I had every intention of telling you how grateful I was on Thanksgiving. However, unbeknownst to me, I lost my internet service on Wednesday when a handyman doing some repair work cut through my DSL line. Of course, he failed to mention that he cut the DSL line so I spent a couple of hours on the phone with AT&T on Wednesday night, trying to figure out what the heck was the problem. Also on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, my dryer died. RIP. Cha-ching.

After a $110 house call from my internet service provider,  I have internet access again. However, while the repair guy was drilling a hole in my house to repair the DSL line, we discovered that my water heater is rusted to the point that water is dripping out the top and there is a slight smell of natural gas. According to my daughter’s boyfriend, I need to get a new water heater ASAP because he saw one blow up on this show called Myth Busters and it was pretty nasty.

All this came a month after the ceiling in my dining room caved in and the condensation line of my AC condensation line got clogged and ruined a box of sentimental Christmas ornaments. Last month I also got a letter from my mortgage company saying that my mortgage payment is going up $600 a month because my homeowner and hurricane insurance doubled and my escrow didn’t cover it last year.

What the heck does any of this have to do with my depression or bipolar or alcoholism?

One again, all I want for Christmas is an OFF-switch. Seriously. My medications are kind of like a dimmer. But what I really want is an OFF-switch.

You know that trendy definition of insanity that started popping up recently? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? Well, I do the same thing over and over and expect the same result. How messed up is that!  I do it because I cannot stop. I know full well what the outcome will be but I do it anyway.

Drinking is a great example. I knew the consequences of my drinking but I kept doing it. Working 60-hour weeks – I knew the consequence of that but for years, I did it anyway. Last week I did a workout that included 100 pull-ups (unassisted) and 100 push ups (not the kind on your knees). I knew the consequences of that but I did it anyway. My lats are still on fire.

I started feeling “It” a couple of weeks ago. I thought “It” was a cold. I went from feeling tired to weary. There were weird dreams and the muscles under my eyes had gone slack. I had been around some folks with nasty colds so I figured it was my turn. On Halloween weekend I got two, 12-hour nights of sleep. I felt better.

But something still dogged me and “It” was not a cold. I have this feeling deep down inside of me that I have done something wrong. I have not been working hard enough.  I am not a good friend. Back in my drinking days, this feeling would have been perfectly normal and justified. I was a blackout drinker and spent countless hungover hours trying to piece together what I had done the night before with just a few snippets of memory and evidence. But I haven’t had a drink in over 13 years.

I have been bouncing up and down that last couple of weeks. Pretty happy and grateful much of the time, until  I regurgitated that icky shame every now and then. But I am beginning to spend more time down than up. This morning was bad. It was a perfectly lovely fall morning in Florida – partly sunny, 67-degrees, slight wind out of the north.

Last week the ceiling in my dining room caved in. I knew it was coming. I had been watching a crack grow on my ceiling all summer. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on and then I realized that the leaks (plural) in my roof had something to do with it.

The roof started leaking early in the summer. Nothing a couple of buckets couldn’t handle. Then the crack appeared. Seems water from my leaky roof and saturated my ceiling. There were no water marks up there but that’s what happened.

I live in an 83-year-old house. My walls and ceiling are stucco. Not the new kind of stucco. The old plaster stucco. Heavy stuff. I got the roof fixed but the crack on my ceiling kept growing. Then I got a call at work from my daughter.