the long version
March 10, 2011

Screamingly hectic at work, as in:
Scheduled for thirteen hours worth of meetings in one eight-hour day!
Losing the only 45 minutes a day I get to business lunches two days in a row.
Bosses expecting 35 hours of research and analysis this week, despite my being scheduled for 26 hours of meetings. In a 38 hour week.

The Retro-Rocket has developed an intermittent shimmy in the front end that scares the CRAP out of me, since it will suddenly start doing this in rush-hour traffic on the tollway when I'm doing 65 or so, and the wheel jerks so hard I can barely control the vehicle. I'm not shitting, it gave me a full-on panic attack when I was coming home from work Tuesday. Sweaty palms, rapid heartbeat, dry mouth, and hypervenilation. You can be assured that Mr. "If it isn't catastrophic, or if it isn't happening to me, I can ignore it" got quite the earful when he came home from school that night. The good news is, he finally agreed that the car needed attention.

The bad news is: OF COURSE it started acting up at bonus time. I was already pretty pissed that my bonus came in under five hundred dollars, and once I saw the tax bite, I wanted to weep. Now, I won't even be able to enjoy that, since I'm sure the mechanic will want over $300 to fix whatever is wrong. NOTHING on that car ever goes wrong for less than that.

And now we come to the tow. Getting ready for bed on Wednesday night, I managed to trip over nothing, and--well, "stubbed my toe" doesn't begin to cover it. I hyperflexed it to the point where it was completely doubled over under my foot. The crack I heard and the intense pain had me pretty convinced it was broken, but what could I do? I had to go to bed, and I had to get up and go to work in the morning (see work screamingly hectic above) and there wasn't anything I could do but try to walk the best I could on a bad left foot and a bad right hip. Spouse drove me to work and back, but it was a long day of long corridors and long walks to meeting rooms.
First chance I had to do anything exept limp and whimper was at chiro after work-- asked him what he knew about toes, and he knew how to tell it wasn't broken, and how to relocate it. So that was a big relief, and ice and elevation last evening helped as well. It is still swollen and very painful, but ever so much better than yesterday.

THIS: "I managed to fuck up a run of SEVEN CONSECUTIVE COMPLETELY SMOKE-FREE DAYS by buying a pack and smoking half a cigarette this morning."
My biggest enemy is a sense of powerlessness. If I feel like I have no power over my own life, I get panicky. And panic is the one trigger against which I have no defenses. I panic, I smoke. Period. And I don't know how to break that connection.

I was super-pissed at myself about this, but my decision to treat this as a process reqyuires me to not get all suicidal about "lost Quits". If I'm out for a ride on my bike and I fall off, and get back on, I am not going to consider that I took TWO bike rides that day. I will look on the bright side and consider that I have been able to get my time between cigarettes up to one hundred and seventy -seven hours!