Lucky

The Doors of Perception is a short book by Aldous Huxley, first published in 1954, detailing his experiences when taking mescaline.  The 1960s band, The Doors, with Jim Morrison took its name from that book.

My (sober) doors of perception have changed greatly for the better over the years.  While not believing I was “unlucky”, I did have the sense that it was my lot in life to stoically endure less than ideal situations.

Now I believe that I am reasonably lucky.  Not lucky in the sense that I will win money in a casino, but lucky to be alive and sober with a living income that is stable with good health insurance and people that love me.

It was unfortunate that I burned my ankle last month.  I am crazy lucky that it was not worse.  Normally I sit at my PC for an hour or two.  That night I was only here for 20 minutes.  I would have lost my foot had I spent my usual time here.  As a sober addict/alcoholic with relapses under my belt, I am blessed to be sober with a place to live in reasonably good health.  I have all my teeth that are in good condition. That is not the case for many, if not the vast majority of, people my age in the world.

I used to be a victim filled with self-pity for poor me and my horrible circumstances.   Truly I mostly needed to grow up and take responsibility for my life.  That was something I was unable to do on my own.  Nature or nurture, I was greatly misguided in my approach to life. 

I will be 56 next week.  I am lucky to have all the many blessings that I enjoy in my life and the lives of those around me.

I am grateful to be getting older, wiser and happier.  It was not clear that this would ever happen.  Of course the punchline is…had I known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of my body.

360 Days

Five days to go until I again have a year of sobriety.  It is good to sober today.  It would be great to have never relapsed… and even better to not have been an addict… If I were to get started on if only, I would not know where to stop.  Dealing with life on life’s terms, I clearly needed additional lessons on humility.

Humility shows up in many ways, one the most important is asking for and accepting help from others.  Must often that is a friendly ear to listen to me talk about my feelings—both good and bad—then give me a hug and tell me they love me.

I am grateful to be sober today.  That is a lot better than the alternatives listed by Narcotics Anonymous which are “jails, institutions and death”.

Healing Slowly

My burn is healing slowly.  The good news is that it is not infected.   The visiting nurse had the burn clinic change the dressing on the wound back to the original methodology used when I was released from the hospital due to a lack of progress with the last method.

It is good that I have great insurance that covers a nurse visit every day and access to high quality health care.  Otherwise, I would be looking at a leg amputation or worse.  I can’t walk, but my legs are a huge part of being balanced in my wheelchair.  Loss of limb would be devastating.  I know many others have lost limbs due to poor health care treatment and/or infection.

I am extremely grateful for the health care resources that I have to treat my burn, spinal cord injury/paralysis, and  diabetes.   Next week, for the first time in four years I am going back to a psychologist that I saw for several years. 

No Ordinary Success Story

A.A. is no success story in the ordinary sense of the word. It is a story of suffering transmuted, under grace, into spiritual progress. — As Bill Sees It  p. 35

Upon entering A.A. I listened to others talk about the reality of their drinking: loneliness, terror and pain. As I listened further, I soon heard a description of a very different kind — the reality of sobriety. It is a reality of freedom and happiness, of purpose and direction, and of serenity and peace with God, ourselves and others. By attending meetings I am reintroduced to that reality, over and over. I see it in the eyes and hear it in the voices of those around me. By working the program I find the direction and strength with which to make it mine. The joy of A.A. is that this new reality is available to me.

From AA’s Daily Reflections for February 26^th.

My own best thinking left me hurt, baffled and frustrated by life.   I lacked skills to create a happy successful life for myself or even be in good relationships with those around me.  I was full of self-pity and rage.  I am at peace and happy with my life today.

I am grateful for the miracle of AA’s 12-step recovery in my life.  It gave me a new lease on life and a new way of living.

RIP Jeanie T

The funeral for Jeanie T is this Saturday.  Jeanie was a big part of my early years in recovery.  She was the aunt that I never had—kind, loving, cheerful and optimistic.  In her later years, she was plagued with a variety of painful health problems that she fought with great courage.  I hope she is in a better place now.

Met the mall gang at Crossroads today.  It was the first time we (I) had done that in almost two months.  It was good to spend time with them, get caught up on our lives, read and discuss recovery related issues.  I love my mall gang get-togethers.

