I hope you and your lady are successful in quitting smoking before the end of the year.
I think it would be beneficial from a health point of view if you could convince your company to put you only on dayshifts. Mixing the day and night shifts is going to get your circadian cycles out of whack.
Good luck on your writing aspirations. You already seem adept with words even before training. It would have taken me a week to create a blog post as long as this.