Day 2009

Take care of your teeth. I've always had good strong teeth and when I was younger I would frequently go decades between dental visits. This was a mistake. Just because my teeth didn't hurt didn't mean there weren't any problems. The problems grew slowly and painlessly year-after-year, until one day my mouth just imploded with bad news. If you take care of your teeth you can probably just go to a regular dentist. I had to go to a place called The Center for Complex Dentistry.

I was in the chair for over three hours today. The dentist talked back and forth with his assistant throughout the procedure. At one point I heard him say "This isn't supposed to be that difficult." At another point he called hurriedly for a second assistant, saying "I don't have enough hands to do this." Toward the end, he told me "I think you've made my top 10 list." Apparently, the work I had done was very difficult. I only had two fillings and one crown replaced, but one of the fillings was almost impossible. The dentist lived up to his reputation though. He was very, very good.

Be sure to pee before you have major dental work. Three hours is a long time to sit in that chair. I still have to go back in early August to have my permanent porcelain crown installed, but my long dental saga is almost over. My teeth are in good shape again, and most importantly, I won't need to get implants. I still don't know why it takes over a month to get a crown made, but I guess it does. The temporary crown they made me today fits well and I don't expect problems. They dentist just told me not to eat anything really sticky like taffy or caramel while I have the temporary crown. No problem. I don't eat many sweets anyway.

I didn't get a lot of work done today, since I was at the dentist for so long, but I did figure out a clever way to do a lobby slide show for one of my clients. These type of things used to involve dragging a ton of still images into an editing program, creating dissolves or other transitions between each image, and then burning the Ken Burns style Quicktime movie to a DVD in continuous play mode. I hated to make these things. Now you just have to plug a little Chromecast stick into the back of your TV, link the TV to one of your existing Google photo albums using your phone and you're done. It took me less than 45 seconds to have a nice looking slide show up and running.

It rained sporadically throughout the day but I was lucky enough to have a dry spell at both the beginning and end of the day so I could get the dogs walked. Dot hasn't had any more accidents in the house since I started being much more conscientious about getting her outside frequently to poop.  The days of trying to fit the dogs activities to my schedule are over. In the long run it is a lot easier just to change my schedule to meet the dogs needs. My financial adviser called today to confirm an appointment for tomorrow. I told him I'd be there unless there was a bad storm and I needed to stay home with Dot and Dash. Nobody even questions these type of things anymore. They all know who comes first in my world.

Hershey is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day