I made a new friend this week that I hope to go to lots of meetings with. We went to two meetings this week and had dinner tonight after a meeting. My friends are very low drama and usually low maintenance. I have not had a steady reliable go-to-different-meetings friend since Joy moved to Walla Walla 4 years ago.
New friends and more
My web browsers of choice
For years, Internet Explorer (v6) was the only game in the town of PC web browsers. There were modified versions of IE such as the AOL web browser, but it was still basically IE with additional bugs.
Opera was released as free software in 2000. It did some tasks really well and felt like left-handed scissors for others.
In 2004, Mozilla Firefox (FF) was released. There were a few problems with FF causing me to switch to IE on some web sites. Back then, many web developers designed many non-standard web sites expressly for IE. I soon adopted FF as my primary browser.
Google Chrome entered the browser wars in late 2008. It was designed from the ground up to be fast and secure.
I have Apple Safari loaded on my PC. I rarely use Safari. It uses the same layout engine, WebKit, as Chrome.
I have used FF as my primary browser for six years. FF v4 was released this year. It is a bit of a pig to load and has problems rendering pages from my bank and credit card vendors. Two weeks ago, I made the decision to try using Chrome as my primary browser. Chrome also has its quirks such as tabs above the search bar. Since I change tabs far more often than doing searches, that is a bit annoying and can also conflicts with the Windows "minimize" button. Now I am in the middle ground of using both Chrome and FF as my primary web browsers.
I am grateful for all the choices in web browsers, options, add-ons and themes for my WWW surfing pleasure. Choice and competition are great for innovation.
Literacy and a love of reading
I have loved reading since I was a child. I am sure that I have spent more of my leisure/recreational time reading than any other activity.
Thanks to the miracle of the internet, I am blessed with instant access to more free books than ever contained in the fabled Library of Alexandria. For printed books, I am a five-minute drive to the large Bellevue main branch of the King County Library System. The vast majority of my library visits are at the small community library in Crossroads Mall. When I reserve books from the KCLS, I pick them up at Crossroads.
I bought my first Kindle book this weekend. Pricing is clearly not based on costs, but on market demand. The book I wanted was listed for $9.99, 12.98 and $13.99 respectively for paperback, hardcover and digital editions on Amazon.com.
I have had my Kindle for two months. I prefer it to paperback and hardcover editions. It is a toss-up between the Kindle and large-print editions—which I can read without wearing my eyeglasses. The Kindle is far more convenient size-wise since one small device can hold 1000+ books.
Warm sunny days
It was a warm sunny Easter weekend in Seattle this year. I love how the days get longer and warmer.
I am grateful for dry warm spring weather with long sunny days.
Happy for No Reason…
I am reading Happy for No Reason by Marci Shimoff. A third of the way through the book and I am liking it a lot. The gist of the book is achieving an internal serene happiness that is not dependent on external circumstances.
Studies suggest that we all have an internal happiness setpoint much like setting the temperature on a thermostat. The setpoint is a 50/50 result of nature and nurture. Using methods and exercises from positive psychology, people can increase their happiness setpoint from, say, "cool" to "warm" in a relatively short time such as a few months to a year. We don't get to go catatonic depression to ectastatic. Going from kinda whiny and sad to more than moderately optimistic is readily do-able.
My experience in changing my happiness setpoint has been fantastic progress on my own. Years of therapy got me from chronic depression to stoic. Five months of gratitude blogging got me to moderately optimistic and even brief flashes of feeling that I am lucky.
My relationship with my higher power
I am grateful for my relationship with a higher power in my life today. When I start to worry or let things bother me too much, it works best for me to turn the problem over to my HP and simply do the next indicated thing.
I spend a lot less time worrying & fretting now and a lot more time doing the next indicated thing (NIT). The NIT might only be read, watch TV or sleep. Those are all a lot better uses of my time than worrying about problems that I can't change by worrying about them.
My relationship with my HP also helps me to avoid feeling alone. I am a bit of a hermit by nature. Knowing my HP is always there for me means that I don't have to feel lonely nor isolated.
