The Helper

By 5:15 PM tomorrow night, it'll be a full two weeks for me without cigarettes.

I'm fine. The cravings hit a peak last week, into the weekend, before basically going away almost completely. Most of the time now I don't even think about it. And even being around people at work who are still smoking doesn't bother me.

It's exceedingly weird.

No, really. It's really strange that I don't have the urge to get up in the morning, go out on the porch, smoke two or three cigarettes, and then actually start my day. That doesn't happen anymore. I get up, make some coffee, check my phone, sit on the couch and vape for a while (sometimes I won't even touch the vape until I've been up for 40 minutes or so) and then go get dressed for work.

When I'm at home on the weekends my sleep schedule is so messed up anyhow that I'm never sure when I'm going to bed or getting up, so obviously it's a bit different. Still, there are very few times where I ever just absolutely crave a cigarette anymore. The vapes have taken care of that.

I mentioned before that I've pretty much settled on my rotation of vape juices that I cycle through, with the exception of some limited edition flavors or promotional ones (meaning, flavors I get for free or have gotten in promotional deals, flavors I've only purchased because of free shipping on an order with other stuff, etc), and I think keeping a regular rotation helps a lot. Changing it up too much or having a new flavor every week messes with me, and I've found that while I'll like to vape a tankful of a flavor to try it, I get really tired of it after that -- if I've ordered a big bottle of it, it'll just sit there until I want it again or until I give it away. I've spent entirely too much money on vape shit in the past several months only out of sheer curiosity, and as part of the goal is to stop spending as much money on this stuff, I really need to scale it back.

So, I have my stable of pretty regular flavors. Every once in a while I'll rotate one out and rotate another one in -- for example, for a month or so I really liked Fruit Hoops (read: Froot Loops cereal flavor), but got burnt out on it. I rotated it out and replaced it with something else, just to keep it interesting. I like routine, but too much routine makes it all boring, and if it's boring I'm likely to go back to cigarettes just out of habit. Part of what's keeping me off them is the excitement of new things, new parts, mods and flavors -- the hobby aspect of it all. And there are indeed ways to do that cheaply that doesn't involve me spending $50-100 a week on new things, as I never spent that much on cigarettes (thank fuck). Having ordered two more backup tanks this weekend, and waiting for two more and two boxes of coils to arrive, I think I'm pretty much done for the next several months when it comes to hardware -- I even gave one of my mods to a friend at work when he broke his and broke his tank. He gave me a $10 bill, two 12-packs of soda, and a bottle of juice in trade and still got the better deal, but I don't care because I like helping people. I like being the helper.

The wife and family are still very proud of me, by the way. I'm glad they are. The positive feedback helps out a lot. My wife is extremely happy I'm no longer smoking. Of course, not having to stop at the gas station every 3-4 days for more cigarettes is nice too, and not having to spend money on them out of pocket is great as well (though that savings is, again, pretty much negated by all of the vape stuff I get). I need to fill the truck up with gas this week, and it'll be the first time I've done so without going inside for cigarettes. It's bizarre.

The truck is still going strong, by the way. No issues with it yet, though I do still need to get new tires and get it tuned up (oil change, spark plug checks, etc). Chevrolets are workhorses -- I know that from the years of owning the Monte Carlo. As long as it's in one piece, it'll run -- and nothing's started falling off of it yet. When the relatives come into town over the summer (whenever that will be), I can't wait to show them that it's still going and still running strong...ahem, provided that it doesn't blow up on me now that I've said that. I'll renew the registration and plates in July, around the time they'll be here.

The wife and I have to renew our lease here in the next week as well. I say "in the next week" because, well, it runs out at the end of the month, and while we let the complex know our intentions to renew (we had to do so by the 1st of this month), they have to schedule a time to have us come up and sign the paperwork. They have not yet done that, so in the morning I will be calling the office to tell them "hey, we need to do this, when's the best day/time for you, 'cause we both work weird hours and will probably have to do it on our lunch break" or something like that. It takes about fifteen minutes at the most, but it's still a relative pain in the ass.

It's a payday Friday this coming week, so I have bills that are coming due that will have to be paid in addition to our rent -- as does the wife. Still, as we go deep into the spring, it appears that most crises are settling down and we're able to get out from under a lot of the stuff we've been paying on for a while now, with the exception of our taxes. I don't know if I've mentioned it here in recent weeks (and right now, frankly, I'm too lazy to care/check if I have) but we owed a shitload of money in taxes this year...all because on my own W4s with our company, they had me marked down for two federal exemptions for no reason. That's not something that can be changed retroactively, and we didn't figure it out until we got our taxes ready this spring. I cannot tell you how absolutely batshit pissed I was, especially as getting a decent-sized refund would've let us pay down some credit cards and would've paid for the aforementioned new tires on my truck. The taxes are paid, thanks to having high-limit credit cards with 0% interest for eighteen months, but we're both very angry. I went in and changed my W4 to zero exemptions shortly after we found out what had happened, as if I didn't we would probably owe again for 2016. Fuck it, let 'em take out all the taxes they want now so when this time rolls back around next year, we don't have to worry about it.

The weeks pass by quickly, and the weekends even faster. Soon, we will be coming up on our second wedding anniversary at the end of May, and both myself and the wife have requested the day off of work so that we can get an extended weekend. We do not have any plans, at least not yet -- the parents asked us last night if we were going anywhere or doing anything. We had to laugh at that to a certain extent, as it's so rare for us to ever go anywhere or do anything we don't have to or that isn't required by law. Shit, there are at least five large boxes and ten giveaway clothing bags for Goodwill (or a similar charity) which have been sitting here in the spare room with me since we moved into this apartment in 2014. The wife's wedding dress is in the exact same spot she left it when she took it off on our wedding night.

I've already purchased and gifted the wife's anniversary present to her -- I bought her the high-end expensive replica of Hermione Granger's wand. I had asked previously and she claimed Hermione was her favorite character in the entire Harry Potter series, so okay. I have several favorite characters, most of whom die quickly (some offscreen, even -- what a tragedy). However, the wand that called out to me was the wand of Narcissa Malfoy, Draco's mother.

I ordered that wand for myself, and during play-fighting with the wife and her wand, it broke in half. Very quickly. Fuck. I ended up getting Snape's wand, so both of us have wands now. The object is to take photos with them for our anniversary. Because we're nerds like that.

The broken wand? Added to the pile of clutter.

"We're cleaning on Saturday," the wife told me matter-of-factly when she came into the spare room a few moments ago on her way to bed.

To be fair, the house is a mess -- it needs a good vacuuming and steam-cleaning of the carpets, a good dusting, a good scrubdown of the bathroom and kitchen, including the floors -- etc etc. I have Mondays off, so a good chunk of the day every Monday is me doing upkeep on the house as much as I can reasonably do based on time and energy levels -- reorganizing the kitchen, doing all the laundry and putting it away, washing the bedsheets, cleaning the cat box and sweeping out the cat room, etc. That's hard to do if I'm not feeling well or if I sleep late, however. And some Mondays I don't even have the energy to mess with a lot at all -- or I want to decompress and play video games and listen to podcasts and let the entire world just go away for a bit. Because, of course, I have those weeks too.

Will keep you posted on any happenings, of course. However, now's the time for me to go to bed as I've been up way too late as it is.