In which I had a dental appointment today.
Okay, so, all I wanted to do was pee the entire second hour I was in the chair. Really badly. But I couldn’t, because I was getting a fucking root canal.
1. Two and a half hours at the dentist.
2. DENTAL. Motherfucking. DAM.
3. Temporary filling: same texture as wet toilet paper.
4. My face hurts.
Moral of the story is that you should pee twice before any kind of long procedure you might embark upon after drinking coffee.
In which I need a fucking root canal?!
My appointment was at two o’clock. I naively expected to be out of there in about an hour, but I didn’t get back to my desk until a quarter past four.
First of all, nobody told me about the smell. The drill wasn’t that loud nor did it hurt, but that burnt smell is weird, you guys. Srsly.
Wait, wait, back up! So, this was my very first filling ever, right, and I told the nurse1 so. She was amazed because every single tooth in her head is filled, and some more than once. I was kind of excited because, hey, it’s a new experience and how many 43-year-olds get to experience their very first filling? Having survived not one but two planing & scaling experiences and four extractions, I’m no stranger to needles, so it’s not like there was anything to be nervous about.
We discussed my tooth as the topical soaked in and we waited for the doctor. The nurse showed me three tiny little discolorations on my x-ray, and read my chart to me. Lingual! Distal! Tiny cavities, all on the same tooth — tooth number 15, for those of you counting along at home.
Then my hip dentist arrived and I told him it was my first filling ever, and he smiled and said, “Ever?” and I said, “Ever!” and he sat down and picked something up and said, “Ever ever?” and I said “Ever!” and then he stuck a needle in my gum — he’s left-handed — and we sat there in the companionable silence you can only achieve with a relative stranger who has several digits in your mouth and is massaging anesthetic into your jaw.
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In which I’m finally rid of my married name!
I decided recently to get a passport. No real reason. I don’t have any travel plans, but one never knows — and I have the money just now so what the hell. Maybe I’ll get to India before I’m 50.
Today I went to my second appointment with the passport lady at the post office, and I gave her a bunch of paperwork and money and she made me re-do my work about three times, which is impressive considering it’s only a two-page freakin’ application and I’d already done it twice and I have a reasonably high IQ.
Halfway through the procedure, the passport lady decided they’d probably reject my application because the name on my driver license did not match the name on my divorce papers well enough. She suggested I go update my driver licence. And could I maybe possibly do it, like, right now, since she’d already put my passport application on her transmittal and she had no idea how to remove it and the paperwork has to go today?
A driver license. Before three o’clock today? Sure. What the hell. I’ll try.
So off I went to the DMV on my bike during my lunch hour. (It’s all downhill, so the ride out there was pretty okay.) I walked in the door and I kid you not: there was no line! None! Talk about support of nature: I got help immediately, which has literally NEVER HAPPENED IN THE HISTORY OF THE DMV. The mild glitches (they had to delete an old expired license from the last time I lived in Washington, plus I very nearly flunked the vision test) were neatly handled. (Note to self: get new contacts.) Less than an hour later, with my name all changed and a new temporary driver licence in my purse, I rode back to the post office. (It was all uphill.) I stopped at Taco Bell, about halfway, for a tostada because I was hungry. (Did I mention it’s all uphill?)
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In which there’s a tech support puzzle for you to solve.
A customer calls in because she can’t send email. She can receive email and she can surf, so the connection is up. I walk her through the settings in the email client and have her correct the following:
– SMTP server name field (it had had the POP server name in it)
– the username (added the domain)
– enabled authentication (it had been disabled).
No wonder she couldn’t send, all those config errors. I have her click Send/Receive, thinking the call is over, but she still can’t send email. The SMTP error is 451.
I ask her what ISP she’s using, and it’s Century Link. Since they block port 25, I have her change the SMTP port to 2525. She still can’t send email. Change the port to 554, and she still can’t send email.
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In which I don’t know where to see Mother this year.
The US Tour schedule just came out, and wouldn’t you know that a friend is getting married during the Seattle dates and I’ve already committed to singing at her ceremony?
Meaning, of course, that if I see Mother in Seattle, I’ll have to leave the program early to be back in time. Lame. Might as well see Her somewhere else!
Chicago? Emailed NLW to see if she’s going; if she says yes, I’ll blow my tax return on airfare. If no, I’ll probably go to the San Ramon ashram programs since I’ve never seen Her there. The DC or New York programs are also possible, but while I do know people both places I don’t think I know any devotees.
(I haven’t even begun to plan my travel but I’m already dreading the results of being out of the office for more than six hours. Being the only person in your department is kind of stressful.)