I don't know if god exists or not. Strangely enough, it doesn't seem to matter whether there is or is not a god. I do know that my life is much better when I act as if god exists.
I am grateful for my relationship with my HP today.Helping others
It is nice to be in a position in my life to be able to help others. Help ranges from just letting someone vent without having to tell them what they should do, to giving someone a ride to a meeting or the airport, or help with buying food & clothes.
Prior to recovery, I was not much help besides giving someone a ride to meet with a drug dealer. Now I am able to be of service a lot more than being needy.
I am grateful for my living situation which allows me to be of service to others. It is a lot better than being needy or dependent.
Grateful for my program of recovery
Twelve years ago, I went to a 3-week in-patient rehab facility on May 1st, 1999. I have slightly less than six years of continuous sobriety. Sometimes I refer to it as 11.5 years minus a week.
I have a friend that is dying from alcoholism. It is sad & tragic to watch her try to find an easier softer way than simply getting a sponsor and working the 12 steps. She knows she has a problem and that her body is shutting down from substance abuse. Her problem appears to be fear of dealing with suppressed pain and having to get enough humility to learn how to live life as a functional adult in our society. It might be better to have progressed to fear instead of being stuck on denial. I don't know. Either way, it is good that I am not in that position.
A big part of my recovery is letting go of my self-pity in thinking my situation is so much worse than what other people have. While reflecting on my friend's situation yesterday, I realized I would not trade my life as an overweight paraplegic for her life as a dying late-stage alcoholic.
I am grateful for my life, my sobriety and the progress I have made in my recovery. It is good to be at peace with my life.
Grateful for my gratitude
I try to write about a specific topic that I am grateful for when posting here on my gratitude blog. Tonight I suffer from a case of topic block. It is good to be grateful and that is enough for today.
I am grateful for my gratitude blog.
Dinner and a meeting
On most Friday nights for the last couple of years, I have met with my friend Sandy for dinner and a meeting. We missed the last two Fridays. Tonight was Vietnamese food. Sandy loves the pho noodles. I had a spicy chicken curry. Both were delicious.
We tend to show up late at the meeting. Tonight we were a few minutes early for a change. We read from the literature for awhile and discussed the impact of a loved one's alcohol consumption on our psyche. It leaves a mark and takes a lot of work for some of us to get past the trauma. For those of us that go to meetings, life is a lot better now than how it used to be.
Life in prison
For 9.5 years, I have been going to 12-step meetings at the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe. Leslee and I went again tonight. As always, it was a good meeting. There were six inmates at the meeting. One guy has 30 years of meetings in prison and the new kid was at his second meeting.
They inmates look just like the people I used to run around with. I would not want to have to spend the rest of my life (or any part thereof) in prison.
I am grateful for my freedom today. I always get a great dose of serenity & humility when I see the serenity the inmates have even while living in a stressful place.
Crisp apples
Since I was a child, apples have always been one of my favorite fruits.
Back in the day, Red Delicious apples were small, crisp and slightly tart. Now they are large red bland mushy inbreds.
Today my favorite apples are Braeburns, Honeycrisps, and Fujis. Tonight I had an organic Fuji for dessert. It was cold, crisp and delicious with a slightly tart aftertaste.
Back in the day, Red Delicious apples were small, crisp and slightly tart. Now they are large red bland mushy inbreds.
Today my favorite apples are Braeburns, Honeycrisps, and Fujis. Tonight I had an organic Fuji for dessert. It was cold, crisp and delicious with a slightly tart aftertaste.
I love the wide selection of fresh fruits available from local grocers. When things are out of season here, they are often in season in Mexico, Chile or Canadian greenhouses. Apples are often stored in oxygenless nitrogen-filled coolers so that they can be sold as fresh fruit all year long.
Dinner with Gigi
It is Seattle Restaurant Week. Gigi and I went to The SeaStar in Bellevue. We got an appetizer, entrée and dessert for $28 each.
I had Waygu beef with gnochi—it was like the world's best beef stew. Delicious.
