Tag: pain

As mentioned before, I’ve been going to the dentist getting my teeth fixed up after slightly more than a few years of neglect1. Monday started the next round of pain2. A couple more fillings on one side of my mouth and a sealer to try preventing a cavity from forming on a back-tooth. The dentist did a good job of numbing the area she’s worked on but even with the numbness it was still highly unpleasant.

I mean seriously the numbness only goes down so far but the vibration from their tools penetrates much further. Plus there’s the distinctly nasty scent of burning tooth from when they drill. *shudder* And if that wasn’t bad enough, my sinuses have been acting up. Which lead to me feeling like I was choking a couple of times while the dentist was working inside my mouth. See they’ve got this mouth-spreader/suction device they shove in first but if you don’t keep your tongue in just the right place the suction doesn’t work. And keeping your tongue in that exact spot gets tiring, so you move around a bit; mere moments later you’re choking.

On the bright side, I think I only have 2 more punishments visits left to fill in cavities.  Also the dentist office appears to have over-charged me on a previous visit, so I after all the fun I got to leave without whipping out the wallet.  Yeah, I’m just skipping with joy and happiness.  *sigh*

1 What can I say, I hate going to the dentist.
2 When my dental insurance says they won’t pay anymore for the year, I have to start scheduling my suffering for the next year. My pocketbook and I can only stand so much misery before calling it quits.

Yup, we’re still here. Just been busy/not felt like writing. Points of interest post-flood:

  • Drove past a hot air balloon that had landed on the side of the rode while coming back from a friend’s house.
  • Two days later drove under a massive lightning storm coming back from the same friend’s house.1
  • Tried taking some end-of/post-flood pictures around town, but did not want to cause any problems for those working in the affected areas. So pictures were all taken from the car while driving through the affected areas and they all pretty much sucked or at best were no better than the dozens of other drive-by photos already posted to Flickr.
  • Gave blood and it left me feeling wiped out for days afterwards.
  • Attended Convergence with AWelkin, Bryon, Amabaku & Oyarsa Elentari.
    • Had a complete blast but also got totally worn out.
    • First night of the con, while leaving to go out to get dinner, I thought I was on the bottom step when I was still 1 step up. Walked out, didn’t feel ground underfoot and fell smack down on my ass folding my leg under me and scraping my arm. Ankle got twisted a bit and is still vaguely sore.
    • Ate a lot of good food.
    • Bought my wife a ren-faire style corset. Yum!
    • Saw many good costumes around the con. Even got a few photographed.2
    • Went to a flip-book animation panel and watched the panel-host get rather confused by all the adults at the panel. He clearly was expecting this to be almost a form of baby-sitting.
    • Drank much good coffee & tea at the con’s CoF2E2 cabana.
      • Especially liked the Moon over Madagascar tea (Chinese Black and Ceylon teas blended with bits of bourbon vanilla).
      • Also quite fond of the English Toffee/Vanilla Latte they made for me.
    • Watched a stunning presentation from a local raptor center.
    • Attended a panel on GMing which gave me some ideas for a game I want to run.
    • Almost played in a steampunk LARP, but the intro panel killed my interest in it.
      • It was this particular group’s first year running a LARP.
      • They based the LARP on some sort of “How to Host a Murder Mystery” thing.
      • They tried to design it to allow players to continue to enjoy the con.
      • Except the players weren’t given any sort of characters. You were expected to go around the con searching for clues.
      • You could interact with the people running the LARP as the characters they were dressed up as or as “norms”. If you tried to interact with them in-character, they said they’d respond by interacting with you based on your costume. I only rarely run around in a costume and didn’t have one for this con, so that pretty much killed my interest.
    • Painted a miniature thanks to Reaper‘s demo painting. That was fun and something I haven’t tried in several years.

1 We were cat-sitting for them.
2 Several I only saw when either I or the costumer were running different directions and so I didn’t always get photos. *sigh* There was one kid in a really excellent TF2 Medic costume. Photos will be posted later, as I have to go through them all and clean them up in GIMP. Especially as my camera fritzed a few times and the image turned out all “purple-ly”.

