Never is there a begin…nor an end

Counting the days,

For whom or what?

Marking the time. WHY?

Whether monthly, daily, or by the hour.

Attitude never should be dour.

For even so–it is LIVING which we are all still doing.

And where there is life…there is, yes……..

…….HOPE!

A lot of people don’t like changes.  They keep their living room furniture in the same pattern for years, never even thinking of moving a table, or, God forbid, a couch, to give the room a different feng shui.  Many people would never try foods that they can’t pronounce, nor would they ever think of vacation in a land that does not know what a McFlurry is.  I was raised in such a household, as were many of my peers in the 50’s and 60’s.  Our living room never changed, neither did our menu or our vacation destinations.  I was…

At once I am bombarded with a multitude of thoughts, crashing in from all sides.  I go to more meetings than ever before for a number of reasons.  Mainly is that I may see how others are doing, to meet out-of-town Peeps, and new, freshly sobered guys, scared, shaking, wondering things like, “What in the world have I done to deserve being in this Fk’d-up place (Alcoholics Anonymous)?”

Then there ARE the friends I have made through years of meetings, and the new friends always coming and going. One such friend, sober 18 months, sat in a meeting Sunday morning, suddenly…

I’ve been depressed since yesterday, when I innocently brought my parents dinner (before work, I stopped by in the morning) and found my father hunched over breakfast in terrible pain. Lower right quadrant of the belly, a 9 out of 10. For an old stoic like my dad, that’s bad.

So I cancel out a couple of patients and take him with my mother to the ER and wait for an evaluation. Can’t wait all day, so I leave my mom with her phone. Gotta’ go. Let me know what happens.

It’s a terrible feeling, leaving your 84 year old mother in…

Hey folks, here is a video that TSR made, which features several amazing recovery stories and promotes the importance of addiction recovery! Enjoy (both parts)!
Follow the break for videos. Leave your thoughts in the comments.

During my final year of drugging, drinking, and anthing-ing, an incident occurred which I will remember always.  I had been working the night shift at a very busy bar in North Naples, FL.  My hours, 6-2 six nights a week, I tended a very busy bar, and played also my violin to sort of entertain the Peeps.

By the time I got to work, I was pretty much bombed, and by the end of the night (2 AM) I was speeded up like a jet plane.  Ten minutes of cleaning the lounge, actually took me two hours, as I drank whatever…

Twelve years ago I was rushing into a grocery store, trying to get a few things on my way to my next errand.  I, as usual, was moving at the speed of light, thinking about what I had to do next….when I saw her.  There she was, a big, black, furry dog with small deep set brown eyes and a face that reminded me of a black bear.  It only took one look, for both of us.  I knew.  She knew.  She was mine.  I was hers.  I brought her home to my little town house which already was home…

SOME MORE STUFF!

Winter will soon be but a memory…WHAT a memory!  Having lived in Naples, Florida 45 years, I can tell you, yes, I still remember.  Even now, when I allow a thought of those 32 years I spent in Cincinnati to live a moment with me–I can “feel” my fingers frozen, my body shaking with the cold.  And I might be exaggerating here, but I seem to recall being often in a gloomy or semi state of depression–the SO many overcast days of bleakness.

It is sort of like having been alive on December 7, 1941– Pearl Harbor–you can never…

Well, once again it is snowing like @&$%# where I live and I am homebound.  It also looks like no one will be moving out of their abodes for several days, due to the “inclement weather” we are experiencing in the Mid-Atlantic.  Being hold up in my home with six dog and two cats makes for some interesting circumstances and it is a constant effort to keep the back deck shoveled so the dogs have somewhere they can walk and not get totally lost in the snow.  That cats, on the other hand, could care less - after all, they…

Heard at a meeting (won’t tell you who said these):

“Never ever plan to NOT go to a meeting.”  It is alright to not go, for one reason or another–just do not PLAN it that way.  Ya never know!

When I take some time out to meditate–somehow I always ALWAYS end up with more time that day.

Out of the 86,400 seconds in a day, did I bother to take even ONE of them to thank my Higher Power?

“Don’t die on Third” (Third Step, that is…)  Too many of us go back out, because we stayed for months trying to work perfectly the…

RANTING AND RAVING–NOT JUST IN JEST

A “good” blogger I am NOT.  I got really hooked, became obsessive, and spent 8-10 hours a day writing, reading, and commenting…for a year-and-a-half.  Three weeks ago I stopped blogging, just left it–with a goodbye message, of course. http://steveroni.blogspot.com if anyone’s interested…

In my blogging “career” I went from reading ONE blog post daily, to checking on about sixty per day, commenting on as many as I could. During this time I went from enjoying 1 follower to 164.  (How many really followed I don’t know.) But my daily readership went from 1 to 101, then leveled…

Addiction has given me such an interesting bag of fears.

Our roommate recently purchased an XBOX 360. He and my husband play and play and play, all day. Here are the things that I fear around the XBOX 360:

I am afraid my husband will pawn it for drugs. We have few fancy electronics left, and I keep the ones that I have under my guard at all times. No matter how well my husband is doing, I am always wary of expensive electronics left unattended. He has paid for lots of heroin with other people’s electronics, and it feels pornographic to…

My husband Mark, I have to admit it, hates fish. And people fish evangelize him all the time. I used to too, in my pre-vegetarian days, when a trip to the aquarium would make me hungry. The problem, you see, is never that people were different and have different needs and tastes; the problem is that Mark has never had “good” fish. “You’ve never tried really fresh fish. You haven’t tried this fish; it’s not a fishy fish. You haven’t tasted fish the way I make it. You haven’t been eating fish the right way. Try this. You’ll like it.”…