Day 23

Hey folks. Funny thing today. I may not have mentioned it but I've always rolled my own cigarettes. For years this meant that one of the major reasons why people quit smoking, money, didn't apply to me. Why? Because, if customs and excise are to be believed, I propped up organised crime and kept the grey economy intact by buying packets of tobacco with health warnings in Dutch or polish etc. No wonder our politicians had to fiddle a few expenses what with me avoiding paying cigarette duty for most of the thirty years I smoked.

Like all good things the cheap tobacco came to an end just over a year ago. My Dealer lost his supplier and before I knew it I was forced to go legit. The only way for me to get cheap cigs was to look for dodgy folk at market stalls. Thing is I was never there at the right time. Today, 9 days after quitting, where do I find myself but at a market that would have furnished me with my smoking needs. I even had money to hand. It felt really strange to not be looking for someone to buy cigs from.

Another thing that you wont know from this blog, because it happened before I started the blog, is that I killed my home PC just before Christmas as a direct result of trying to repair a faulty external hard drive. It took about 4 days and many a full ashtray to get back up and running with a working PC. The external hard drive however has never been recovered but needs to be as it has about six years worth of photos on it. So tonight I am typing this on my laptop whilst my main PC is running a recovery program on the external drive. This is a long slow process that will hopefully run over night. I'm only telling you because there are a couple of things that could happen that may send me over the edge.

First the recovery software could find a bad cluster within seconds of me leaving the room meaning that when I get up tomorrow morning I'll have lost out on 7-10 hours disk recovery all for the sake of pressing one button saying 'yes'.

Second the temporary file created to let me see what can and cannot be recovered from the damaged drive may actually be big enough to completely fill the working drive of my PC putting me right back to the position I was in before Christmas where I have to format my C drive and start again.

If the first sentence of my blog tomorrow indicates that I've smoked 70 cigs and smashed the house up. Don't blame the Champix. I can always claim extreme provocation.

Wish me luck. Until tomorrow....