Long overdue

OK, I have been neglecting my travel blog. I'm sorry, but in the first flush of romance with my travail blog, something had to slide. And this was it. Sorry, Travel Blog -- I have more important suitors to woo!

Seriously, I did not successfully quit smoking on August 8th. My sister Amy quit smoking on August 9th, and I kept taking Chantix. I set another quit date for August 20th.

That was last Monday.

And I did, indeed, quit smoking on that day.

Since then, I have not smoked once. Although -- as another Chantix blogger noted -- I still feel like a smoker. I'm just a smoker who isn't smoking at the moment.

For the first couple of days, I tracked my cravings and cigarette desires like a statistician for major league baseball.

Then I had a tooth that totally abscessed.

If you have never had an abscessed tooth, count yourself among the world's luckiest people. Ever. It hurts worse than any pain I've ever experienced. Including childbirth and kidney stones.

Since roughly late Tuesday night -- and certainly Wednesday morning -- I spent most of my energy just trying to survive my abscessed tooth. My dentist was out of town. And he didn't have a back-up. I finally got hold of a friend of a friend's dental office -- and by the way, that dentist was at the same conference as my dentist, so honestly, it must be one heck of a conference -- and finally someone called someone who called someone else, and I finally got a prescription for antibiotics.

It still took an entire day for the antibiotics to take effect and do some good for me. In the meantime, I've discovered that I certainly CAN choke down straight vodka if I absolutely must.

So while I was dealing with the sheer, towering, quivering pain of the tooth, I kind of forgot about the quitting smoking thing. My mind was somewhere else for a few days.

An acquaintance of mine said, "Oh, my gosh, you've had such bad luck healthwise this summer!"

I hadn't thought of it, but now that she mentions it -- yeah, it sucks to be me! I threw out my back, and then I quit smoking, and then, to top it all off, I had an abscessed tooth. OMG! It *sucks* to be me!

Then I remember that it doesn't really totally suck. For one thing, no matter how much pain I'm in, I still have hummingbirds.

See? Every cloud has a silver lining!