Some time in college, summer of my freshman year, I bought my first pack of cigarettes.. a woman I was hung up on graduated high school and left for New York and then Rome to find her fortune.

I bought a bottle of wine, and a pack of cigarettes and proceeded to learn two things.. One, You need to spend more on a bottle of wine if you want something that's actually drinkable.  Two, cigarettes don't taste good.

Now i look back and wish I'd taken that as a signal that I didn't need or want to smoke.   But it just started a journey through various tobacco products until I found something that tasted good.

Cigars were ok, but the cigars that tasted good were way too expensive.   So I settled on smoking a pipe.

I'd hoped to quit on/around my 40th birthday.. it felt appropriate but events conspired to make that particular time of life too stressful to contemplate adding quitting a 20+ year habit onto the pile.

Now, my 41st birthday is approaching, and like the techweenie I am, I have been taking slow methodical steps to quit.. quantifying how much I was actually smoking, cutting out triggers (no smoking in the car, no smoking at work, no smoking right after a meal, etc) till I was down to filling my pipe three times on a normal day.

Today, I emptied my pipe for the last time, dumped the remaining tobacco in my pouch into the toilet and flushed it away.   I took my morning shower and slapped on the first transdermal patch from the a I bought yesterday.   I'm starting at "stage 2" because I think my intake is equivalent to 10 cigarettes or less per day.  

I can taste it in the back of my throat.. it might actually be more nicotine than I normally get.