Category — positives

Yesterday was lovely, simply lovely. I worked all morning, very early, so I was done work by early afternoon, with plenty of time to take in an afternoon stroll to the bank in the springtime sun. Then I returned home and baked a cake!

It was a day worth celebrating and I wanted to have something special with which to celebrate! Two years ago when I made it to Non-Smoking Fools’ Day I baked a cake and made some really messy, cement-coloured icing that caused me such strife that I very nearly broke up with my girlfriend, who was laughing at my pain over the phone. We laugh about it now, but it was hell at the time!

It ended up being a really ugly cake. I mean seriously ugly. I am no baker and I am certainly no cake decorator. It’s kind of hilarious, how bad it was, really. Witness:

Ugly as it was, it was actually really delicious. So much so that every time we have had some birthday or other cake-worthy party to celebrate since then, Kabuki requests the special coconut icing. I have since adapted it to make it not only even more delicious, but also less sloppy and ridiculous. And a more appetizing colour. Live and learn.

So this year I wanted to make that yummy cake again, complete with the miraculous, if trying, coconut-mascarpone icing that has gone from being my bane to being my specialty. However, this time around I wanted to do something a bit different with it. A few weeks ago I had rewarded myself with a trip to Kitchen Stuff Plus, one of my favourite places in the universe. I went in for a spatula and came out with a haul, including these nifty little guys:

They’re cupcake cups, but made of silicone so you can bake the cupcakes right in them! So cute and colourful. I was itching to post this find on here before, but wanted Kabuki to be surprised on NSF Day, so I kept my mouth shut until now.

The Ugliest Cake In History, however, had become something of a nostalgia by now, after all of our struggles, so I still wanted the cupcakes to reflect the old cake in some visual way. So I adorned each one with one of my ridiculous decorations from the old cake. And since my decorating skillz are so…interpretive that it may be difficult to tell what any of these illustrations are, I made another funky image map to explain them! To view it, click on the image below:

After enjoying a delicious meal that Michelle so kindly brought home from Chipotle, we sauntered over to Kabuki and the Good Doctor’s place to share the cupcakes and congratulations on all of our hard work. The cupcakes were a hit! I am really proud of the both of us.

And I have a whole cake left at home yet to be decorated… There may be more ridiculousness in that department still to come.

I made it through March!!

I have officially made it through the contest period. I expect that phone call telling me I have won my car any day now. I’ll settle for dinner at Chipotle, though, which is what my darling Michka is going to get for me tonight. Yum!

I am also making cake. I would have someone make cake for me but the truth is that my icing is the best icing and I won’t settle for anything else. It will look like it was decorated by a five-year-old, but it will be EPIC in flavour, I promise. I am going to pop by Kabuki’s place after dinner with some kind words and cake to share, and then it’s back home for a nice quiet evening in for two (well, and Punky makes three) with movies and red wine. Sounds like a winner to me!

Let’s have a closer look at that calendar.

I’M A NON-SMOKIN’ FOOL!!!!

Yesterday marked Day 28 on my journey to independence. I’m feeling pretty good about myself. In sadder news, Kabuki had a bit of a relapse, but has a distinct plan in place to get back on the horse. I’m still cheering her on; she’s been doing really well.

Yesterday we decided to celebrate our hard work by heading out with our partners to the Ontario Science Centre to see the Sultans of Science exhibit. It was pretty cool.

We generally ran around like rugrats on speed and played with all of the interactive crap, like plasma balls and mirrors and spinning rooms and stuff.

That Science Centre is really cool. When we arrived there, we wondered why anyone would want to spend such a chunk of change on a membership that would take five visits to pay off in a year, but once inside I realised that there is tons of stuff to keep you busy, especially for the young’uns.

The thing that surprised me most about the place, though, was the lack of supervision. I mean, while I appreciate a museum/centre that really encouragtes creativity by leaving the interactive exhibits open for kids (and adults) to play with, I think that maybe having hot glue guns at the ready without any staff supervision can be a bit dangerous. I know the parents can also look after their children, but some of the older ones want to be a bit independent, and even an adult who doesn’t have experience with one of those things can accidentally burn herself, or someone else! Don’t worry, honey—I know it was an accident.

Anyway, it was an excellent day, full of fun and geeky goodness. I have said I would go on outings to places I don’t usually visit as part of my quitting strategy, but until now I haven’t really done so. I plan to go out to more fun places in the future! Maybe check out some of the small galleries and things Toronto has to offer.

Happy 3-Week-iversary to Kabuki and me! We fucking rock. 3 weeks went by fast, too, not like two years ago, when every minute was a pain. We’re getting better at this! And just to show that it pays to quit smoking:

Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. Instead of buying a pack of smokes at the store, I buy a couple of scratch’n'wins. I’m on a winning streak!

