I own it, a distant, not proud that was me, and when I face it a little dignity, not looking for excuse me, I just want to be free from power, weakness head on me, free, free, free, free, free.

Hi, everyone.

Welcome to the bubble hour where real people tell real stories of addiction and recovery.

I'm your host, Gene McCarthy. I write the blog Unpickled, where I have been telling my story of life after alcohol since my first day of sobriety in 2011.

I tell my stories there, and I invite you to share your stories here.

And I have noticed this thing happens where a lot of bloggers, we sort of circle around each other for years on end. A lot of us get kind of sober at the same time and we've ate each other's

stories and we cheer each other on. And it's really cool when we can connect in person and chat.

And I was fortunate enough to have that happen a couple weeks ago in L.A.

I got to have lunch next to you a lovely lady who has been an online pal of mine for years.

Her name is Laura Ward.

And her website, her blog is Quitwining.com,

cutelywining, W-I-N-I-N-G, dot com. And so I was eager to finally get Laura to come on the

bubble hour so that we could continue our conversation and that you could all learn about this beautiful, sunny, wise woman as well. So Laura, welcome to the bubble hour.

Thank you so much, Jean. This is so super fun. I was just jamming out to the music the way I do

when I'm listening to the pod in my car. Only that we're really talking talking were you there in L.A. when I actually

sang this song on the stage or tried to sing it. Were you still there? Had you left already?

Yeah, that was cool. It was like, it was neat because so many people in the audience knew the

words and we were all singing along and it just and I was telling my husband about it afterwards.

I was like, it was so cool.

You know, I forget that people hear this song along with me.

So anyway, it's cool.

It's neat the way that things join us together.

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