Two plus years, a lot of booze, and then a lot of sobriety.

It's been over two years.  I'd love to say that I've been sober since my last post.  I may or may not have been...and by "may or may not", I mean I haven't.  But the upshot is I'm on an 89 day streak.  It's been a rough road with some dark times...divorce, etc.  My drinking was not the cause of my divorce, at least not directly, but it certainly didn't help.  I'm still wading through this sh!tstorm, and one of the many things that I've learned is that life is much easier to deal with when you have a clear head.

I need to start blogging on a regular basis again.  It's therapeutic. Things are going to get better. They already have, and at some point I'm going to want to look back and admire how far I've come.

This is about so much more than sobriety....It's about growing up, taking responsibility for your own happiness, setting a positive example for your kids, and many other things.  I thought about starting a new blog, but this one is already here so I figured why not pick up where I left off?

I'm going to cut this short....my son is sitting next to me slurping on a candy cane.  He has his headphones on and he has no idea just how annoyingly loud his slurping is....Admittedly, I'm overly sensitive to noise, but OMG!

Don't drink, don't smoke, what do you do?

It's been awhile. 

Easter in Sedona was good.  Lot's of drinking going around but I managed to abstain.  It wasn't that big of a deal. 

Gene has been stopping by a little more often and I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that I haven't been blogging. 

I guess things have been a little stressful around here.  Father in law has been doing better lately, but that's to be expected.  We've been told to not get our hopes up because we're in for a roller coaster ride with him.  Not sure if I mentioned it before, but he has Lewy Body Dimentia.  I don't know much about it but I guess it's a pretty ugly disease.  He's been really clear lately....so much so that my Mother in law has been questioning whether he's been misdiagnosed. 

The doctors told us this would happen though.  They also said not to get too excited because he'll soon cycle back into a confused state.  He was confused when I saw him three weeks ago, but at least he was nice and calm.  He's also bipolar and has been for most of his adult life.  I've known him for about 16 years...great guy, but man I could tell some stories.

Anyway, my wife has been spending a fair amount of time in Houston helping her parents.  She's home now.  We're planning on visiting again next weekend. 

What else?  I worked out four times last week.  That's typical.  And I'm used to being sore...it kinda goes with the territory.  What I'm not used to is how crazy mind boggling sore I am this week compared to most other weeks.  Maybe I got dehydrated and that did me in.  I haven't been getting as much sleep lately.  I guess that could have something to do with it.  Whatever it is, when I woke up this morning my chest, arms, and abs hurt so bad I could barely get out of bed.  No bueno! 

I'm going to get plenty of sleep tonight and hope that I feel better tomorrow. 

This has turned into one big whiny pity party for me.  Apologies.

I'm sober though...so I got that going for me, which is nice!

Back on the wagon and busy

I'm back to coasting along which is nice.  Been busy dealing with life.  My father in law is ill and it doesn't look like he's going to fully recover.  My wife has been spending a lot of time in Houston visiting him and helping my mother in law deal.  I was down there last weekend with the boys.  We're all back home now.

This weekend we're going to what was supposed to be a big family reunion and celebration for my wife's grandmother's 100th birthday.  Unfortunately, she passed away about a week ago.  The grandmother, not my wife.  It wasn't unexpected.  So now we're going to a big family reunion and funeral. It happens.

This will be the third big family reunion I've been to on my wife's side.  They have one every five years.  They're all good people and I get along with them well.  Some of them drink, but a lot of them don't.  I don't foresee any temptations this weekend.  I'll probably be too busy chasing Five and Eight around.

I feel like I'm in a pretty good place sobrietywise.  The Goofup didn't cause any downward spiral back to my nightly drinking binges. It happened....now it's over.  I haven't counted, but I think I'd be pretty close to day 100 at this point, but the number doesn't really mean much to me now.  Sober nights still feel like the norm, and that's a pretty good place to be.

Ride On

First of all, thanks for all of the words of encouragement.  It's greatly appreciated.

So yeah, I got slightly intoxicated Friday night.  Not only that, but I also drunk posted on my own sober blog.  I'm not gonna lie, it's a little hard for me to not laugh at that...at least a little.

I woke up Saturday morning feeling that all too familiar minor hangover....slight headache, cotton mouth. All things considered, I've felt worse.  I was low on energy most of the day which made me mostly useless.  The hangovers I remember.  The low energy day of uselessness that follows a night of drinking was one thing I had forgotten about.

As for the overwhelming sense of shame and regret that I assumed would follow my first slip-up....well, that wasn't there.  In fact, I didn't really feel any shame at all.  Sure, it would be nice to be celebrating my 80th something day of sobriety, and that's gone now, but I'm ok with that.  I goofed.  It's not that big of a deal....or at least I don't feel like it is.  I'll try to learn from this and be better next time.  I felt way worse mentally last year after 21 straight nights of drinking.

The truth is when I started this journey I never figured I'd be sober for the rest of my life. I started off thinking I'd go 100 days, but after about a week of sobriety, I gave up worrying about reaching some big number.  I kinda figured at some point I'd decided to have a few drinks on some special occasion, and then get back to being a sober guy.  I guess I didn't figure that being forever sober was necessarily necessary. 

