whew...Gratitude !

I didn't make time to write yesterday (although it was a pretty hectic day) so here let me share some of the highlights with you. Close family member relapsed again and I had to be the heavy and talk to him about some harsh realities (that was not a lot of fun - but he took it well). My mom and sister and nieces came from out of town to visit. That turned out to be interesting - we took them to a restaurant that treated us in a way that was let's just say: not cool at all - EMBARRASSMENT & ANGER MODE. Later on that night we took them to the local hotel to get a room & that experience was; let's just call it -even less cool. The nearly empty hotel provided them with a room that had water-damaged, peeling wall paper and marsh-mellow soft, trampoline-like bouncy mattresses (great for morning back-aches !) But they were troopers and decided to "ride it out". That is until the discovery of several bugs (both living & dead) on the beds. ANGER - EMBARRASSMENT MODE x TWO ! So we moved them to another hotel - which was absolutely great. Then I made my meeting, which was, let's just call it interesting. I found myself sitting in an NA Topic Discussion meeting (I attend AA meetings sometimes too, but mostly NA) anyway we have these two people in the meeting talking about "they're alcoholics", the AA fellowship & a whole lot of alcoholism - and let me not forget the "advice" giving. This was considered a little bit disrespectful to our NA meeting (One of these people frequents the local AA meetings and you'd never hear him talking about addiction or anything else non-AA and in fact I was there when he shared his story; a very crack-infested story but he was soooooo calm and mannerly and respectful of the fellowship that he was attending (AA). He comes to our meeting and is very loud, yelling, preachy and to top it all off - he held our meeting hostage for every bit of 20 minutes ! I was just about at the THROW A CHAIR ACROSS THE ROOM MODE. But that wasn't the end of the fun; a guy who I actually like proceeded to share after him for an additional 20 minutes. I was flabbergasted. I don't know about your area but around here it takes damn near 30 minutes to get the floor open for Experience, Stregnth & Hope (after all the readings and the clean time & announcements and topics.) In a 90 minute meeting the has about 50 people in attendance - that left about 20 minutes for the other40 or so people to share if they felt that they needed to. But God did His thing and an addict shared some awesome info which lifted my spirit and made it all worth while. GRATITUDE MODE.
I am grateful that the world isn't filled with assholes and that there are some nice people out there. Grateful that everybody isn't relapsing - some of us are holding on. Grateful that everybody in the meeting isn't tripping all on the same day. Very grateful that I can be restored to sanity & that the process isn't taking as long as it used to. Grateful That A Day Clean Is A Day Won ! - Yayayayayayay !