I am grateful for the people in my life that have made me a better person for having known them.  I must be getting older.  This is the third good friend to die in three months.

A Gorgeous Day

Met Sandy for lunch today for the first time since early January.  Due to leaving home early, I stopped by the Juanita Beach Park for a few minutes to enjoy a beautiful spring morning before lunch. 

Bought a glucose meter at Walgreen’s while killing time shopping.  Turns out I have a bit more to learn about glucose meters and needing to buy the little strips that go with them along with lances to get a drop of blood.  While shopping online tonight for the test strips, I bought a much better Bayer glucose meter on Amazon tonight that comes with a USB connection so I can upload my results to a PC.  By Thursday, I will be checking my blood sugar.  From reading the reviews, it is clear the results are not always accurate (off by 25 on a scale that is ideally ranges from 60 to 100).  The Bayer model was really well rated with few negative reviews.

I am grateful for beautiful days, good friends, delicious food and easy affordable access to medical technology.

My Home Group

I have been going to the same meeting on Sunday night for 11ish years. Until now I never missed more than a meeting or two in a row.  It had been seven weeks since the last time I was at my home group when I made it back tonight.   It felt good to be there and good to be anywhere.

I am grateful to have a functional strongly recovery-oriented home group focused on studying AA’s 12 steps and 12 traditions.

A Free Pass for this Post

Giving myself a free pass for not writing a topic tonight.  Wanted to use the word “mulligan” but that is about a free do-over, I am not going to double write this Gratitude blog post.  Still found a way to fit mulligan into the post…

I am grateful for my free pass on tonight’s post.

Clutter

My decorating strongly tends towards functional minimalism.   Nothing in the middle of the room and that much stuff on the walls.  A more accurate and less charitable description is that I crappy decorator.  My efforts have always felt a lack of the warm and inviting feel of a place to socialize.

The current situation is a perimeter of crap all around my living room.  Putting a dresser and chest of drawers to use as hobby toolboxes moved the needle from an iffy situation to full on busy.  For whatever reason, I have lacked the motivation and/or energy to streamline and organize the front room. 

The biggest component of stuff collection is that I have not moved in a dozen years.  This is the longest I have lived anywhere in my adult life by years.  Goods that would have been recycled or junked found a place in the closet without needing to be moved or discarded.  Now my closets are full of clothes that are too small, linens, duffle bags, wheelchair parts and rolls of Christmas wrapping paper (which I don’t even use much of in the first place).

Another part of that is observing that Lea has not seen an empty space that did not need filling.  Pre-emptive clutter has cut down on the rate of stuff increasing.  Still I could fill the spaces in vastly more organized and attractive ways.  Blaming it on others is a feeble excuse at best and more nearly another character  flaw.  Having a spare bedroom was a great clutter reduction method for the front room.  That space resource was reallocated two years ago.  Time to move on.

My rule of thumb is nothing more than one layer deep around the perimeter.  Unfortunately that has expanded to include blocking my access to the sliding deck door and the front closets.

It is time to declutter my living room.   I will at least get rid of enough stuff so that everything else fits in a place that is at least out of sight and hopefully well organized.

My place is messy and kind of trashed.  Wheelchairs are hard on carpets and foot-high sheetrock (where the wheel bumps corners).  My lease expires in April.  I can’t imagine finding the gumption to move out, get new carpet and paint, then move in.  I can at least attenuate the IED bomb crater (currently watching American Sniper about US soldiers in Iraq) look.  Okay, it is not quite that bad.  I can reach the wall from my wheelchair all around the room and the stuff that I have all works—I just am not using it now.

I am grateful that one of the biggest problems in my life today is having too much crap that I don’t need or use.  That is fantastically better than suffering from a scarcity of resources such as food, clean water, warm shelter and a safe place to live.  I have a classier set of problems these days.

The Gift Of Laughter

At this juncture, his A.A. sponsor usually laughs.

— 12x12, p. 26

Before my recovery from alcoholism began, laughter was one of the most painful sounds I knew. I never laughed and I felt that anyone else's laughter was directed at me! My self-pity and anger denied me the simplest of pleasures or lightness of heart. By the end of my drinking not even alcohol could provoke a drunken giggle in me.

When my A.A. sponsor began to laugh and point out my self-pity and ego-feeding deceptions, I was annoyed and hurt, but it taught me to lighten up and focus on my recovery. I soon learned to laugh at myself and eventually I taught those I sponsor to laugh also. Every day I ask God to help me stop taking myself too seriously.

