I'm very thankful that I planned ahead for craving days. Last night was just miserable, and the fallout from it has lasted throughout the day. I'm sure I've gained at least 4 pounds today, munching away the cravings and the frustration that I've felt growing stronger. I suppose it has finally come to a head.

Never let it be said that quitting smoking isn't a magnificent opportunity for personal growth beyond breaking an addiction. I've learned a great deal about myself. A great deal. Some of it is pretty tough, because there are issues I felt I had already conquered that, apparently, have only been masked and not sufficiently addressed.

I don't deal well with negativity, for instance. They say that you learn a lot about a person by the way he handles a tangled string of lights at Christmas-time. I've always felt that to be true. Raising the girls, I've always felt it was important to have "projects" to work on with them. Some of our projects worked out well and we came through them with a fantastic end result. Some were less than wonderful products in the end, and presented challenges we were ill equipped to overcome.

Regardless of the outcome of the product, however, we always had a great time doing the projects themselves. Mind you, this might involve coming home from work after an agonizingly horrid day in which nothing went well at all. A couple of times, it was after such a day that also terminated in an injury at work requiring a trip to the emergency room for stitches. Still, promises made should always be kept and so I'd go home gritting my teeth, determined to work on our project together with the girls.

And it always cheered me up, if I let it. All I had to do was thwack my thumb with a hammer or paste a sequin to my nose or something equally ridiculous and instead of cursing, raging, getting angry or even just pouting, we'd all have a big laugh about it. The more it hurt, the harder I would laugh. It made the pain go away faster and it made the evening fun for everybody.

Well, last night we had a project, my Sweetheart and I. And, apparently, he had a horrible time of his day before coming home to work on the project. To his credit, he didn't try to welch out of working on it though. And the project itself - whoa! A new king-sized Sleep Number mattress! Okay, so what was required was to take 3/4" plywood and create a larger platform to sit atop our existing queen-sized platform bed.

Yes, there were many challenges. But it could have been fun. We could have laughed through any of the mishaps we encountered. True, his falling was alarming, especially considering his back problems. But once we established that he was going to live, we could have had a simply magnificent time of the whole ordeal.

Guess what happened instead...

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