Sober Blog

I just came back from a cruise to Alaska where a posse of us carried the message to several small local meetings while on the road. At one meeting a gentleman was lamenting that he could not have a couple of beers in celebration of Memorial Day. After all, it was summer, and it was his American right to have a few beers. He could not make the connection between beer and the fact that he had just gotten out of jail after his sixth DUI. It truly is an astounding disease. Alcohol twists our minds so much we can’t quite comprehend what it says in the Big Book, “We are like men who have lost their legs; they never grow new ones.”

My first summer sober, I remember being on the beach playing scrabble with another newcomer. We wanted to be like the other young girls in bikinis seemingly having fun drinking. The weather was steaming hot and I remember really wanting a cold beer. It didn’t even matter that I hated beer’s bloating bubbles and bad taste and that I didn’t drink it even when I was active. I kept telling myself it was just a another cold drink. It was the seduction of it that I had to deal with, and another old idea that I could drink like other people that had to be smashed. I bought a cold soda, played several resentful games of scrabble that day, and just put more time into the getting sober thing. I was not sure I wanted it, all I knew is that I would get it first and decide later if I wanted it or not. They told me I could go back to drinking any time I wanted to.

How do you stay sober in summer when it seems like everyone else is having fun drinking?

#1 You must first accept that we are bodily and mentally different from our fellows.
For us to drink is to die or go insane. I had a pretty easy time admitting this, but a hard time accepting it. I had to pray fervently on my knees every day to the God of my sponsors understanding for help accepting it, just for today.

#2 Never go to any event on an empty stomach. We get confused on body signals with cravings and huger.

#3 If possible, take your own car to all events so you can leave if you feel uncomfortable.

#4 When you go to the beach
Take a small cooler of your very own with water, drinks and snacks. Bring some for sharing so you don’t run out if there are moochers around!

#5 When you go to B-B-Qs
Bring your own preferred beverages and some sweets to the host/hostess as a gift. Leave a small cooler with your favorite beverages and snacks in your car in case you run out.

#6 When you go fishing or to a baseball game
See above.

#7 When you go on vacation, go to www.aa.org and get the list of meetings that are available in the city where you will be going. Use the telephone to call your sponsor at home or the local intergroup to tell them you are in town. Get a temporary sponsor if you are spending lots of time on holiday in one place.

#8 Have fun at fellowship events
Check your local Intergroup for fun events like “Bowling for Big Books” “Movie Night”
“Picnics,”

#9 Plan a Fellowship Vacation
There are plenty of conventions, round ups and conferences to attend. Get some pals and plan to go on a program vacation at one or more of these. Plan on going on a Gratitude Cruise in fellowship.

#10 Create your own events to look forward to
Have a fellowship BBQ, Pool Party, Breakfast Bike Ride, Scrabble Tournament, or Pictionary Party. Get involved on any fellowship committee that is planning something, especially any fundraiser for your local Intergroup. Become part of the solution of staying sober in the summer for others.

#11 Carry Support
Gratitude Boosters: Write on ten small pieces of paper things you are grateful for and keep them in your pocket. If you feel bad for a minute, take one out and read it. Also, carry a little Big Book so you can go to the rest room and read until the dark moment passes.

#12 Remember, God will meet you anywhere!

Snow@sobercelebrations.com
561-702-2312

Our cruise ship Radiance of the Seas slips in between the mountains, glaciers and fish to dock us in a little port built up with rocks. The port is ready with a platform full of new helicopters. There is not even one doctor in this town and medical attention is a two hour flight away. Pregnant women are required to leave town two months prior to giving birth. It’s still a frontier town and charming to pieces.
I went to a farm where I did something I have wanted to do forever, I did glass blowing. I made a beautiful snow, blue magic feather and gilded paperweight which will be shipped to my home. Then we had a home made brunch from all the ingredients in the Jewel Farm garden. 33 staff live in the baracks there and grow their own food.
The air tingles with crisp promise of more northern adventure. Although the guides sait last ngiht that we wouldn’t probably site any whales, our group saw 5 Orcas and a humpback with a baby who did tricks for us. Although you can only see Mt. McKilyey 30% of the year, we saw it clearly the first day. Today we snuck into Icy Straight Point and the sun blazing on the streets is so unusal we know how truly blessed this trip is as it is rarely sunny this long. I stayed onboard and slept the morning away in elegant luxury. The internet and cell phone connections come and go. AT&T seems to be the only carrier that works in these remote areas. My phone is dead for sure!
We have our meeting at 5:00, formal dress tonight and our Private Coketail Party at 7:00. Life is that good!