Gigi is one of my best friends. I have known her for ten+ years. We are opposites in many ways, but we love and support it other very much.
The lady that got my into the idea of a gratitude blog—Christine Carter—is coming to Seattle on May 10th. Gigi is going to go see Christine with me. It will be fun.
I am full and have a TV show to watch. TTG
I am full and have a TV show to watch. TTG
Grateful just because...
My gratitude blogging goal is 5x/week for all of 2011. There is no criteria for the quality or quantity of the post. I had a good day today. Talked about having faith instead of hope in my life tonight at the meeting. It is a much better relationship with my HP and the rest of the world. The weather was sunny and warmish compared with the last two weeks of rain.
I am grateful today for days that are better than merely good enough.
My PCP aka family MD aka general practitioner
My Primary Care Practitioner (PCP = UWMC vernacular for family doctor) for the last nine years is a kind sweet smart lady named Dr Lucy Hwang. Her dad came from Taiwan (nee Formasa) as a young man. He raised two girls. Lucy and her sister both become doctors. Lucy's sister works as an MD in Jordan.
I love Dr Lucy. We have a wonderful working relationship. I take a blood thinner/anticoagulant called warfarin. One industrial use for warfarin is as rat poison. It is kind of tricky stuff to use in that I have to take enough to have a slower blood clotting time but not too much so that I go hemophiliac. That means that I have to get a blood clotting test (protime) every month. I see a lot of Dr Hwang.
I used to see her on Tuesdays. Turns out that was the busiest day of the week in the UW-Factoria clinic. There are two handicapped parking spots at the clinic and then it sucks for me. I went today for the first time in years on a Friday afternoon. It was dead at the clinic with only two doctors working instead of the 6 or 8 doctors on the busy days. I am now a Friday appointment kind of guy.
When I go to the clinic I take 12-step meeting schedules with me. Today I took 20 schedules putting ten them in the literature rack and leaving ten with the receptionist to restock the rack later. The schedules are always gone when I go back for my next appointment in a month. I like to think it is helping somebody. At least I am trying to carry the message of recovery to those that still suffer. Part of the program is that I don't have to achieve great things. I just have get it a reasonably good effort—not perfect or the best ever—just try to do what I can.
We surfed my medical records for the results of my colonoscopy last week. The one polyp they removed was benign. Another great feature of the UW Medical system is that my medical records are all online. I don't have to carry my records on paper from clinic to clinic. My understanding is that the UW has a cutting edge medical information network compared with the rest of the USA. Europe and Japan might be years ahead of us in that area due to quirks of politics over technology—much like how the US lags in stem cell research.
Dokie is Dr Lucy's nursing assistant ("RA" which I think means Registered nursing Assistant). She is a middle-aged lady that grew up in Iran and came to America when the Shah was overthrown and exiled. Dokie has great stories and collects old coins dating back to the Roman era.
I love and am grateful for having Lucy and Dokie on my health care team. They take very good care of me.
Shopping at Fry's electronics superstore
My cell phone was in the early phases of a death spiral. Since it is the cheapest phone on the market, it can be a darned short & quick spiral. Time for a trip to Renton where I could check out Fry's or get a new phone at Walmart. As a matter of personal economic principles, I was not going to pay $50 to T-Mobile in Bellevue Square for a phone when they are $15 in Renton.
Web research found the phone I wanted for $15 at Walmart. After a delicious lunch of General Tso's chicken with a Shawna. A trip to Renton in mid-afternoon was in order. 405 was full of cars with traffic moving at a brisk pace for the most part. Fry's was on the way. It is an electronic superstore of immense dimensions. Fry's has a full page ad every day in the back of the Seattle Times sports section called gadget porn by the cognoscenti. It has been several years since I looked at those ads. Time for a trip to gadget porn land.
