Today is day 20 of my quit.  Still on the 14mg patch (started there) and things have been going really well.  I have to say the last couple days though have been tough in the morning.  Seriously feeling nic withdrawal symptoms (know the feeling from past experiences) but surprised after this amount of time on the same patch dosage.  The cravings do ease after a few hours, but that throat tightening, teeth clenching, raw gut feeling hangs around no matter what I do.  I work from home so it's easy for me to walk around, distract myself with something, yell at the damn thing, but nothing seems to ease it for long and I just don't get why they’re happening now.  
But man does it feel liberating to be 20 days away from these things!  Things I don’t miss…
1.	I didn’t smoke in my house, grateful I stopped that more than 10 years ago, so the back patio was my smoking area.  It can get pretty wet in Oregon to the point that furniture on a covered patio even gets soaked, so often there’d be no place to sit; I don’t miss standing outside in the cold & damp getting my fix!  
2.	I don’t miss coming in, knowing I reek of tobacco and running to try to clean myself up as best I could; my significant other is a non-smoker.
3.	I don’t miss that panicky feeling when you know you’re running out of smokes.
4.	I don’t miss being on a road trip with my guy (didn’t smoke around him) and getting anxious wondering when we were going to stop so I could take a break and have a smoke!
5.	I don’t miss handing over my hard earned monies to the tobacco companies to buy their poison.
6.	I don’t miss rushing out of bed in the morning to calm the demon that was wide awake!
7.	I don’t miss the irritating little cough I had; I was so blessed not to have a worse cough or bigger issues after 40+ years smoking.
8.	I don’t miss being mad at myself for still smoking.
I think I’ll keep this list handy for the next wave of cravings that come my way.  This quit feels different though from past attempts, for many of these reasons.  I was feeling so imprisoned and so much like an outcast, I finally stopped looking at this beast as a friend and started seeing it for the toxic, manipulative, abusive relationship it is.  It didn’t even make me happy anymore, time for it to go!!