Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Greetings guys,

Back in January, I made a resolution to quit smoking, and surprisingly it worked...for about 5 months. I don't know if it was the change in the weather, stress at work, or just stupidity that made me start it back up. Ever since starting back up, I have felt really super bad about it. I keep telling myself, "After this pack, I'm done", but then I find myself back at the store buying a pack.

A few days ago, I came down with a sinus infection from hell. Since the illness hit, I haven't smoked a cigarette one (my throat has been so sore it would just kill it). So here I am, my sinus infection is going away, I have 0 cigarettes left, and it has been 2 days since I smoked.

I am a 32 year old man, who has a beautiful wife, and the sweetest young 2 year old daughter I could ever ask for. I have a great job, a nice house, and a couple cars. I have a full game room with 5 full sized Warhammer tables in my basement, and on Saturdays my place is the local hangout to play. Even with all these great things i have going for me, I still hold on to a 16 year addiction that is killing me. Its not that I WANT to keep smoking, its just that it has a tight hold on me. I don't WANT to always smell of smoke. I don't WANT to get winded at the thought of walking up some stairs. I don't WANT to set a bad example for my little girl..but at the end of the day, I keep lighting up.

So, I don't think I can just give it up, it never works. I need something to make me feel as if quitting is worth it, and I think I have come up with a solution.

I don't buy a lot for myself. After the bills are paid, money is put into savings / college fund, we have some left over to do the things we want. As we all know, this is an expensive hobby, and I don't buy as much as I want, because I end up feeling guilty for the purchase. 200 bucks on a new codex and some units, is 200 bucks that could have gone to a college fund, or a small weekend getaway.

Smoking is also incredibly expensive, I smoke anywhere between a 1/2 pack to a pack per day. At about 6 bucks a pack, you are looking at Minimum 48 dollars every 2 weeks. and at Maximum 96 bucks every 2 weeks. That's some pretty serious money, and it would be great if I could take that money, and convert it to my hobby.

So, here are the rules:

Every day that I don't smoke, I get $3
I will update the OP daily, with the current amount I have in my fund
I will list what is my "next purchase", so that I have a clear goal I am working towards
When I use the money to buy something hobby related, I will add it to a list, so I can track the goodies I have gotten because I quit smoking
As I build and paint the items that I purchase, I will post pics and progress shots. Paint tutorials will be posted if requested. (I will also post up some of my previous paintjobs to
get the ball rolling
If I smoke even one cigarette, I lose all the money in the pot
The non smoking money IS my hobby money, so under no circumstances will I buy anything hobby related and still smoke. Its a clear choice..smoking or my hobby that I love
I smoked for 16 years, so this blog will go on for 16 years (or as long as Dakka stays rockin')


And there we have it. I hope that by publishing this on an open forum, it will keep me honest. I also hope that you guys can keep me motivated. If I start having cravings, Im gunna post it here, so you guys try to keep me in line. Who knows, maybe this post would garnish the ultimate reward, and motivate someone else to quit these wretched things...

So lets see how it goes

CURRENT $$ YTD SINCE 9/10/2013 $27.00
CURRENT $$ AVAILABLE $27.00
LAST CIGARETTE SMOKED 9/10/2013 10:00 PM

NEXT PURCHASE Box of 12 Tau Fire warriors (1 days left)


**********PURCHASE HISTORY**********

This... is a pretty noble reason to start a blog.

Count me in! I want to see what you are buying with all the money you are going to save from now on

Best of luck with that MONKEY. It wont let go of my back either.

Good man, good luck with it!

This is a great blog and I will be watching closely.

If it's ok I may even pinch your idea!!

I really, really wanna give up smoking, I spend an average of £200 a month on cigarettes which not only depresses the hell out of me but also means I can't afford any plastic crack!!

Really wish you the best of luck, I have also tried to give up and it has always been a struggle and I've always ended back on the cigs, but at least having an incentive like this might encourage me to try harder.

Brilliant idea best of luck with that, i'll b keeping an eye on this

Young Logan

Good luck with this endevour! Think I'll keep an eye on this thread.