After a lap around the store looking at PC motherboards, CPUs, netbooks, laptops, external Blu-Ray drives and wi-fi routers, I was at the pre-paid phone stand. There was the phone I wanted for $19.99. It was not worth the drive across downtown Renton through the Walmart parking lot to save $4. Shopping mission accomplished. The customer service rep wandered over to chat me up. We had a great conversation about coming wireless websurfing gadgets of the smart phone/tablet ilk. I could have foregone the zit-popping while talking part, but it was a nice conversation.
Fry's has a great system for their cash register line. It is one line feeding into up to 25 cash registers. Today, there were 6 open registers and a wait of several minutes. The line is a linear corral fenced in by impulse buys on both sides for 50 feet. I got Cinnamon Altoids.
It was the fastest phone purchase ever. Girl scanned the bar code, I swiped my credit card and I was done. It takes at least 10 minutes to buy a phone at the T-Mobile store register.
I am grateful for my shopping choices and look forward to an fantastic year of new Armdroid* gadgets!
*In the PC days, Wintel was the acronym for Windows computers with InTel processors. In the coming tablet era Armdroid stands for ARM chips running Google's Android Software—this will include smart phones and tablets.
blessed with cell phones, friends and financial security
I have the cheapest cell phone plan that I know of using a basic Nokia 1661 cell phone on T-Mobile. About every 8 months, I buy 1000 minutes for $100. My cell phone stays in my car and I almost never do SMS text messages. That works out to $12/month for cell service for me. If I were to use text messaging, my current plan would soon be out the window since it costs a dime for every inbound or outbound message. The Nokia phones have cost from $0 to $25.
As a part of my making indirect financial amends (to the deceased, etc), I have bought a few of these phones for friends in early recovery. Cell phones with voice-mail are an incredibly convenient aid in modern living for setting appointments with social service providers, potential employers and family for those in transitional living situations. They are vital to economic development in the third world where there is no land-line phone system.
Yesterday when attempting to use my cell phone, I discovered to my dismay that it would not work due to an problem with the cell phone. The phone kept prompting for a security code that I had never set in the first place. That is the first time I had a problem like this since I started using cell phones 12 years ago. I was bummed and immediately went into a false belief that a particular person had switched phones with me without my knowledge. Stolen was the term that I used in describing this situation to others. I was angry and resentful. A few minutes of testing with a land-line quickly proved that misconception wrong. Oops.
It is appalling how quickly I can still get in the mode of being a victim and feeling threatened by others. Fortunately I am a lot better able to change that stinking thinking and get back to an even keel today.
I went to the T-Mobile store today. They could not get the phone to work using the default Nokia Admin password of 00000. Doing a hard reboot by pulling the battery twice in short order while the phone was on & waiting five minutes then using a security code of 12345 fixed the problem. YAY! Since that was the most trouble-shooting that T-Mobile staff could do with the phone, I left the store with my phone before knowing if the problem was fixed or not. The next step would have been to call Nokia directly.
While I was at the T-Mobile store, I put some money on accounts for two of my friends whose phones had stopped working due to nonpayment. It felt good to be able to help them. Their cell phones are a much more integral part of their social networking/communication than mine is to me. For $80, I got make three cell phones go from no calls to working today.
It used to cost $65 to get a landline turned back on 35 years ago. Back then, I was not always so good at paying my bills in a timely fashion. I quickly learned to pay the phone bill on time! That god (and Judge Greene) for the breakup of Ma Bell monopoly.
Someday soon, in the next year or so, I will upgrade my basic phone plan into an Android smart phone setup so I can surf the web from anywhere on a 5-inch monitor on a 4G phone network instead of being forced to use my giant monitor at home with 40 Mbps DSL. It is nice having a new toy to look forward to.
I am incredibly grateful for 21st century cell phone reliability, prices and convenience. It is a blessing in my life to be able to help others. Fear of economic insecurity has left me. I will never be rich, but I will always have enough to get by thanks to the miracle of the 12-step programs.
Carrying the message aka working with others
Twelve step programs have but one primary purpose—to carry the message to those that are still suffering from addiction of one sort or another. I love the simplicity of that concept.