Last year I had ‘get divorced’ and ‘obtain passport’ on my post-seeing-Amma to do list. I’ll have both handled by the time I see Mother again. We’ll just have to wait and see if I feel compelled to ask Her whether I should go to India/do ashram life for awhile or stay here and wait until G’ma actually needs me. I’m really not doing anything useful with my life, ultimately, and hello: I’m alive during the embodiment of an Incarnation. Why am I settling for seeing such a being once a year? What the hell am I doing, not fighting tooth and nail to be near Her all the time? The odds of there being an Avatar in my next life are low, low, low. Every second you give away you never get back.
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In which there’s a party.
My friend Embo had a birthday yesterday. We took balloons and cupcakes to the bar and got drunk.
It was fun. Pictures are here.
In which decorating has unexpected results.
In an effort to celebrate the season, which is Spring, I guess, and some Xian holiday I only vaguely care about, I filled these bottles with colored water yesterday and put them on the kitchen windowsill:
Nice, huh? I pretty much nailed the whole pastel thing, don’t you think?
Anyway, as a result — I believe — of observing this ritual, I found candy on my bedroom stairs this morning:
Take that, you God-hating atheists!
Er, wait.
Take that, you Nature-hating, um, non-Paganists!
(No matter how old you get, there’s nothing like finding a treat on Easter morning. Makes you feel like you belong.)
In which I’m feeling bitchy, so I’m going to bitch.
1.) First of all, that rain? Isn’t just rain. There’s fucking snow in it. I know this because I just rode my bike to work in it, and now I’m cold and wet and my space heater died so I’m going to stay this way for an hour or so and it sucks.
2.) No matter how many times or ways I quit smoking, I fail. I’m generally pretty good at most of the things I try, but let me tell you: I suck at this. Research is showing I’ll probably need a support group to get this thing done. (And a move to an ashram where I would never be able to smoke. And someone to beat me if I broke down and tried. Ugh.)
3.) Because I can’t stop exposing my various mucous membranes to smoke and all its attendant immuno-suppressing toxins, I’m coming down with another. Goddamned. Cold.
4.) To stave off this impending cold, I had soup and juice for dinner and then slept 12 hours last night. I spent so much time resting I practically have bed sores. My bones hurt from lying down.
My throat hurts when I swallow anyway. (Yes, I destroyed and threw out my smokes. Again. I don’t even really know how I managed to come into possession of them; it just happened.)
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In which I get some bad news u guise! I have to get holes drilled in one of my teeth!!!!1!
[dropcap]I[/dropcap] have never had a cavity IN MY LIFE*.
I’m that one person who can say, “I have never had a filling. Ever!” (I have bad skin and have to wear glasses, not to mention the horrible tartar, so I figured I deserved it.) UNTIL NOW.
Now I have not just a cavity, but two! In the same tooth! And an appointment to get a filling! In April! No shit!
When I went for my exam yesterday, the dentist, whom I’d not previously met, asked me what I do. “I’m a rock star,” I said. “I play blues festivals all summer.”
He quizzed me a little more and of course I revealed that one doesn’t live on gig money, that I’m a sysadmin by day, blah blah blah. He apparently made the leap that I must understand electronics.
My cavities, such as they are, are very small and going weird directions and failed to show up on the films, so the good doctor took another couple because I said I wanted to see them, my very own cavities, but still no joy. So he brought out an oral wand camera thing, stuck it in my mouth, and took a picture.
My cavities, such as they are, are two little brown spots on my upper left rear tooth — not very dramatic at all, but I guess one gets them drilled and filled to stop them getting worse. Whatever. (I thought it’d be this Terrifying Black Nastiness that Clearly Needs Intervention to keep it engulfing my entire brain pan, and not a boring little brown spot. I mean, sheesh.)
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In which we’ve moved.
Keef has been hosting goblinbox.com for free for years on a sandbox server he had co-located somewhere in California. That box finally got compromised. (I’m surprised it took as long as it did, honestly.) He decided to take the box down since he wasn’t really using it, so I had to move.
Now I’m at bluehost and am pretty much digging the holy hell out of it. Their hosting is cheap and their support is kick ass, and all kinds of WordPress neatness works that never worked before (like automatic updates. Hell yeah) and the ability to surf for themes from within the GUI.
You may find broken links until I finish the file migration. I may also post all kinds of old crap like this as I find it:
- A random collection of film I had developed in August 2002. (This gallery is broken, but hey, it’s A DECADE OLD.)
VSCO
Instagram has become unusable crap, so please click the icon below to see my latest pics.
4 random books from my Library!