Thanks for the support guys!

Well, so here we go. Today I am starting to feel better from this damned sinus infection. So back to work I go. Its one thing not smoking when ya feel like crap and are lying around the house. Its going to be completely different going to a stressful environment, while also seeing all your "smoking buddies" carrying on as normal.

Hopefully this blog lasts more than 24 hours before it goes into the garbage lol

I'll post some pics of my different armies color schemes and whatnot tonight, as well as what I am currently working on

It's a hard battle to give up an addiction. I struggled with caffeine for years, drinking approximately 4-6 liters of Mountain Dew or dr pepper a day. I gave it up cold turkey one day and used the money to help finance a mission trip to Nicaragua. It lasted just over a year until I go back from the trip and I drank a dr pepper that was put in front of me. I was rehooked immediately. After six months I went cold turkey again, this time for just under three years, I went on a caffeine binge the last two weeks, but I'm off it again now.

The best thing I can say to do is find a healthy substitute. I chose water. Whenever you think about a cigarette drink a full glass of water. Not only will you soon get tired of wanting a Cigarette, because you know it will be followed by a water chug, the water is way healthier for you. After I started solely on water I stopped taking ibuprofen and Tylenol all together as well. I went from taking he pain killers every six to eight hours to only taking them once every month or two, then only the Tylenol because of caffeine in the ibuprofen.

Don't substitute food unless you want to get fat though. I think that's why everyone says how much weight they gain after quitting.

I am not a medical professional, do your own research, and make your own plan

Good luck.

I'm around your age(a year younger) and started smoking around the same time as you from your story. A few years ago I decided I was finally going to quit. So I ended up getting an e-cigarette which uses water vapor(with nicotine). This allowed me to gradually lower my nicotine intake without having to break the physical habit of smoking cold turkey. I used the e-cig for about a year before going off that. I'm now at 2 years of no cigarettes and over a year of no e-cig. I haven't looked back at all. You can do it if you put your mind to it, regardless of what method of quitting works best for you. Good luck!

I did something similar by putting money away, but it would have been spent on something worse than Smokes.

Glad I kicked that habit.

Good luck to you sir.

I'm about to hit the one year mark myself and I'm also 32. I smoked for 13 years straight. When I quit, I did Step 1 of the patch and after two weeks got off it. I then used the e-cig for about a month before just stopping all together. You can do it if you are ready to do it. Hopefully this blog won't end soon, but if anything, hopefully you can grab up a box of Fire Warriors at least. Best of luck! Keeping active with hobby-related stuff is a great way to keep your mind off a cig, as well.

Ok so as promised, here is some of my hobby related stuff I will be posting here on the thread.

As I had mentioned before, my house is kinda the Saturday night hangout for 40K in my area. We have no real games store, so it is up to splinter factions of nerds to band together and get some games in. For the most part it works out well, but it is REALLY hard to get new people into the game, when there is no public place to play. Its one thing to have your buddies come over and spend 5 - 6 hours in your basement, but when ya ask someone who has never even met you, if they want to walk into some strange dudes basement to play with little toy soldiers, it can be a little off-putting.

In order to drum up some new players, and to get some older players back in the swing of things with 6th edition, my partner in dice rollin' crime, decided he would start up an escalation league. I can post the exact details of the league if you guys are interested, but it basically began with everyone getting together 500 point armies, getting 1 month to play test their 500 points, hosting a narrative event, locking the 500 point lists solid, then having a month to practice your list for a tournament, hosting a tournament, and then gaining an additional 250 points to add to your previous list.

This would go on until everyone had a fully flushed out 2000 point list at the end of 14 months or so.

My main army is Tyranids, been collecting them for years. I wanted something different, so I decided I wanted to play Tau. In my 20 years in this hobby (yes I started messing with this stuff when I was 12), I had never touched the Tau Empire. I also thought that this would be a challenge, because at the time the Tau codex was considered garbage by just about everyone. I also wanted to do something fluffy, so I started reading stories about the Tau, and came across this story in the Dark Eldar Codex

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/War_of_Dark_Revelations#.UjKGIT-9Ifg

Even though the 2 armies are desperate allies, I had to theme my Tau force around this story. So the Tau / Dark Eldar theme army had begun.