There are countless ways of doing that. Today I worked with others by sharing a meeting about my experiences in the last 9 days since my last meeting. One of the most profound slogans in the program is "I am only as sick as my secrets". It means that being honest & current (what is going on in my life/head today) with others is a fundamental spiritual principle in my recovery.
Most people feel safer sharing one-on-one with another person. There are a small fraction of others like me that feel safer sharing with a group. I know pretty much what a group will do, I don't do nearly as well in being able to read individuals. I know there is a trust issue somewhere in that situation. I have made fantastic progress with my trust issues. More will be revealed.
high-speed DSL Internet access
I have two Qwest DSL accounts. Qwest's weird billing schemes greatly encourage upgrading DSL speeds every 6 months. Today I upgraded from 1.5 to 7 Mbps and the price went from 49.99 to 45 with a free month of service. Experience has shown I will have to do that again in another 6 months. My home account is a 40 Mbps download rate.
On the bright side, it will be faster and cheaper. On the dark side, customers in the US pay more for slower internet than any other country in the OECD.
Qwest also sends me emails about violating the TOS for uploading bitTorrent files. It is not that I want to upload the files, but when I am downloading movies & shows, bitTorrent works best with reciprocity. It is possible Qwest will cut me off from paying them $100/month to appease the RIAA. At least the RIAA, stopped suing people as of 2008. I read somewhere that they spent about $45 million to collect several hundred thousand dollars.
just because...
Today I am grateful that nothing bad happened to me today. That is admittedly a low mark to clear. Some days that is good enough.
It is also a lot better than what a couple other people I know did today. One got locked in the psych ward after a suicide attempt. The other is now drunk and homeless. Both spots are grim places for 40-something adults that have trying to get sober for years.
My biggest problem today was finding a parking spot at Costco on a Saturday afternoon when giving a friend a ride to their pharmacy. It will be long time before I go back to Costco on a Saturday. They had every register going.
I am grateful for small problems today. All I had to do was wait 5-10 minutes for a parking spot to open up. Patience is a good thing.
2 procedures at the UW Medical Center
This week I had 2 routine procedures done at the UWMC on Wednesday and Thursday.
I have problems with blood clots and so need to take an anticoagulant pill. When I have a surgery, I switch to heparin injections which can be neutralized by a catalyst in cases of excessive bleeding. Changing from pills to injections and back to pills is a hassle to deal with. Fortunately for me, I was able to schedule the procedures on consecutive days so I did not have to change from Coumadin to heparin to Coumadin twice.
Wednesday's procedure went well. I incorrectly set my alarm and so overslept. They told me to come asap. I was 90 minutes late. It worked well for everybody, they moved up the next person's procedure to my time slot. By the time I got there, they were ready for me and I did not have to wait long before starting my procedure at 11 AM. I was on my way home at 2 PM. After sedation (light anesthetisia), they required a friend come get me to release from the post-op ward.
Thursday's procedure had a longer wait time to get started since I was on-time and things were running late. The pre-op staff was incredibly kind, helpful and supportive. Stacy was a pleasant distraction when she chatted with me for 10 minutes. After the procedure, I got some strong pain medicine making for a more pleasant wait for a bed in the post-op ward.
Once upstairs, the kitchen was a wonderful surprise. I could call in an order off the menu and get it sent up in about 30 minutes. Lunch was pot roast with mashed potatoes and gravy. Dinner was a cheeseburger and a salad.
I slept in the evening and could not get back to sleep until about 3:30 this morning. At 4 AM, the RN woke me to see if I wanted pain meds. I declined while wondering wtf? Turned out her assistant had to take my vital signs (blood pressure, temperature and oxygen saturation in my blood).
I could not get back to sleep. I finished the Glass Rainbow by James Lee Burke. Two residents came by on rounds at 9 AM. Neither one of them was at the procedure so they could not tell me what happened. I slept for two hours and it was time to go. I picked up my meds at the pharmacy on the way out and was glad that was all over.
It was a fantastic organizational experience performed by the UWMC to coordinate two procedures with MDs in 3 locations. I am grateful for their expertise.
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