            From the book Daily Reflections for February 20th

I used laughter like a sharp weapon to keep others away.  Whether by witty sarcastic remarks that hurt others or by a harsh braying laugh aimed at the heart of others, laughter created distance in my relationships and left me feeling even more lonely at the end of the day.

I still have inappropriate laughter at times when I don’t know what to say to a friend’s deep revealing vulnerability, but it is a lot friendlier than how it used to be.  I now usually immediately own my not knowing a more appropriate response than a sort of embarrassed laughter and we have a moment of shared humanity.  But not always.

Now I laugh at myself and with others.  That works a lot better for me, for others and my relationships.  I now see laughter as an expression of love, caring and healing.  It is the best medicine.

I am grateful for the laughter in my life today.  There has not been a lot of laughing by me in the last month.  I am sure there will be plenty when I chair the meeting tomorrow morning on this very topic.

Chilling aka Refrigeration

Started reading the book How We Got To Now by Steven Johnson.  So far, it is like a more linear in-depth version of James Burke’s Connections. 

The first story was of silicon starting with a naturally formed piece of glass in the Libyan desert that was found in King Tut’s tomb.  From there it moved on to Turkish glass blowers moving to Venice to mirrors, lenses, glasses and telescopes to fiber optics and the world wide web.

The second story is presumably about refrigeration starting with the story of Frederic Tudor shipping ice from Boston to the Caribbean.  He started rich, went broke and then made fortune.

While casting about my mind for a topic tonight, I thought again of refrigeration. I was sure I had written about it before on my Gratitude blog.  With help from the magic of Google on Blogspot, I found a post from back in May of 2011 that covers a few of the miracles of refrigeration [back when I was still fighting with formatting issues in my first 100 Gratitude blog posts].

Modern refrigeration

Feeling lazy about cooking tonight, it was dinner from the freezer. Pulled sausage, corn, potatoes and an ice cream bar from the freezer. I usually nuke frozen food in the microwave. Tonight I went all out and used a steamer/double-boiler for the corn. It was not gourmet. The food was good enough and could hardly have been easier to make.

I tend to cook a hunk of meat (chicken, pork, beef or fish by frequency) and maybe have a salad with it for a meal. Tonight's dinner was reasonably well balanced for me.

Some day I will work more on that diet and exercise thing. Lord (and anyone who sees me) knows that I need it.

I am grateful for my refrigerator/freezer and the amazingly wonderful selection of meats, veggies, fruits and prepared foods at local grocers that I can stick in it.

                                                           

I am still grateful for the miracle of refrigeration and heat exchangers.  I will buy a bit better sliding door AC unit this summer than the one I got last summer with a closed cold air circulation cycle so it does not blow cold air outside and can sit outside making it a bit quieter in my bedroom.

Savoring Good Times

My mind has a strong tendency to ruminate about past events viewing them a negative way causing feelings of guilt and much shame.  One of the techniques I am using to change my self-talk is to focus on savoring pleasant events and good times.  There is plenty of room for great progress in getting better at savoring the good times.  It is a blessing to have one more tool in my mental toolbox to make for a more positive mental outlook and health.

I am grateful for the successes in my life that I can savor in ways that make me feel better, happier and help me flourish to the best of my ability.

  

NBC’s Saturday Night Live Turns 40

Watching SNL’s 40^th Anniversary Special with Lea.   It is funny, kind and a funny flashback comedians and events they parodied of the last 40 years.

Here is a link to some highlights: http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video.

I am grateful for all the humor and joy these incredibly talented people shared with us over the years.

No Drama Today

Another day of homebound healing with reading, napping and a little TV watching.  It is certainly life at a slow pace.   That is a lot better to me than having a bunch of drama going on.  For me, that invariably results in confusion, chaos, hurt feelings and somebody doing self-destructive behavior.  My healing might be going slow, but that is a lot better than chaotic drama.

I am grateful for a quiet day today.  It is good to not have drama nor a sub-zero blizzard going on like back east from Ohio to New York.  I am grateful for a lot of crap that I am not dealing with today.

