Category: just for today

I just went for a wonderful walk with my wife. It is a blessing to be sharing my sober life with someone I love, respect and enjoy being around. An added bonus with a walk today was a break in the cold weather. It was in the mid 40’s which is the warmest it has been for some time. Snow is melting, being outside does not have to involve bundling up real tight and there is lots of ice/water/slush everywhere. We got involved in a heavy conversation about our work (we are both scientists). The time passed quickly even though we were out for 45 minutes.

Part of this walk involves going along a route that an active drunk regularly drives. He or she has to live in this neighborhood. There are always bottles strewn about on the sides of the road. Not a huge number and most of them are those small shots of liquor but enough evidence for me to figure out what this represents. I had not walked this route in awhile and there is lots of snow everywhere. Sure enough there are some newly placed bottles on top of the snow.

When I point things like that out to me wife “these bottles are from a drunk” and lay out the story of what I think is happening, it makes it so clear how different we alcoholics are in so many ways. It is easy for me to know these bottles are from a drunk. She on the other hand does not have a clue. And it is obvious her mind has a hard time understanding the crazy behavior and rational. Why would you need to have a drink when you are are leaving or coming home (why not have it at home)? Why have those little shots if you are doing this same thing every day (why not buy a big bottle)? Why do you have to throw the bottles out the window? And so on.

My question is “why doesn’t she understand?” It all makes perfect sense to me. Rationalization and weird habitats, after all, used to be some of my best friends!

I am supposed to walk every day to help me with my back issues. I am far from having any regular walking schedule and I must say I walk way less than I should. A bit of prayer, and some added focus on willingness to do what is best for me, seems to be in order with this situation. The funny thing is I love to walk and to be outside.

No meeting today. I need to get my ass to one soon.

Wishing you all the best in sobriety,
AA Blogger

A nice morning with a day of possibilities ahead.

I’m grateful to be alive, married and have love around me.
I’m grateful to be sober, relatively sane and have an interesting life.

Challenge. That is my immediate sense of the day. I need to go to a meeting, the library, finish a paper, sort through bills and paperwork, work on a website, shower, read, learn……..

This is typical for my head. It want’s to do everything. I can see by dumping that on the page that I need to stop, right now, and take some time to meditate and pray. Even if it is for five minutes. It will make all the difference in the world.

Wishing you all the best in sobriety,
AA Blogger

I took the bus today and had strong emotional reactions to two things that happened during my trip.

A young girl got on the bus with a few of her friends. She had headphones on and was singing along with what must have been her ipod. She was not signing loudly and had a pleasant voice. When I hear a women singing softly like this it can fill me with a strong sense of peace.

I learned about this reaction of mine years ago when I was working in the mountains. I had one person that worked with me. We would sometimes have to drive for hours to get to a logging site where we would do our survey work. We could pick up one radio station and it played country music. This gal loved country music and would sing along with about half of the songs that came on. She often felt a little self conscious about it and would say she was sorry she was always singing like that. I simply told her it was not a problem and that it did not bother me at all. In reality I would love it when she sang! And I swear it was not any kind of sexual thing, or attraction, or anything like that. It was just very, very soothing.

I clearly remember those experiences, and my reactions, riding in the mountains even though it was years ago.

It had been a long time since I had that kind of sense about me – feeling like I did riding around in the mountains listening to Nancy sing – until I was on the bus today. It was wonderful.

It made me wonder if I had a deep memory about this from my mother singing to me when I was a child. There is something there but it is like a fleeting ghost when I try to pin it down. I will have to ask my Mom about this the next time I talk to her.

The other thing I observed today was two guys getting on the bus, one in a wheelchair, and how nice the bus driver was in helping him get situated. Now the buses where I live require the driver to have to go through all kinds of things to help handicapped riders. Put down a ramp, put up some seats and strap the wheelchair down.

There is no requirement that I know of that they have to do this with kindness. I watched him going about his business and I was touched by the care he took in helping that man.

All in all, it was a nice ride to where I needed to go.

I guess I was feeling kind of good today.

Wishing you all the best in sobriety,

AA Blogger

Just another sober day. Some things seem to be well to me and others could be better. One part of the could be better side of things is my spiritual condition. I’m not feeling as well connected as I feel I should. Perhaps I need to do more prayer and meditation.

On the good side of things, I have been getting better sleep over the last few weeks. I am reading a book about insomnia too, written by an insomniac that is frustrated by the lack of understanding about this problem. The book is a hoot as it talks about problem sleeping like we in AA talk about our alcoholism. And the funny thing is, from some aspects there are a number of perception similarities between alcoholism and insomnia. Like there being lots of well meaning advice offered from people who do not have the problem – you should just stop / just drink some warm milk.

Anyway, it is getting late. I should really think about going to bed!

Happy trails while you trudge the road to happy destiny!

As a sober drunk I am also – just human – and as such have many other issues. One of these is not being able to sleep well. This has been a lifelong problem, starting before I even began drinking. And I had my first drink at 13.

Tonight I am sitting in a hotel room in Cape Cod at 3:30 AM. My wife is sleeping soundly. I like to say she is a professional sleeper and I am just a wanna be.

I subscribe to an RSS feed about sleep problems and when I fired up the computer tonight low and behold one of the articles led me to a new web resource I had never seen before. A list of things to do if you can’t sleep. One was to list your blessings. Gee, what an interesting idea.

Tonight my wife and I watched the sun set at the northernmost part of Cape Cod. As we were standing at the edge of the sea, I saw something pop up out of the water in front of me. It took me a little bit to realize it was a seal’s head. Then just like that it was gone. It turned out there were a few of them there and in a few minutes time you could see one or two pop up somewhere in the vicinity of where we were standing. At one point I tried to take a picture of the beautiful scene in front of us but it turned out the batteries in the camera were dead. I had a moment of rising frustration. Then I realized how blessed I was to be standing right where I was. I love my wife and I love to be on the beach. I also got a sunset and some seals thrown in for good measure. The camera was just not an issue.

I am blessed too today to be sober. One of the great gifts I have been given in learning to live sober is that any initial ideas I have about what might be a problem can often be turned around, just like that. I am lying in bed, not sleeping, eventually have to get up, and feel a little defeated. Five minutes later I read about counting my blessings and feel better. I try to get upset that I can’t take a picture of a scene I want to preserve and quickly realize perhaps I just need to focus on enjoying a really good moment. This skill I was taught has also come in handy during some really serious and relatively weighty issues that have arisen in my sobriety. Most of these things are now just a part of my staying alive rather than it all being  alcoholism related stuff. Health issues, people dying, or whatever. Yet I can tell that my ability to weather the storms, large and small, seems to improve with practice.

So that is my report from the cape this early morning. I hope you are all sleeping soberly, and well.

I finally made took some action on a decision I made a long time ago. I needed to move my blog to a new wordpress theme. I was having trouble doing so because I could not update my server with the latest wordpress and database versions.

I just had to manually enter all my posts into this new site location (I moved the domain to a new server and moved the location of the blog within the domain). A pain but it was necassary to just get it done.

The hope is the fresh start will do me, and you, well. Now I can work with comments again where before I was getting hammered by spam so bad I had to shut them off. The newer tools available for handling such problems can better deal with such things.

Well…..here we go…..