Addiction is Hell! Addiction to anything is worse than any story about an evil genius trying to take over the world. Troy Clarkson had the consumate courage to admit that he was addicted to alcohol to the point where he retreated to the woods, taking with him "a blanket, a change of clothes, a book on Abraham Lincoln - because despite my journey to live in the woods I considered myself an intellectual - and six half pints of vodka. I was prepared to die there that day, and in the deepest, darkest, most fearful caverns that existed in my soul, the latter option appealed to me more."
As he said in the first line of the Forward of this book, "I came out of the woods to write this book. Literally."
The sub-title of the book is: 365 Ways to Not Be a Dung Beetle. He explains that "The dung beetle exists for the sole purpose of carrying around the crap of others. It is a miserable existence. Don't be a dung beetle."
So he created this motivational compendium of daily words of encouragement - Out of the Woods. And since holidays are an especially difficult time, there is a section of the book that focuses just on that. Taking it one day at a time. There is no calendar attached to these words. It doesn't matter where you start, but what if the words of just one of these verses breaks the link to the addiction for a moment? You may not agree with all of them. It just takes one - and that can lead to another.
I don't have the skill to write a horror story to reflect the depths of addictive hell.
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Portable Generators and CO
This is the time of year when wind pushes trees over and they fall across power lines and knock out the power. People don't like being without power because the food in the freezer melts and the air conditioners shut off and the house overheats.
To compensate, a portable generator gets dragged into the garage. It's common for the garage door to be left open when the gas engine on the generator is fired up. Gasoline engines produce a lot of nasty substances, one of which is carbon monoxide or CO. Gasoline engines need to run outside the house.
CO is odorless, colorless, and has about the same molecular weight as oxygen. It can follow the air currents into the house through any cracks and holes in the structure. If the pressure in the house is lower than the pressure in the garage, CO will get sucked into the house.
If there are battery operated CO alarms in the house and the batteries haven't been removed or died, when the level of CO reaches a deadly level, they will alert the occupants that they should leave the house.
CO alarms are just that: alarms. They are not monitors. They won't tell IF there is ANY carbon monoxide in the house. They will just set off their alarm if the CO has reached an alarming level - and it has been there for awhile. People die when they take the batteries out of their CO alarms.
One other fun fact: the sensors in CO alarms have only slightly longer longevity than the batteries. When you think it's time to change the batteries, go ahead and change the whole device. What's your life worth?
Check out the information from the Building America Solutions Center.
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