So my cell phone alarm clock rang at 7:30 this morning and I got up and got dressed in long johns, hat, mittens, etc. and went into the elevator as the sun blazed its morning song through the ship I am on which is 50% glass. I didn’t know that my cell phone reverted to east coast time and I had awakened at 4:30 am until some folks in the same daze got on the elevator!
I went back for a few hours rest to preparare for my excursion. Nothing could have prepared me for taking a helicopter ride in the Juneau, Alaska Icefield. They have been studying the effects of the icefield’s glacier system here since 1946.
We were given glacier boots to put over out boots, instructed on how to board the helicopter, and squeezed in for a ride to heaven. The temperature today was 67 and hot hot for everyone. We climbed up over the majesty of the white blanketed mountains until we got to the the south end of the icefield and landed on Mendenhall Glacier. As we flew over the blue topaz pools of water which signifiy a glacier, it was apparent we were traveling back in time. Nestled in the middle of the glacier were about twenty white huts where 15 people, mostly in their twentites, taking care of about 100 sled dogs. Our guide met us wearing no shirt. It had snowed up there yesterday so it was pristine. Our dog sled was all hooked up and ready for us to go for a ride. The dogs were so responsive and much leaner than I thought they would be. Our team came in 8th in the Iditarod this year. Some dogs have competed as much as 9 times in the race. Gee and Haw are the two commands they respond to. Gee being right and Haw being turn left please! As we took turns riding in different position, we watched as an avalanche went crashing down. The sound echoing through the glacier was as old as time itself. This is North America’s fifth largest icefield which blankets over 1,500 square miles of land and stretches nearly 100 miles north to south and 45 miles east to west. The whiteness was blinding. I took lots of pictures and videos, but could not really tell if the camera was on, as nothing was visible.
Sober Dog sledding on a glacier…WOW…take that one off the bucket list!

I am sitting onboard Radiance of the Seas sailing thought the Alaska morning. Wish I could load some pictures, but alas, nature is so powerful here all machinery is helpless. My new camera is shy, my cell phones won’t send pictures and I can barely tweet! It’s truly living in the moment! I just found this computer onboard with some time to spare before 10:00 am meeting.
Our tour guide for the previous four days on land was one incredible German woman who has lived in raw Alaska for a long time. She is about 36 years old, lives in a cabin with no electricity, and has to chop her fire wood and haul water to her cabin which has no lock on the door. She volunteers to help the mushers for the Iditarod every year, has biked not only the Iditarod trail, but 4,000 Alaska miles. She is from another time and place. As a farewell gift I bought her a book titled “Gold Rush Women.” We all signed it and I think she will enjoy reading it on the long winter nights. She was good friends with Susan Butcher, the only women to win the Iditarod three times in a row. The Iditarod is up there in world class races with the Tour de France. It’s an 1,159 miile dog sled race.
We are blessed with so 65 beautiful alcoholics on this trip! Two women have only two months of sobriety each and they will get an earful from our gang! Many volunteered to be sponsors at sea and all are willing to carry the message any time of day or night wherever we are.
Today we cruise Hubbard Glacier and have a fancy black tie dinner tonight. Ain’t life grand?

I arrived on May 24 a day before the group so I could work out the incoming kinks and boy am I happy that I did. The four hour time difference between Florida & Alaska put me in my hotel room with only one stopover in Houston, at 2:00 am body clock time. It was an exhausting trip and I am really happy I came a day early.
The next day folks started to arrive and I organized a trek to a nearby meeting at 5:00. I had called ahead a month ago and told them they will have extra guests and the note left in the chairperson’s box was really cute. They could not interpret it! It didn’t matter because there were 12 of us in a room with 5 local Anchorage folks and the fresh horses were surly needed. One gent coming back from a relapse, one gent wondering if he could ever travel again sober, one gent lamenting the fact that he could not have a couple of beers on Memorial Day Weekend. The lamentor had just gotten out of jail from his sixth DUI. This disease is so baffling, he can’t make the connection between drinking and jail.
When we got back to the hotel, I had arranged for the shuttle to pick us up and bring us to the Sourdough Mining Company for dinner. We had some wonderful local fare. The show, “The Adventures of Dusty Soughdough” out in the back barn where there was a stage was cancelled, so we just milled around the chocolate factory across the street where they have the world’s largest chocolcate fountain. It was awesome. The shuttle took us back for a great nights sleep!
This whole trip is so organized and easy. We boarded a private motorcoach which brought us to our glass domed train the next morning. Awesome views while sitting in a dining car in booths from heaven! The reindeer sausages in the omlettes while traversing the wilderness was an elegant affair. I felt like I was on the Oriental Express…only with my alcoholic family giggling the whole way. It is the beginning of the season here and we were only the second group on the train. Our waiter looked at Bill’s tshirt with the triangle and breathed a sigh of relief. He was jumping for joy when he knew all 45 of us were in recovery! We meet up tomorrow with 25 more folks for the rest of the journey.
McKinley Village Lodge, Tuesday, May 26…rustic, we are the first guests of the season…I think they didn’t know we were coming!
Wednesday, May 27, Talkeetna Alaskan Lodge is sublime! This three story fireplace in the lobby is like a ski lodge in fantastic mountains.

