a muggle quitter

God how I'm lumbering about this week. I promised I would stop smoking last Sunday, and once and for all. I kept my promise and four days later I am smoke free, an emotional ticking time bomb, professional speed eater, and driving everyone around me crazy. By everyone, I mean Paul who, thanks to my sometimes-severe deficiency in the friends department in Buenos Aires, is my almost entire support system these days and who has been faithfully putting up with my misdirected outbursts while coddling me with empanadas and Dairy Milk bars. I have taken the occasional walk, taught the occasional class, been swimming, shopping, eating, etc. and yet the headaches continue and so does the desire to make unnatural mouth-to-mouth contact with anyone having mouth-to-mouth contact with the Marlboro man. Not that I want pity. I do it to myself. I have one of those fateful 'addictive personalities' that people like to talk about. In my 27 short years I have been addicted to almost all possible substances both illicit and non-illicit and banishing them from my life one by one is getting harder not easier. Let's just say... I feel like a quitter. Now that there are no booze filled afternoons or cigarette and coffee mornings away from me - I wonder how addictive TV will actually become, or whether I will ever be able to cast-on well enough to be a professional knitter. To think I had so much potential as a child.

The tougher days still bring small pleasures. This week is officially Harry Potter week with the release of the 7th (and FINAL - boo!) book on Saturday (my preordered copy is waiting for me now - I can smell it) as well as the new film 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix'. To all Potter fans out there - muggles and mudbloods, deatheaters and Diggory-doters one and all, I share this week with you because I will likely be going underground on Saturday morning and not emerging until poor Harry's fate is decided once and for all.