The one big regret I have about falling off the wagon is that it wasn't planned.  I assumed, or hoped, that if/when I did decide to have a drink or two....or three, it wouldn't be a spur of the moment type of situation.  That's not so much what happened Friday night.  Not at all.

So the bad news is I slipped.  But the good news is I've been dying to get back on the sober train ever since....even before I sobered up Friday night.  So that's what I'm doing now. 

Part of me thinks that if I can go 80 days between drinks, then I'll have far better things to worry about than sobriety.  But I also know that this is a slippery slope.  It took many years for my occasional drunken party behavior to turn into a nightly drinking ritual.  And 80 days doesn't fix that.  My sobriety done sprung a leak.  Now I need to make sure that this slow drip doesn't turn into a steady stream.

So yeah, Day 2.

Day 1 - blindsided

Well, it happened.

I drank.  I'm not sure what happened.  Nothing really happened.  No Gene sightings.  It felt like I was on autopilot.  Friday night. Nothing to do.  I went to the liquor store and bought a bottle of vodka.  I wasn't in a bad mood or pissed off for any reason. 

Next thing I know I'm drunk.  Not crazy drunk.  I had a few and I'm feeling the all too familiar buzz.  In six or seven hours I'll wake up dehydrated and feeling like shit.  Not knowing why I made this decision.  But I did.  And now I start over.

Really not looking forward to the morning guilt that I'll no doubt be feeling soon.

A few months ago I longed to be the guy who could get hammered once and awhile and then lay off the booze for another month or two.  Maybe I am that guy.  Who am I kidding?  I started this blog because I'm not that guy. 

I'm going to go drink a lot of water. 

This is actually day 0.  Tomorrow will be day 1.

Dumbass here.  I apologize to myself.

Day 79 - Streaks

A few years ago I decided that I was going to start running again. I've been an on again off again runner for over 20 years....more off than on.  I had read an article about streak runners.  Not the run-around-naked-through-the-Quad people, but people who run every day, no matter what.  Some streak runners are going on twenty plus years of daily running.  Crazy bastards!

I was fascinated!  So of course that became my new thing.  I started running at least one mile every day.  The first day was easy...even I could run a mile.  The second and third days weren't bad, but I was beginning to get a little sore.  Days 4-7 were rough.  My legs were sore and wanting a day off, but I powered through. 

After the first week my legs apparently realized that the dumb ass upstairs no longer believed in rest days, so things started getting easy.....and then fun.  By the end of the first month I had started increasing my distances.  One day I did a 65 mile charity bike ride and then came home and ran my mile before a bachelor party.  My friends thought I was crazy.  Things were good.

On the afternoon of my 100th day I didn't feel well, and things got worse as the day went on.  But that evening I decided to get a really slow mile run in and go straight to bed.  As bad as I felt before the run, I felt ten times worse after.  I ended up with the flu and a broken running streak. 

I recovered from the flu, but the running streak was gone and I never made it back to 100 days.  I learned a valuable lesson though.....streaks can be a great motivational tool.

That's definitely one of the reasons why I've been successful so far with sobriety.  I have a good streak going and I don't want to have to start the counter over.

I found an app called "Days" recently.  It's a very basic tool that keeps track of my various streaks.  Well, actually there's only one streak right now, but it's showing a big fat "79".  Anything that allows me to do less math is a good thing. 

Now I have to come up with some other streaks to start tracking.....like maybe how many days can I drive past a Whataburger without stopping.  Or how many days in a row can I wear the same pair of socks......kidding.

Anyway....yeah, streaks!

And still sober!

Day 76

I was wandering around inside of my head today when I asked myself a question that I'd asked over 76 times since I started this crazy sober journey....."Why am I not going to drink tonight?'

For well over two months the answer had been the same:  no hangover, I'll sleep better, no post drinking shame and guilt, etc.  When I first stopped drinking, I think answering the question every day was my way of convincing myself not to drink.  But a few weeks into sobriety the answers, although the same, turned into my way of reminding myself why I wasn't drinking anymore.  I was past needing to convince myself.  For the most part anyway.

Today, for the first time, the answer changed....instead of running through the same list of reasons that I'd been relying on for two plus months, my dome gave me a different answer.  "I'm not drinking tonight because......I don't want to!" 

I don't know if that means anything, but it sure feels like it does....especially because there was a little attitude in the answer.  Kinda like, "You're not drinking because you don't want to.  Now quit fucking asking me that question!!"

It's the same type of attitude that Eight gives me every morning when I wake him up for school.  Now I know where he gets it. 

Maybe I'm past having to remind myself why I'm not drinking.  Maybe it's my brain's way of telling me to quit spending so much time thinking about sobriety.  Maybe I'm getting a little too big for my britches with this whole, "Look at me, I'm sober" business.  It's times like these when I forget to lock the door and Gene sneaks in for a chat.  I hope he wears those cool demon shoes if/when he does come back.