Wow, this week flew by. I barely even had time to document the week’s struggle here, which I suppose means that it’s getting easier to live without thinking about smoking all the time.

After all of my talk of side effects the other day, I forgot to mention one very important one: I spend next to no money when I am not smoking! I rarely go out and don’t drink, don’t throw money away on stink-sticks and instead use the cash on other more enjoyable things. Which means that my money jar is already accumulating some serious dough!!

That’s what I’m talking about. I’m fucking rich.

So on Friday, Kabuki and I decided to get out of our respective homes and go a-walkin’—to the local Dollarama, of course. What? We love cheap shit. It was a good outing and a great reward for our non-smoking efforts.

Recently the Dollarama added some new items that cost between one and two dollars, to which Kabuki and I take some umbrage. Dollarama used to be the only dollar store in which everything was actually priced at one dollar, as opposed to the fakers that called themselves dollar stores but really had a bunch of cheap junk priced anywhere between one and ten bucks. Boo. Dollarama was the real deal! Until now. It’s called Dollar-ama, not Two-Dollar-ama or Buck-Fifty-rama.

But oh well. Mostly we still love it. I told Michka, I’m taking a bag with me, and I plan to fill it. I did a pretty good job! Kabuki did well too, finding stickers and goodies and a grabby thing that she used to terrorize passing businesspeople on the way home. Oh, Kabuki. Can’t take her anywhere nice. That’s why we go to Dollarama.

The Haul:

You can click on the above photo to see a nifty image map I made of the goods. Just hover your mouse over any item for a brief description. Fun stuff, fun stuff.

Yesterday I had to get up twice: once at three in the morning to make some phone calls to Europe for work and again in the late morning to face the day. It felt like going through two days at once. Which is to say I was really, really cranky all day. No amount of tea and sen-sens could help me.

I made it through, however, and at the end of the day I decided that I had been such a trooper that I deserved an extra sticker for my efforts.

I love this return to kindergarten-style decoration. It actually is fun. Plus, that rocket ship sticker looks kind of like a vibrator, which cracks me up. Bzzzzzt! Now that would be a nice reward.

But I like more substantial prizes, too. So tonight M. and I are going to order some pizza (which is half reward and half laziness—we had to reorganize our cupboards so everything is everywhere and I don’t feel like having to cook after putting it all away again), and the other night we had some delicious sesame tofu that we ate from our brand-spankin’ new square bowls.

Only $10 for a set of four! Best pack of smokes I never bought.

One of the first things that any addiction counsellor will tell you to do when quitting smoking is to reward yourself daily for your victories. It’s really something I haven’t done in the past, except to save up money for some distant future prize. I think it’s good to have both long and short term rewards, however, so Kabuki and I came up with a list of some possible ways to treat ourselves.

While we still include long-term goals, such as saving for travel, finding an apartment with a working elevator in the building (me), buying handheld video games and fashionable footwear (her), we also made sure to include some instant gratification. Things like books, magazines, wine and chocolate can be acquired for around the same price or less than what we would have been laying on the counter for a pack of smokes, while things like classes and massages are achieved with a week’s worth of quitting. Trips to Dollarama (I LOVE Dollarama) are cheap yet fun rewards and toasting yourself for making it through the day costs *nothing*. I already rewarded myself a little bit with a couple of books that I have been wanting to get:

I was also going to make a calendar of quitting with creative sticky-note days to mark my progress, but the truth is I was too lazy to get around to it so I went to Dollarama (have I mentioned that I LOVE Dollarama?) instead and got some shiny new stickers to paste on my regular calendar. I have tons of stickers, so I had better stick to this quitting thing, or they will all go to waste. And it’s a sin to waste.

Yay!!

So it’s March 1st, a.k.a. Quit Day!! It was a hard day, but Kabuki and I made it through. We got together last night to go over our plans and get pumped up about quitting. We made plans to keep our minds off of the cravings today; I slept in and had plans with another friend later in the afternoon, then went to get some movies for the evening. Kabuki napped a lot. Napping is good.

It has been a long day, but I do want to set down some of the groundwork for our plan to quit. So I scanned some of the notes from our planning sessions to share here.

Those are the bare bones plans we have made, but the important thing I wanted to put up here is the list of positive benefits to quitting. We didn’t really focus on the health aspects, because those are both obvious and abstract. We wanted to focus on things that mean something to us immediately and personally. I like to have the list here ready for the hard days, so I can just look it up and remind myself.

Unlike many years before, although I had trepidations surrounding my own ability to stick to my plans, I didn’t go into the challenge with dread or sadness. I know there will be hard days, and having a list of things to look forward to helps me to get through those moments.

Tomorrow I’ll share some of our plans for rewards and some of the strategies we have to get through the day-to-day.

Day 1: we made it through the day! Here’s to us.