As I had no idea what color scheme either of these forces used in the story, I decided to come up with my own. I had a small Dark Eldar army I was already putting together, so I decided to leave them the same purple color scheme. The Tau however, I had to come up from scratch. From reading the story, I felt the Tau were portrayed as very ignorant of the dangers surrounding them, kind of like a small child. So in the end, I decided to paint them bright pink, kinda the color of innocence...at least that's what I thought anyways.

Without further ado, here are some shots of my 500 point army that I used at the beginning of the league :

Group shot

Fire Warriors

Crisis Suits

Devilfish

Wracks & Haemonculus

Venom


So there we have it. I will probably post the story of the escalation league and whatnot tomorrow, along with some of the crazy missions we cam up with to tell the story. It has been very successful, and has also be a ton of fun. I am currently working on a crisis suit commander, I snapped a quick WIP shot of him tonight, lemme know what ya think so far. If you dont like pink..well then you aren't gunna like it lol.



Thanks for reading through all this. Didn't touch any cigarettes today, and I am felling pretty good about it. Have a good night Dakka!

Jburch, bravo on your decision to quit smoking. I recently quit my smoking habit of 3+ years, and havent had a cigarette in over 3 months.


It's excellent to set goals for yourself, and if I could I'd like to give some ideas/helping hints to help in the quitting process.

For me, quitting cold turkey was a no go. I tried the gum, it tasted like fresh ass. I was at my wits end- and then I tried "the patch", and while I had the "pleasure" of being in the 10% of people that had a constant itch with it on, as well as day long nausea- I quickly began to recover stamina and overall feel better about my health. I would really recommend the patch, it curbs your cravings so much, and helps wean yourself off nicotine at a smoother rate. Word of wisdom though, stock up on ginger beer/ginger/anti nausea products if you go that route just in case.

Make a smoking trigger list- make a list of all the things that made you want to smoke, and work on either avoiding them or doing something else and make a new connection with the activity. It sounds pavlovian but it works.

Lastly, be prepared to both hack up a lot of that gunk in your lungs, and consequentally feel very tired for the first few weeks.

Best of luck man- I'm working on warhammer models as an anti smoking project too; there are brothers fighting the good fight alongside you!

And remember, and most importantly-- by quitting, it's more time you get with your wife and kid. That alone makes it all worthwhile.

++Edit++

The best thing I can say to do is find a healthy substitute. I chose water. Whenever you think about a cigarette drink a full glass of water. Not only will you soon get tired of wanting a Cigarette, because you know it will be followed by a water chug, the water is way healthier for you.

You have to be careful about that though- you can actually over-hydrate, and cause massive cellular death depending on how much water you drink. Too much h20 actually causes cells to grow, and eventually burst. (google woman in water drinking contest dies, or water intoxication).

Noble cause and a great start to it. The painted Tau look great as well. Let's hope you can add many more of them to the force!

The Pink is striking - great paint job. Im guessing its camo for a particular planet (I believe Mars has a pink sky?)

Make sure you adjust your "hobby income" over the next 16 years so that your daily allowance is in line with inflation and taxation etc. I think it will be more interesting to see an accurate depiction of how much you are not spending on the old deathsticks.

I don't know why but the Tau actually look pretty good in pink. Also nice execution, lines are nice and crisp, and the good work on the lenses

(by the way, pink is the colour of innocence, except in 40K, where it is the colour of slaanesh, which is about as far from innocence as you can possibly get... )

OK guys, first, just a quick update, still smoke free!! Today has been kinda rough, but I think I can power through it. On the brighter side, tonight is game night over here at my house, so that should take my mind off things.