33 Days to Spring

My birthday is on March 5^th.  I love this time of year due to being the start of early spring in Seattle.  In the 2.6 weeks until my birthday, the days go from 10:17 minutes of daylight to 11:17.  

Outside my window, the deciduous trees are budding with the promise of new leaves coming soon.  The grass is turning from a sickly yellow-brown to a bright lush vibrant green.  The sun no long skirts the horizon on it daily journey as it beings to rise higher in the sky.

I am grateful for the optimism of early spring overcoming the dismal weak sun of winter.

Winter Weather

New England beat Seattle in the Superbowl two weeks ago.  Since then, they also got 6 feet of snow with another snowstorm on the way.  Seattle was 60° and sunny this week. 

While I am pretty much homebound with my healing.  It was great to be able to drive to Seattle in light traffic this morning and then pick up two delicious cheese-steak sandwiches from The Original Philly's on the corner of Rainier & MLK in south Seattle for a takeout lunch at home—something I rarely do.

The occasional snowstorm that quickly melts away makes for a beautiful winter wonderland.  6 feet of snow with more on the way would be a horrible unending nightmare for people like me that don’t drive in the snow.  I don’t mind driving in the snow.  My rearwheel drive car does poorly and the consequences are way too severe to make any kind of sense.  Being stuck in my car with my wheelchair with treadless tires would be a crappy way to spend my day.  Wrecking my car then being stuck in a cold car on a snowy day is not going to happen anytime soon.

I am grateful for relatively warm sunny winter days with delicious sandwiches.  The visit to the burn clinic went well enough.  I am slowly healing.  The doctor’s prediction was for a few more weeks with my leg elevated.

Telephone Service

Spent some time on the phone with friends and rearranging appointments today. 

It was great to chat with my friends with my ankle elevated in a healing position.  While I was dealing with my health care issues, Michael was dealing with a case of the flu that was extremely serious forcing him to sleep sitting up with a hot pad on his chest.

Rescheduling health care appointments was a lot better than trying to do more than I should tomorrow or failing to show up.

Having worked at a baby internet telco (VOIP), I have decided to stick with a landline POTS service for the foreseeable future.  Talking with Leslee yesterday again reinforced the wisdom of that decision.  Comcast has been losing her vmails for a week or two…and she does not even know she missed calls.  Plus my phone will work when the power goes out—which will be hopefully never.

I am grateful for my incredibly reliable hassle free high quality phone service from Ma Bell, PNW Bell, Qwest, err, I mean Century Link.

Homebound Activities

Most of my time for the next two weeks will be spent in bed with my ankle propped on pillows.  I love to read and so that is not the hardship for me that it would be for most others.  My friends  would likely go stir-crazy in the same amount of time it takes me to become comfortably ensconced in my pillows.

That makes me more than a little sloth-like most days of the year, but is a huge positive attribute when doing the slow recovery for spinal cord injury impacted slow healing ailments such as my burn.

There are plenty of hobby projects for me to work on in my apartment from jewelry making to gardening to trying out my new food processor by making some low carb snacks.

I am grateful for the vastly improved progress in wound healing this after my stint in the ER & burn ward.

June Bug and Love Bug

Needing a short post to get back to bed, I will write about something close to me.  My cats hang out on my desk when I am my PC.  June Bug (“Bug”) is my 8 year old cat and Love Bug (“Baby Kitty” for now) is my 8-month old kitty cat.  Bug bonded closely with me when I got her as a young kitten.  BK bonded with Lea in a big way.

My friend Joy came up with the name June Bug way back when.  After trips to 4 different cat shelters, Baby Kitty walked up to Lea and started purring on her ankle.  The ribbon on her neck said her name was Love Bug.  Our search for a new kitten was over and that is why they are both bugs.

I am grateful for my well-mannered social kind and loving tortie cats.  They provide much love and comfort.

Extended ER Visit

Had to go back to the ER due to an infection in my burn/graft.  It was basically a trip to the ER for an IV antibiotic and slight dressing change protocol that took a night back on the burn ward to complete—like an extended ER visit in slow motion.

It was good that I went to the ER and got some IV antibiotics in a timely fashion.  I will spend more time lying down with my foot up for the next two weeks and will hopefully be healed to a closed wound in a somewhat fragile condition.