EXCURSIONS: I took a flightseeing tour to the top of Mt. McKinley with 9 other folks. We landed on a Ruth Glacier. This was the experience of a lifetime! It was like standing in God’s hand. The majesty of the mountains and glaciers defies description. My camera was impotent, my heart bursting with gratitude, and my mouth hurt from smiling. The sun does not got down here until late late at night. My flightseeing tour

Happy 100th Birthday Dad

Today is my Dad’s 100th birthday. When they invented the phrase “salt of the earth” they were talking about him. Wikipedia says it refers to humble and unpretentious people.
That was him, humble, unpretentious and happy. He lived for 84 years. Although paralyzed from strokes, Parkinson’s disease, blind in one eye, on a feeding tube in a wheelchair, his last Halloween he managed to convince someone to buy him a Batman costume. His sense of humor buoyed the world, and always inspired my heart even when I was stuck in a morass of despairing alcoholism. I always wanted better things for myself because of him. One night in a drunken stupor I called and woke him up to tell him I had just found a two headed nickel. He didn’t yell at me, or get mad; he just chuckled and said he would like to see it. In fact, I can only remember him getting mad at me once in my life. Instigated by my Mom, he slapped me across the face for playing hooky. I lived a half a block from my elementary school and told my parents there was no school that day. At 3:00 when all the kids in uniform swarmed the streets, it was obvious I was lying.

My father was one of eight children of Italian immigrant parents. I don’t know much about his childhood in the depression, but I do know he suffered and learned frugality from it. He would save a few pennies by walking instead of taking the subway. He tread lightly on his shoes so they didn’t need to be resoled often. He was frugal, but was never stingy of heart. He got a job in the post office when civil jobs were hard to come by and did not go to war. He and my Mom had two children and she worked until I came along. My Dad did back breaking plastering work every day in New York City with his brother Matty for forty years. He would come home at 2:30, take a shower and be having his dinner just as I was coming home from school. He would change his clothes, get on the subway and got to work in the Post Office on 42nd St. until midnight. He worked in the Post Office nights for 30 years. There were always love notes for my Mom and me signed, “See you on the next shift.”

He saved every penny so he could take us provide for his family. When we went shopping, he would encourage my Mom to buy a nice dress or a good piece of meat. I never met another man who enjoyed shopping so much. He got so much pleasure out of seeing his family enjoy the fruits of his labor. They were not grand my any stretch of the imagination, but he got such satisfaction from living as well as he could. After 29 years in a tenement on the 4th floor, he saved up the whole $1200. for a down payment on an attached house uptown. It was only one window wide, but it was ours. What kind of man can work around the clock like that and never complain his whole life?

He was my hero. When my Mom said they already had two biological children they couldn’t take care of another one, he insisted that they keep me. I was six months old, someone else’s child and already lost. At a year old, I tasted some Vicks vaporub, liked it and ate the whole jar. I was blue and suffocating when he found me. He instinctively knew if they waited for an ambulance I would be dead. He sucked the poison right out of me and saved my life.
I can remember a time when I spent the weekend with my biological mother. It was New Year’s Eve and we clanged on pots outside the tenement window at midnight. I was 8 years old and I remember being filled with total despair and just crying. The next day was Sunday and snowing and my Dad came to get me. We walked through the streets around the snow plows and I held his hand tight. His hands were always so warm. He always wore a light jacket and a little pork pie hat. Heroes look like that sometimes. I was so happy that he was taking me home, the place where love and kindness prevailed.

Because of our precious program, both parents were able to see me achieve their version of happily ever after. I graduated college, am still married twenty eight years later and have three fine children. My parents were married 60 years and as reliable as rain. On his deathbed I promised Dad I would take care of my Mom for the rest of her life. One day at a time, no matter how tough it was, I kept my promise and carried her back to him when she was 91 years old. Happy Birthday Dad. I know you must be telling jokes to the angels today, I wish I were there and could just have one more dance with you.

://tiny.cc/BBwjB

I’ve been fortunate enough to experience and explore different careers in sobriety. At one point I worked in the world of private aviation. It was a good old boy’s club of big toys, expensive cigars, and bull pen events. It was fun and exciting and if I were 20 years younger, I would have taken on the challenge of being one of the few women in the field. My brief involvement included going to an aviation show with top executives one weekend. When I was drinking I wasn’t comfortable anywhere. Now I am comfortable in any place on earth, including business situations. I have owned night clubs and restaurants with no conflicts to my sobriety. Fortunately the obsession was lifted from me after the first two years of being sober and I continue to stay committed to our precious program.