As I mentioned before, the Escalation league has a narrative to go along with it. For the 500 point narrative event, here is the story that the league organizer came up with. He says he sucks at writing this stuff, but I think he does a pretty good job of it

509997.41m
Echos from the Void

Segmentum Obscurus
Newly Colonized Argo World Syltro 4

A fleet of Xenos, mercenaries, and opportunist bound together by the promise of rewards exited the warp above Syltro 4. Lead by the renegade Pysker Kolth, who was more infamously known as "The Mindlasher" commanded the invasion of the new colonized planet. The local defenders were easy pickings for the invading forces, the descending flood of troops and orbital bombardments
quickly washed away the few untrained and under equipped PDF forces in a matter of days. Kolth and his forces stormed the planetary governors palace and Kolth personally
executed the governors with a psychic lash devouring the mans mind. Scanning the knowledge he just digested he became aware that the reclamation fleet
would soon be arriving.

Knowing they had little time to complete their objective before the Imperial reclamation forces arrived
they began their plans to capture the surviving civilians and argo workers and lead them to the hastily constructed camps inside the major hive city of
Slyrto 4. unfortunately for them first responders, vanguards, and even mercenaries of the imperial fleet had already entered the star system and will begin landing in a matter of hours.
Their mission is to slow and soften the schemes and defensives of the invading filth ahead of the main fleet.

WHO WILL YOU FIGHT FOR!! FOR THE GLORY OF THE EMPEROR OR FOR THE RICHES AND REWARDS OF POWER!!!

To go along with the opening story, we played this mission in the first narrative event :

Echos from the Void mission 1 : Slave raid!
The Enemies of the Imperium attempt to gather slaves for their dark plans.
the Defenders of the Imperium must stop the enemy and rescue as many civilians as possible.

Deployment is 6 inches in from the edge of the table.

Slave objectives are a D3+2 markers rolled for at the beginning of the game. there is one marker worth 2 slaves and one worth 3 the rest are worth one each. Any non vehicle non bike unit can claim but only can claim one a turn. Before a objective is claimed by a unit roll a d6 and on a roll of a 1 the slaves were booby trapped and explodes with the unit suffering a d6 str 4 hits ap --.

the game is random turn length
each point earned goes to their sides points pool. even if you get tabled you get to keep the points you earned that game for your side. If you table your enemy you get 1 additional point for your side.

During this mission I played on the good guys side, and ended up getting creamed pretty much every game. One game I managed to capture a good amount of civilians, but unfortunatly every time I rolled, they ended up being booby trapped, and would explode.

After all the dust was cleared, the forces of Chaos won the day

LIke I said, I will be posting these little updates just to give everyone interested a quick update on the escalation league, to do along with my painting updates on the league army I am putting together.

Tonight, I think I am going to bust out my Tyranids against a buddies Imperial Guard. I might put together a battle report on our game and post it up tomorrow. Maybe along with some pics of my Nids

Thanks guys!

While I cannot offer advice on quitting, I can offer moral support! Great start so far and keep it going!

Also, I like the pink Tau, they are looking fantastic. The scheme and colors you chose work very well together.

hey man thats a good idea...i get tired of spending 80 bucks every two weeks on a cartons of smokes...considere me subscribed and gonna attempt to follow your example...i aint got a wife and kid yet but i do wanna be a tad more healthy.

the pink WOW thats all i can really say man. looks pretty good you are a very skilled painter.

that seemed like a very fun scenario your buddy came up with i liked it. good luck on the stop smoking front and the painting

I can't speak for the others but I'm rooting for ya...

Time for a battle report update.

I wont be doing there all the time, but I figured, new blog and whatnot...why not post up a bat rep. One of the regular guys that come over on Saturdays for game night, challeneged my Nids to a 2000 point game against his Imperial Guard. He doesn't get to play larger games very often, and has been away for a while. He is one of those players who know the rules, and know his army, but just needs more play experience to know what to do, when the battle deviates from what you envisioned in your mind.

So without further ado, I present to you the table terrain layout.