My temporary roommate was incredibly asocial.  He was a homeless vet with a burn claiming that a guy from a neighboring encampment lit him on fire with alcohol.  It was easy to see how this guy almost got burned to death for being annoying and whiny.  That story might be true.  Easy to imagine some substance abuse issues being involved with whatever caused his burn.    

I am grateful for the health care treatment and to have got to go home today and that I am nowhere near close to being as miserable and unhappy as the guy next to me seems to live his life.  He was spinning elaborate revenge stories towards multiple people and places that had “wronged” him.

Flow With Danica

Danica got a new Windows 8.1 Touchscreen laptop for her birthday.  We spent 3 hours customizing the hard drive, folders, downloading and installing web browsers, media players and Google Drive (nee Docs).  It was the most I have ever taught/shown someone in my life in a single sitting.  I was not really trying to teach her full PC competence, more nearly I sat at my PC explaining and demonstrating how my PC was laid out and what she should do next.  She did it with few questions nor mistakes.  It was very impressive on her part.  We got interrupted by a phone call and realized it time for a break.

It was great to be able to help someone setup their new laptop going from barebones Windows to nearly all they need in just a few hours.  I could hardly have done it faster on my own.  I greatly enjoyed helping someone make great progress in a short time.  Danica was extremely pleased with her new hardware and knowledge.

Sandy and Victor made an accepted offer on a condo in the building where they had been renting.  They are going to a loan officer tomorrow instead of lunch.  I am very happy for her.

Leslee is going to buy a new car for the first time in 30ish years that will likely last her the rest of her driving days.

I am very grateful for my friends making progress in their lives, my PC skills, and to be able to help others in a way that was fun, enjoyable and productive for both of us.  Then we had pork fajitas for dinner!

Setbacks

Started my day with one potential healthcare setback and then another revealed while changing the bandage on my ankle.  My foot was slightly red.  That could have been from the way I was lying in bed or early signs of an infection.    The first problem has been an ongoing urology issue.  If my foot is still red or redder tomorrow, I will go to the ER with a quickness.  I have a long standing appointment with my urologist on March 3^rd.

These setbacks suck.  Even if nothing needs to be done to treat them, they are still wearing on my mental health.  It is not that I have a lot of anxiety over them, it is just a grind to process and deal with.

It is hard to talk to others about them.  All too often instead of getting a kind ear to listen to my vent my frustrations, I am given medical advice by people with no experience dealing with these issues.  While the medical advice is of the “go to the doctor right now” ilk, my issues are rarely of the life-threatening emergencies and so are not solved at the ER.  I appreciate my friends concern for me, but am frustrated by not being able to have an actual conversation about my feelings, thoughts and concerns.

I am grateful to have great health care providers all less than 30 minutes away.  This week, I will talk with a dietition, an RN nutrionalist and my GP about my health care issues—providing I don’t also have to go to the ER for infection problems.

Returning to Routines

After a month of flu and burn issues, I made it back to my morning meeting doing my Friday AM service position of chairing the meeting on the topic from AA’s Daily Reflections.  As would be expected in early February, the topic was on the 2^nd step of coming to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Riffing on the theme that god is love, I talked about learning how to love myself, my life and others thanks to the miracles of 12-step recovery mentioning my new favorite definition of love with others as being sharing a moment with others and then feeling better.  Members responded in kind talking about much more sane behavior, learning how to receive and give loving support with others.   I had a good meeting and hope they did too.

I am grateful to be getting back the successful routines of daily live that make my life better.

Helping Others

Took Lea to a GI doctor this morning.  In the 2.5 years I have known her,  her stomach has been messed up in a variety of ways.  Turns out she has gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD).  Much like my diabetes, this can be greatly mitigated by appropriate changes in diet.  She will get an MRI later this month to help create a good treatment plan for her.  It will take some discipline to implement changes in her eating habits.  I hope it helps and that she does well.

I needed to volunteer somewhere besides 12-step recovery for the last few years.  Tonight I emailed a program that deals with reading to ESL students near Crossroads Mall.  Some friends have done this sort of thing and found it incredibly rewarding.  I am a big fan of reading and education, so this is something I truly believe in.   I have rarely been a tutor/trainer/teacher in my life, so this will be a bit of a reach for me.