The Good

Some time back my wife went into the doctor’s for a check-up and found out her cholesterol was completely out of wack. Since then she’s been on a restricted diet to fix it and since she’s the better cook, I’ve been on the same diet. We’ve been doing this for roughly 2 months now and this morning when I stepped on the scale, I was quite pleased to see not only have I already shed my “winter weight”1 but I’ve also lost about another 10 pounds.

The Bad

This winter we’ve had ~4x our normal amount of precipitation. Our soil is heavily saturated with water and we’ve been getting more rain as we move into spring. The end result is we’ve been getting water into our basement. Our basement which happens to have carpeting in it. Fortunately, the carpet was just lying down on top the concrete floor but about half the carpet has been getting soaked.

The Ugly

We never liked the carpet down there but hadn’t done anything about it; however since we’ve had so much water down there this winter. We decided we needed to get at least the wet parts of the carpet out of the basement before it got moldy had destroyed our sinuses. So this past Saturday my wife and I put on our grungiest clothes, went into the basement, chopped up the carpet and hauled it out to our garage2. It was one of dirtiest, nastiest jobs I’ve ever had to do around any house. And I’ve replaced entire toilets before, so when I say it was nasty I know what I’m talking about!

1 Every winter where I’ve weighed myself, I’ve put 5-10 pounds which I quickly shed once spring comes.
2 Just until we figure out if we can have the city take it to the dump for us, or if we have to get it over there ourselves.

Not sure what kinds of fun you lot had with your Memorial Day weekend but my was just a barrel of laughs. To make sure I kicked the weekend off right, Friday morning I used the screen door to rip a chunk out of the back of my foot. Saturday, Michelle & I ran errands and did a bit of shopping1. When we stopped at the bookstore, I was getting out of the car and started to kick the door open a bit more with my foot. Only I goofed and hit the car door with my toes, breaking back part of the toenail on my big toe. Fortunately it didn’t hurt2. Unfortunately it was bleeding. So here I am hopping across the parking lot into the bookstore behind my wife. Only she’s so focused on getting inside that she’s doesn’t hear me complaining about my toe on any of the 3 times I tried to get her attention before getting inside. Even then when we did get in the store it took a couple of minutes to get her attention. *seesh*

Sunday was a better day though. We drove out to Davenport to visit with a friend, as she invited us out for a bit of a BBQ3. The BBQ was very nice, though everybody else who’d talked to her about it cancelled on her (shame on them!). After we ate, we sat around chatting for a good, long while. Though he add to move away from her brick oven/grill as the wood was popping/crackling and spitting bits of hot ash out at us. Later we went out and caught a movie (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End). It was a fun movie, but not good. Over the night, Michelle had multiple coughing fits and finally around 3 AM this morning I gave up trying to get any sleep. I dinked around for a while and then ended up mowing the lawn in the early hours of the morning. It wasn’t fun, but it needed to be done. On the bright side, I did make some progress on my super-secret decorating project (more on that when I finish it) this weekend, which is a very good thing.

1 Some gardening books for her, some paints for my super-secret decorating project.
2 At least it wasn’t hurting at the time.
3 And unlike other people issuing invitations to get together, she actually replied when we contacted her.

I used to love playing video games and would waste entire days doing nothing else, but over the last couple of years I’ve started slipping away from that hobby. The expense of keeping my computer updated to handle the latest games combined with the pain I’d get in my wrists just kind of killed the fun. Particularly since I wasn’t seeing a lot of new games to keep up my interest. Well, if the game behind this trailer plays anywhere close to as good as it looks; then I’ll be back to burning the midnight oil to lay waste to the enemy. *grin*

You see, one of my all-time favorite video games was the original Team Fortress mod for Half-Life. The class choices, mayhem and fun were an unbeatable combination1. Then as other mods were developed further; Valve announced they were going to go all out on making TF2. This was 5 years ago and was the last we heard from Valve about it. At least the last we heard until this month when they released the official trailer for TF2. The new character models are wicked cool and oddly enough something about the trailer reminds me of No One Lives Forever (another great video game).

Just wow! I cannot think of any better description of how cool this trailer looks. Go on, hit the link and watch it yourself!

1 At least I’ve always thought so, but others have preferred that POS called Counter-Strike.