Day 3. Murderous nicotine craving stampede seems to have slowed down to a murderous nicotine craving...saunter. Or maybe a murderous nicotine craving trot.

To give you all an idea of my current sitch, I'm used to smoking about 15-20 cigarettes a day. So approximately a pack a day.  For the past 11 years (I'm not counting the smoking dilettante years preceding my pack a day habit.) I'm heavily addicted, to the point where my pink little lungs are not so much the pink anymore. I'm sure if you opened me up you'd find some sort of lung shaped oily mass in my chest hole.

But yesterday I only had a grand total of 7 cigarettes. People! This is HUGE! And today I went FIVE. WHOLE. HOURS between smokes (current count: 2). Sure, I ate a lot of Skittles and maybe ground my teeth down to nubs, and stopped talking to the world, but still.

Quitting (or at this stage, cutting down) has had it's effect on the house, too. In an effort to make the loooong hours between cigarettes go by faster, I cleaned. And ironed. And knit. Then ripped out all my knitting. Good-bye, Norwegian mitten. May you be reborn in a more appropriate gauge.

Thank you, Wellbutrin, and your low instance of sexual side effects!

Well folks, it's day 2 of the "Replace Cigarettes with Wellbutrin" quitting smoking plan. For those of you not familiar, you take Wellbutrin or Zyban for a few months and it helps you quit smoking. You don't quit cold turkey, you taper off for about a week first.  By week two the medication has made a home in your brain and you physically don't *need* a smoke, it's just the habits and mental cravings. This is appealing to me, as even the words "cold turkey" make me want to shoot things. And smoke afterwards.

So, here I am, pathetically eating Skittles one by one to sooth my oral fixation. It's been 4 hours since I last smoked (well, maybe I had a few puffs [LITTLE ONES, I SWEAR] about 3.5 hours ago), and I plan on going all the way to 1:30 -ish. Yes, I am dying to smoke, and Wellbutrin aside, I still have to force myself not to smoke.

If blog entries are a little incoherent (this one included) for the next oh, five months, let this post act as the explanation to why.

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a nice weekend. Mine was pretty relaxed, some knitting, some movie watching, some lying on the couch due to spraining my back. I was cleaning the Death Tank, home of Murder Fish, and carrying buckets of his shitty water (goldfish shit a lot) gave me a pain in my butt bones and lower back. Ouch. >Insert "insult & injury" joke here<

Some friends got together and we watched this movie called Hostel. Heard of it? Yes? It's so gross. Grooooooooooss. Some guy brought his LITTLE KID to see it! What is wrong with people?! Augh. I "jokingly" made a comment about this, that we should dart the kid, tag him, and follow him around for study. Oh, and for SERIAL KILLINGS. Anyway.

Mitten news: Mitten is huge. Like, oven mitt huge. I'm thinking I might not make a second one (we already have two oven mitts, three is kind of insane but four would frighten our house guests), but that's ok, because it gave me some good practice and taught me how to knit with two hands. Can you tell I am still really proud of learning to knit continental? I am going to milk this for all the self esteem it is worth. Anyway, I am notoriously fickle (what Harry Potter scarf?), so I might really love the finished outcome and decide the make the 2nd mitten. Then I will go on a spirit quest to find the man with large hands who can fit these mittens, marry him, and have his titan children.

Welcome to the year of the dog, y'all. Being born in the year of the goat, I'm just going to have to ride this one out and wait for the glorious year of the Pig. Which is, like, far away. Woe.

This will be a short post because I've got nothing, knitting wise. I seem to have acquired some sort of cramp or shin splint equivalent in my wrists and forearms. I think it's from the tiny needles on the mittens and the weird way I hold the yarn in order to knit with two strands. Anyway, there was only like 20 minutes of knitting last night before my arms dropped, of their on volition, limply into my lap and stayed there.

So Happy Friday, everyone! Have a great weekend and hopefully I will have some pictures or other fun thing to show soon.

Needles...check. Yarn...check. Pattern...check. (Size 2, Cascade 220, Folk Mittens by Marcia Lewandowski)

So innocent...so diabolical

Here's my very first stranded knitting. I'm kinda proud.

Tension schmension, tighter is righter!

But...

Ugh...just...ugh. Ta da! They're now a gift!

This is where the new round starts. Fugly. That's ok, you know why? Because I taught myself to knit with BOTH HANDS. It's not easy, it's not pretty, but by god I can do it. Left hand, you are a useless stump no more!

I could totally sell these! (sorry, couldn't resist)

Speaking of which...thank you all for your commiserations. Wow. It's so nice to have a blog and talk the talk with people who know. Elli & Angela suggested a knitting class, which I've done and wouldn't you know, it's the people who don't deign to learn who expect me to knit them dirt cheap goods. Figures, I guess.

Just to clarify, I make big noise about what a selfish slag I am, but I don't mind knitting for people I love or people I know will appreciate the knits. The people who offer me $10.00 for my time and labor, however, are not people I would consider the appreciative type.

What can I say, I like to give it away. *wink wink*