I have been helping Michelle a tiny bit with getting resources for a small church she attends that recently moved to a new location.  It is a challenge to for both of us for us to help her better understand how to use a PC, word processor, printer, and write letters requesting donations.  She has a lot of fear about admitting to what she does not know while trying to do things in a way that does not work well.  It is frustrating for her.  Learning is a skill she has not practiced much lately.  She is extremely smart. 

It is Danica’s birthday in two weeks.  I got her a new laptop at Costco today.  That will be a huge learning curve for her.  She is getting her GED and will be ready to start college later this year.  The laptop will be great for doing her homework and for watching TV shows when hooked to a larger TV screen using an HDMI cable.

It is good for me to help others.  It certainly gets me out of myself.    25 years ago I started three charities in an effort to “save the world”.  It was not as rewarding as I had hoped it would be.  In recovery, I have learned to save the world one person at a time.   That is a lot more rewarding.

I am grateful to be able to help others in ways that work for them and for me.   It is vital to my having a good feeling about being able to make a positive contribution to our world.

11 Months

Lea and I have 11 months of sobriety today.  In my typical Pisces way, I see it as being not as good as closing in on 16 years since I went to rehab and a lot better than having even less time.  It is fantastically better than being stuck using.

Life is not perfect and we have our problems—just like everybody else.  They are a lot classier problems than the ones we had while using.

I am grateful for our 11 months.  It is good to be sober today.

Good To Go

Went to my first follow-up appointment at the burn clinic today.  My “mesh” graft is doing really well given my paraplegia.  Charlie the nurse-practitioner pronounced me ready to get about and about as long as I elevate my ankle every two hours.  

Tomorrow, I will go to my first meeting in almost four weeks.  That is the longest I have gone without a meeting since I went to rehab in May of 1999.  It could be a lot worse inside my head. 

I am grateful to be doing very well on a relative basis in both my burn recovery and mental health.

Feeling Relatively Good

I am feeling good even after having been home-bound and/or hospitalized for almost a month.   It could be a lot worse and could hardly be better given my situation.

I am grateful for positive mental health in a tough situation.

Seahawks 2 Yards Away Superbowl Re-Pete

 

Our beloved Seahawks had the ball on the 2-yard line with 40 seconds left in the game.  It was a given that they would give the ball to, Marshawn Lynch aka Beast Mode, who lead the league in scoring touchdowns this year.  Instead it was an intercepted pass that sealed a 4-point win for the NE Patriots.

It was a Cinderella second half of the season for the Seahawks going from being iffy to making the playoffs to winning 8 games in a row. 

I am grateful to have been able to watch my hometown team play an exciting close game in the Superbowl at home on my big-screen TV.  That was fantastically better than watching others play on a small screen from the hospital or a long-term care facility.  Danica came over with Jayse and we had Pagliacci pizza and salad in homage to Superbowl junk food dining.

Seahawks Lead NFC Championship Game For 71 Seconds—Beat Packers In OT

[ed. note: this got stuck in draft mode instead of being "published" on 1/18/15]

Our beloved Seahawks got spanked for the first 58 minutes of the game being down 16-0, 19-7 and then pulling ahead at the end by scoring 15 points in 44 seconds.  The Packers tied the game with a field goal.   In OT, the Seahawks got the ball and drove the length of the field to score a touchdown that was an automatic game winner.

It was a bummer of a game to watch until the end.  QB Russell Wilson threw 4 pass interceptions for the first time in his career—although two were tips by his recievers caught by Green Bay defenders.

I am grateful the Seahawks won and will be playing the New England Patriots in the XLIX (49) in Phoenix in two weeks.

Seahawks vs Patriots in Superbowl XLIV (49)

The defending champion Seahawks will try to repeat over the New England Patriots on Sunday 2/1 at 3:30 PM Pacific time.   While adamantly against the subsidization of pro sports such as finally paying off the debt on the KingDome this month—ten years after it was destroyed so we could build two new stadiums at maybe two billion dollars in tax payer subsidies that could have gone for things like housing the homeless or education, I am happy that our local team is at least doing really well against the other white billionaire owners and their multimillionaire players.

I hope the Seahawks win.  Locals are going crazy over “blue Friday” wearing team colors and decorating buildings with 12^th Man art.  It is fun to have a winning team and be a part of something we are all happy about.

I am grateful for the wonderful job owner Paul Allen and coach Pete Carroll have done in creating a winning team with the potential to repeat as NFL Champions.  Go Seahawks!