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Thursday, November 20, 2014

Sugar Overdose

When I first started giving up I was handling the oral desires by using sugar-free gum and also munching out on nuts, almonds, dried peas (salted or chilli). This was good for keeping my mouth busy but also appeared to be leading to increased flatulence and other digestive discomforts. Subsequently I've decided I'm unsure about the flatulence as I now blame Champix for it.

To cut a long story short as my need for oral gratification decreased I decided to switch to sugar-free sweets. Great idea, lousy execution. Today I discovered that the brand of sweets I had picked wasn't sugar-free at all. I have no idea why I thought they were.

To rub insult into the injury, I've also been munching on Vicks lozenges today. I knew they were mostly sugar, but wasn't expecting to have doubled up.

Update 20/11/2014 @21:21: There's no secret, they're Mentos. There are regular Mentos with sugar and sugar free Mentos. I probably started with a roll of the sugar free ones and then switched to the regular without noticing. Mystery solved.

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Back pain

Nothing special or world shaking about today's write-up. I've just had this nagging pain in my back for the last couple of days.

Yesterday I went for a walk at lunch-time to try and lightly jolt it back into full service. I ended up walking past the hospital (1 to 2 km away). When I realised I was going there I decided to have lunch at the Sierra cafe on the street nearby, got there and realised that it was a Columbus cafe instead,  saw the smokers clustered just outside the green line, and panicked. Next thing I knew I was jumping a bus for Downtown, nothing inspired there, nor at Ronnies.  I had a nice chillied tofu lunch in the food court at the bottom of Albert Street and hopped a bus back to the Symonds St end of Grafton Bridge. I walked back to work from there, passing the green-line and the Columbus cafe without incident or panic.

Mid afternoon the back came off my chair at work and my already sore back was jerked a bit. Come day's end I decided I'd try going for a long (in time terms) bike-ride. After coming home I hung the washing and then lept back on the bike and rode down to Cornwall park. I ended up riding around for about 1½ hours, pretty much non-stop. It was a gentle ride, but plenty of lateral flexing of the spine. Afterwards I felt a lot better. Was shaking a bit, not sure why and it wasn't a bad or unpleasant shaking so I pretty much ignored it.

Today I felt better but I was getting a tightness in the back. Come day's end I really felt that I wanted to give it another shake-out so after bringing in the washing from last night I headed down to Cornwall park for another ride-around. A little shorter today at just over an hour and my leg muscles weren't happy with it but my back felt good.

A couple of hours later I decided to go for a shorter power walk to even up the leg exercise.

After all this I feel pretty good, certainly better than I would have felt after the same amount of exercise a couple of months ago, but my general lack of exercsie this year was showing. I can see I need to keep my exercise levels up.

Monday, November 17, 2014

Going back for more punishment

I scared myself a little at work today and realised that if I'm going to succeed at this non-smoking game I need to get my life re-integrated so I can simply do the things I like to do without worrying overly about the smoking vs non-smoking identity.

Angela and I are due to resume bridge early in the new year and I've been wanting to go back to stand-up and have another try for quite a while. I haven't felt very funny since the 6th of September, but I was having a bit of humourous "verbal diarrhea" in the office today and decided I am ready to put a new set together and have another go.

I zapped off an email to Scott at the Classic Comedy Club asking for a slot and then Tessa and I went to the Club last night and while I was there had a brief chat with Scott letting him know that I want him to give me a few slots so I can't run away and hide again. As soon as he gives me my start date I will no longer be an ex-raw-comedian. Hopefully the comedy unquit will be as sticky as my smoking quit.

It was a little funny as I stood there last night looking out through the glass and into the terrified eyes of those soon to be sacrificed to the crowd as they sucked the nicotine into their systems as fast as possible to calm their nerves.

Will I be able to resist the nicotine before my first set? Will I need it afterwards? I'm hoping that the answer to both of these is "No", but I can no longer look at my reflection in the window, floating translucently among the raw comedians and not want to be back on that stage. Life is full of risk; when you go to KFC, every single drumstick has the dog-killing bone, and it's just as effective against humans as dogs, yet we continue to go to the red and white stripes to lick our fingers.

I need some material ... I think I have enough to do a set on quitting smoking, if I can make it into a coherent story that's funny otherwise I might just have to talk about something else, but smoking or not smoking I will be up on that stage.