I’m trying to quit smoking for the umpeenth time. I’ve tried to quit smoking seriously at least four times. Once when I was in the hospital. They have a program to help people quit smoking, but so many people smoke and it’s so stressful to be in there that it didn’t work very well. The nurses themselves admitted that it was ridiculously hard to quit smoking in the hospital.

The downfall of my last quit was Djarum Black cigarettes, which are more like smoking something out of the spice drawer than cigarettes really. I didn’t consider them seriously full of nicotine enough to worry about getting readdicted, but I was, and by the time I got into the hospital I was toting a carton of DuMaurier. Sad really. And intense, since the carton looks like an extra large package of cigarettes.

Our cigarettes all got stored under the sink in the nurses med office.

But enough about smoking in the psych ward. I had been smoke free for about 6 months or so when I went back to ciggy’s, and despite a few halfhearted attempts, have not really tried to quit until today.

I went out and bought the patch. I was on the patch in the hospital, but all those people going down to the Meewasin Valley Trail to smoke drew me back into tobacco’s cruel plegmy clutches.

Bleh. Smoking is smelly. And I’m really getting freaked out by our Canadian warnings. I mean, I have to look at rotting teeth or a bloody heart or a weird brain everytime I have a smoke. That’s no fun! I haven’t wanted to look at such things since I was a morbid teen.

They’re so dire too, because they’re all in black with white writing.

So I’m quitting, as of today. I am also going to bleach and dye my hair. I’m in a good mood.

In weird news, my mother and I, but mostly my mother, worked on fixing her stupid toilet for two days. A leak had rusted a bolt so much that eventually a hacksaw was procured to cut off the offending bolt.

I was just in the middle of complaining about the hacksaw when after 24hours of trying to get that one bolt off, the thing made a happy clink noise to the floor. Toilets are poopy!