One night after dinner that weekend of the aviation show, we went to a party one of the fuel suppliers was hosting. We were having a good time, but several of the men thought it peculiar that I was not drinking. As the night wore on, it bothered them more and more they decided to do something about it. Much to my shock, the CEO of one company pinned my arms behind my back while the other executive tried to pour Jell-O shots down my throat. They may as well have had a gun to my head as I fought for my life. I kicked and pulled and pushed in terror until I got loose and ran back to my hotel. I was appalled, terrified and grateful that God once again had my back. They had no idea they were actually threatening my life, but I was well aware of it.

Yes, we can say stay home, pull the curtains down, not go to work, wear brown bags over our heads, listen in terror at the news, or we can get on our knees every day and have a conscious contact with God and live a conscious life. I have found that following the steps and program to the best of my ability on any one given day allows me the total freedom to participate safely in this banquet of life, no matter how many crazy people I run into. No matter where I want to go, what I want to do, I take my devotion to the program with me, I pad either side of the journey with fellowship and try to surround myself with it like warm blankets. We have been blessed to be awake for all the colors, flavors, joys and sorrows of this life. I don’t want to miss any part of it! No matter what, no one can steal your magic and I know for a fact, God will meet you anywhere.

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They love our movies. They hate our politicians (well, most of them). But what about our manners? We found out what everyone thinks of our behavior—be it good, bad, or just plain perplexing

There have been better times to be an American, at least in terms of world opinion, yet tourists and immigrants continue to flock to the United States. And when they do, they find that our mores are a lot more complicated than what pop culture, or the chance encounter with fanny-packing tourists, has led them to believe. For all our vastness and diversity, we do have a culture of etiquette—one that can be just as confusing for the visitor to navigate as Japan’s, or Egypt’s, or France’s is for the American tourist. Which is why this edition of Etiquette 101 is an inside-out affair, an introspective examination of the U.S.A. in the eyes of the rest of the world

1. THEY THINK WE’RE A “LOOK, BUT DON’T TOUCH” CULTURE…
THE SMILE: One of the qualities that sets us most apart is how often we smile—even at strangers. “It really is peculiar to Americans,” says Gary Weaver, a professor of international communications at American University, who’s trained many a foreigner. Visitors often take a smile very seriously, “and then when they realize that it extends to everybody, [they assume] it’s because Americans are phony.” But it’s just a basic signal of politeness—mixed with perhaps a preoccupation with first impressions. “We’re a very mobile society,” says James L. Bullock, a diplomat at the American embassy in Paris. “We’re always trying to fit in—that’s why other people think we’re always smiling.”
EYE CONTACT: Whereas in other cultures avoiding eye contact—particularly with an elder—can be a sign of respect, here eye contact is mandatory, even if you’re just making small talk about the weather.
PERSONAL DISTANCE: Weaver warns visitors that Americans are not to be touched beyond the forearm, and estimates personal space here at nearly two feet—twice what it is in the Arab world and in Mediterranean countries. The author Aleksandar Hemon, who emigrated to the United States from Bosnia in his late twenties, noticed that people here flinched at his touch. It’s not that Americans are cold or that Eastern Europeans are pushy, he says. It’s just a cultural difference related to notions of personal space and privacy.

2. …AND THAT OUR WOMEN ARE TEASES
In most countries, a scantily clad woman smiling at a stranger is an invitation. “We’ve had major issues,” says Pamela Eyring, director of the Protocol School in Washington, D.C., “especially with the Russians and Serbians.” Some men have even given female colleagues the keys to their hotel rooms. Eyring is currently preparing a course on dressing conservatively. “That’s an area we’re having trouble with in the United States.” Weaver finds himself having to emphasize that “when an American woman says no, she means no. It doesn’t mean ask me again,” as it often does in other cultures.

3 THEY THINK WE MAKE MEANINGLESS SMALL TALK
Small talk—which Hemon calls “the verbal equivalent of smiling”—is a staple worldwide, but it seems that we Americans do it the most. Take the phrase “How are you?” “In many countries where people say ‘How are you,’ they really mean ‘How are you,’?” says Weaver. “We just want people to say ‘fine.’ It’s not an invitation to a health report.” Sherry Mueller, head of the National Council for International Visitors, gives detailed workshops on small talk. “I recommend that they read a local newspaper or a magazine. That gives them topics and conversation skills.” It’s a way to avoid just discussing the weather, or topics you’d rather not hear about, because…