I am glad to report that I actually wrote addressed, stamped and mailed exactly one thank you card.  I'm sure it wasn't for anyone who reads my blog so don't get your hopes up.  I was going to go walking, but by the time I got it together it started raining.  I am disappointed.

Over a week ago, I went cold turkey on Diet Pepsi and Diet Coke.  I won't wallow in facts about how much I was drinking or the effects of drinking that instead of healthier things, like water.

I will just say that it is harder to get free from caffeine than I thought that it would be. 

About three days after I quit cold turkey, I started a 1300 calorie a day diet.  Mostly that means that I am counting calories, and I have not been as successful counting calories as I have been in not consuming diet colas.  To help me on my low cal journey, I have available to me cases of products from an unnamed company that my husband invested in last year, thinking that we would become distributors.  Mr. Sofa is a wonderful, intelligent businessman, but he does not really have the kind of personality that goes along with that kind of business.  He invested in it against my better judgment and without my consent so he was leery of asking for my help when it came time to sell it, and not just listen to tapes about it.  I offered my support nonetheless, since it was already a done deal and a lot of irretrievable money had been spent.  By this time, Mr. Sofa decided that he had pretty much been snookered because he planned to sell it by phone, using a leads list generated by the company's infomercials and he realized too late that this approach was not going to work although it had worked with him.

I said all of that to say this:  caffeine is hidden in a lot of products to 'help' us. 

Yesterday, for some reason, I missed taking the supplements that this company supplied, and I felt absolutely horrible.  Like really bad.  I had been taking one pill from four different bottles, twice a day.  They recommended three times a day, but I felt like that was just too weird.  One was a multi-vitamin.  (Who needs three of those a day?)  I will not give the brand names of these other items, just their listed functions:  bottle two - nutrient support formula, bottle three- dietary supplement, and bottle four - promotes weight loss, boosts metabolism and builds energy.

Trust me when I say that I felt all day like I was craving caffeine, and I had a monster head ache.  Two ibuprofen barely smoothed the edges off of it.  When I got home from my second job, I just crashed into bed, fully clothed, and slept until 5:30 this morning. 

Yesterday turned into a horrid day for other reasons as well, and sleep was the best tonic for everything that went wrong.

This morning I have found out from research on the web that green tea is a big source of caffeine, and that just one pill from bottle number four had 84 mg of caffeine in it.  I think I was getting more caffeine from those supplements than I had been taking in with diet cola.

Here's my philosophy of life on the last few days:  life is a journey and I have been on Stupid Road.  I am going to be taking the multivitamins which do not appear to contain any caffeine, and I am dropping the others.  I will still use some of their shakes from time to time, which when added to milk with a little protein powder are not too bad.

I don't use them everyday, but they are not bad for a meal replacement once in a while.

My conclusion is this:  it is harder to give up caffeine and to truly get away from it than you think it is. 

I have been endeavoring to reorganize parts of my house that have been disastrous nightmare material.

For instance, the basement stereo cabinet somehow became a repository of unwanted junk stacked on top of it which then became a magnet for more and more stuff.  Yesterday, I made a trip to Walmart for storage bins which happened to be on sale.  Today I was filling them with CD's and cassette tapes when I stumbled upon a great map of the Ridge to Rivers Trail System in Boise.  It is a neat thing to look at because it is accurate, glossy and shiny.  That does not mean it will do a geographically dyslexic person like myself any good, but it is pretty nice to look at.

I also found some seashells, candles, and little funny gift statues that people have given members of our family.  No one wants them..  We feel too guilty to throw them out.  I put them on a book shelf in the basement to display them until the guilt factor wears down, and then I will give them to the Idaho Youth Ranch.  Please do not give me any little statues.  You are not my friend if you send me something like that.  The guilt trip that is attached to them is just overwhelming.  It can take literally years to toss out something of that nature.  It is funny, but one of them was given to my kids for a birthday gift by a Mormon girl down the street who no doubt bought it second hand.  We could have gotten rid of it easily enough, but then one of the kids, I think it was Aimee, re-gifted it to her dad.  It is a little white statue of a man with outstretched arms saying, "I love you this much!"  How in the world will we ever be able to get rid of that?  I think not.  If Paul dies before me, I will hide it in his casket.  Oh, the guilt.

Here is the funniest thing that I found in this hide-and-seek venture:  a sermon CD of the pastor who excommunicated me.  The title is:  "No One Can Snatch Them Out of My Hand."  I literally laughed out loud! 

The CD's are safely packed into two storage containers with lids.  They are not alphabetized, but I will get to that later.  I overestimated our need for storage so I have two bins left.  If I am good, I will attempt to put photos away next.  However, that is such an overwhelming job that I will probably pretend to send out change of address postcards next.   I should actually do that very soon.  I found a whole stack of pre-stamped postcards the other day in the mess of paperwork in the laundry room.  Finding things is the fun side of cleaning.