 18 years. I don’t know if this happened before or after she was diagnosed, but I remember my father doing dishes in our apartment, when we were living in California. I was standing in the kitchen watching him when all of a sudden he stopped and ran into the bedroom. I remember, very vividly, that my mom was bouncing on the bed and I thought it was funny. Then I noticed my dad was in a panic and screaming at me, 6 or 7 years old, to call 911. I remember he was shoving a brush in her mouth and I didn’t know why. I remember the firemen and the paramedics getting to our apartment and taking my mom away. I remember being really afraid.

In 1990 we moved to Arizona. It was the beginning of the best years of my life. My father had been working in Arizona for a while, so we decided to move out here to be close to him. It didn’t really work out. It turned out that the job in Arizona wasn’t long term, like they thought it was, and he was shipped back to California to work. He would come home after a couple of months to visit, but it really did nothing to create a relationship with him for any of us kids. He would come home, get shit faced and become an asshole. This went on for a long time. I don’t remember when it was he finally stopped drinking, but by then it was just too late for us to start a real relationship. My brother and I were teenagers and already angry at the way he had been with us.

So in 2000 I had my daughter, Carley. At this point my brother and I had already graduated high school, so my parents decided to move back to California. I had to go with them as I was unemployed and very young and I wasn’t able to support myself and a child. We moved to a town called Clearlake, CA. The town was tiny and the lake did not live up to its name. Although I hated it there, I tried to make the best of it and got a job at Cheap Tickets, a 30 minute drive, and started taking general education classes in Napa, a 2 hour drive, at a community college. Things were ok there for me and my brothers. I was still able to visit Arizona to see my best friend and on a 21^st birthday trip for her, met my future husband.

Things were not so great for my mom. She kept getting sick and having to go to the hospital. The conditions in the place we were living were not good to have to do the dialysis she needed. She would get an infection, and that infection would get worse and she would go to the hospital and the condition would worsen, instead of get better. She developed an infection of the lining the holds your insides together. Every time she would get sick, she would eventually bounce back to 100%. During this time I moved back to Arizona. My mom would call me and I would call her and we would catch up and for the first time ever, I felt like an actual adult.

During one of these phone calls I could tell that she was pretty upset. I asked her why and she told me that my father had gone to work in Puerto Rico and while there he had an affair. We were all pretty devastated about it, but she and my dad had talked and they realized that there were things in their marriage that had suffered as a result of my mom’s disease (which I thought was a pretty bullshit move on my dad’s part, also the beginning of many shitty things to come) and they were trying to work things out. Things went ok for them for awhile, until he cheated again. This time was pretty serious, as he wasn’t willing to work on things at home like he was before. He mentioned divorce to my mom and it broke her. I should say this is pretty much all my opinion of what happened, as I wasn’t there to see it firsthand. She was still having health problems and it seemed to us that she lost the will to fight to get better. Things went down very quickly and she was admitted to the hospital in Napa. I have some guilt about this time because I was here and living my life, and I thought it was just another time in the hospital. The last time I talked to her she was in a lot of pain and asked if she could call me back. I never got to talk to her again. While my mom was in the hospital for the last time, they put her under for a surgery. She never came out of it. She was in a coma while the doctors were trying to heal her many infections. We were told that it was pretty hopeless. So my uncle flew me out to California to say good bye. My father was so upset by what was happening that he had to bring his girlfriend to the hospital for emotional support. He thought that it was a good idea to sit my brothers and me down at a table in the hospital cafeteria and have a chat about why he brought his girlfriend with him, and that we should be able to accept it. He thought that we should try to have a relationship with his new girlfriend eventually.

We all pretty much responded how you would think. With a big fuck you asshole.

So I attempted to have a small relationship with him after that, looking for something I never really had. The resentment was too much. I blamed him, and still do to a certain extent, for my mom’s death. Part of me feels like if he had been there for her while she was in the hospital, if he had supported her and helped her try to recover, if he had been any kind of husband at all, that she would have gotten better and would still possibly be with us. The rational part of me says it was just her time. The emotional part of me is still very much upset about the circumstances surrounding her death and refuses to see reason.

I am sure there are things that I have left out or forgotten.

So, on this 5^th anniversary of my mom’s death, I will raise a glass of iced tea in her honor.

I love you mom. You were everything to me. I miss you always.