Puerto Rico, Kindle, & Starting An AA Meeting

Today is Friday January Eighth Two Thousand Ten and woo fucking woo ! Its a woo fucking woo day for a variety of reasons. The first is that it is a friday and I dont have to work tomorrow. The second is that I booked tickets to San Juan Puerto Rico for next weekend and thats going to be awesome. I am hopefully going to stay in an apartment thats connected to a bigger house. I made the request thru this website that places people like me with people who have vaca rentals available. The last it their appears to be an extra six hundred dollars in my checking account. I got paid today and it appears that the payroll dept counted both xmas eve and NYE as holidays and paid me 1.75 times what they normally do for that period. I am sure that it is a mistake and they will figure out how to screw me out of the extra money but having the extra cash in my account a week before I go on vaca is awesome.

One thing I really want to do in PR is to go fishing. I was checking out the boats that have websites and its about three hundred for a half day and seven hundred for a full day. I want to spend something like two hundred and five hundred so I am going to walk down to the docks on Sat or Sun morning and see what sort of deal I can wheedle for Monday. As it stands I plan to hang out on the beach, check out museums, see some music, and go to at least a four star resturant for din-din one night. I really hate eating out alone but if I am paying a hundred bucks for dinner, what the hell. The rest of the time I plan to cook in the apartment kitchen. I am really excited about the spontaneity of this trip and the fact that the airfare to San Juan is nonstop and about two hundred fifty dollars. So for airfare and three days lodging I am looking at about five bills. Not too shabby.

So I have finally decided that my Kindle is the single most important piece of electronics that I own and might be the most important thing I own. Reading is super important to me, I always have a book with me and I enjoy reading more than almost any other activity. My kindle will allow me to download over a thousand books which I will own forever or at least for as long as my kindle lives. I just finished the first Kindle book I downloaded, SK's "Under the Dome: A Novel" and it was awesome. A totally throwback from his "The Stand" days and I really enjoyed every page I read. Some of King's books can be a bit wordy and you can skip over paragraphs but that wasn't the case with Dome. It was as if the pedal was to the medal for the entire book and he left several easter eggs for readers to find. The first one was the character Jack Reacher from Lee Child's series and the second was a "God of his own choosing" which is a total AA reference if I have ever read one. I know that SK had a major depenency problem with alcohol and painkillers so it doesn't surprise me one itty bitty that is was in there. I dl'd the new Jack Reacher novel and SK's "The Cell" which I have wanted to read for some time.

The say in AA that if you want to confuse a member of AA then ask questions pertaining to the Big Book or something of that nature. The BB is an interesting text although it is dated at times it really has some good things to say and it shows you that alcoholism transcends time, races, sexes, and geographical locations. I was able to dl a copy of the BB onto my kindle for ninety-nine cents and while I already own a copy I did this for several reasons. The first is that it was only a buck and why the fuck not, the second is that I will always have my kindle with me so I may read the text more than I have in the past, and the third is the ability to bookmark and make notes in the text on the kindle. I think this will be very helpful when I try and start my own tuesday night meeting this spring and will need source material for discussion.

I decided last fall that I was going to start my own meeting on Tuesday nights in Cambridge starting at seven thirty. There is a need for a good meeting on tues nites because the only other offering is a freaky atheist meeting which I will never attend again. I have been thinking about the format and since I like reading so much I was going to present the idea of a AA texts discussion meeting as well as a speaker discussion. My idea is to ask someone right before the meeting to speak and if that doesn't happen then we will read something in one of the AA texts and then talk about it. I realize that not everyone will have all the texts but we can just pass the book from one person to another. I enjoy participating in meetings and I think there is a def need for another tues nite meeting. My only problem at this time of writing is where the hell I am going to hold it. I am going to start going to various churches and also find out what folks pay for rent. I think the Harvard Divinity school would be a good place but some people say that it is too far out if the way. I am going to ask the First Parish Church as well as the church where we have our mon nite meetings. If the meeting fails to pick up steam and become permanent then I will learn from what I did wrong and try again.

Going up to the north shore this weekend to vacate my presence from 74 Amsden street because Jamie is having a friend and her three year old kid visiting. What a fucking bizarre time to visit and to tote yer child along to someone's house that isn't baby proof is also strange in my opinion. Jamie is from the northern west coast and apparently they do thigs different there. She does not have a drivers lisc, not due to health reasons but because she just never wanted one. I do not understand that reasoning. I can maybe see if you grew up in NYC or even Boston but she grew up in rural Washington State where for most of the kids getting your drivers lisc must have been both a rite of passage and a freedom. Dunno, differenct strokes for different folks.