My army list was :

2 flyrants with 2xdevourer. Both rolled iron arm and endurance
2 squads of 3 hive guard
2 tervigons
2 12 man squads of termagants
20 man brick of gargoyles
2 Trygons
2 biovores

I cant remember exactly what his army was, but it was something like :

command squad with plasma vets in a chimera
3 vet squads with flamers & plasma in a chimera
2 manticores
a vendetta (or valk..whichever one has all the lascannons)
Bane Wolf
3 Leman Russ squadron
2 armored sentinels

The mission we rolled was Purge the Alien, with a Pitched battle deployment type. I won the role and chose the lower table half. I chose this because I thought it looked like it had more LoS blocking terrain that could be utilized as I made my way up close to the enemy. I also liked the very large ruin right in the center of the zone. I thought that this would be a good place to place my 2 squads of hive guard, as it would allow me to have 12 S8 shots in the middle of the table..ready to rain down hell. We rolled for deployment, and I won the roll. I chose to deploy first, so that I could deploy my Tyrants on the table and be able to get them in the air and shooting one turn early.

After deployment, it looked something like this



I will post the actual battle shortly..stay tuned

Hey man, more power to you! I'm only 26 and have never smoke but my pop does and as he's getting older i do worry about the effects it'll have on his health. Your setting a great example for your little girl embracing the hobby instead of the habit , that's something that should be respected.
Rooting for you!

Thanks man!

Actually, right now is pretty rough. I just went out for a drive, had the windows down, sunroof open, cool autumn air...and all I could think about was a damned cigarette. For some reason a cool fall night was always my favorite time to smoke...it sounds stupid..but I guess that habit takes root in your brain, and makes you think that it is necessary to enjoy certain things. O well...just trying to find things to do to keep me busy tonight, so I dont think about it as much.

It is kinda funny, but seriously a big factor in me not smoking, is the fact that I would be letting down a dozen or so random people on the internet..so thanks guys!

Firstly, nice Tau. I like the pink. Second, good luck with the smoking. I gave up dip 3 years ago. 2 days before my daughter was born. I still want to dip, but no where near as much as when I was hooked. More of a passing thought. It gets easier. You will soon find 40k is a much harder habit to kick.

Oh, and find a buddy to talk to when you want a smoke. It helps.

My habit is chew a penwhenever I want to eat junk food. Helps when you are studying, and once you smell that ink you dont want anything near your face for at least a few hours. I' m not unhealthy or anything, but you know... just thinking out loud.

On a more important note, those are some super awesome pink tau. If I ever do tau, they will be like that.

Alright, it's nice to see this blog is still up and running beautiful pink tau! I never thought Tau would look so good in Pink, but here we go, proof!

Only 4 more days until a Fire Warriors box!

It's been a couple days, how are you holding up Jburch?

Good luck!

Keep in mind that second-hand smoke is a major reason to give up as well, for your daughter's sake, it's not just about setting a bad example, there are serious health implications too.. my step brother ended up with asthma as a result of his dad smoking all the time when he was young.. at that age even the smallest contaminant can be harmful.

Also, at 32, you're inching towards the upper limit of the age at which you can give up without ending up dead in your fifties/sixties due to lung cancer. Do you want to be dead in 20 years and never see your daughter graduate (after that college fund paysout!) is the simple question.

I'm not making that figure up either, my stepbrother's dad is mid 50's and has a few months to live at this point in time. Lung cancer, which spread into the ribs and surrounding bone. Permanent agonising pain.

Far better to be addicted to the minis!

I smoked from the time i was 16 till i was 23. It took some serious effort on my part but i am now 42 and have not had a cig in 19 years. THe most important things to remember.

1. Your daughter. DO NOT be the one to die of cancer or COPD because you did not have the nads to quit. You can do this.

2. Just dont do it. No drags, no more packs, no more smoking. Its just as simple as that. Every time you start smoking again, you are throwing away all the effort that you have invested to not smoke, and starting over. To drive this point home, count ever day you succeed in not smoking until you reach 1 year. Then start counting years.

Take care and good luck. Believe in yourself. Dont ever smoke another cig again.