It is now 33.1 degrees, and there's a pile of snow in front of the garage, slid down from the roof. Global warming my ass.
UPDATE: Currently 52 and sunny. Maybe the dentist's assistant was not just being wildly hopeful when she predicted 60s and fair for sunday, noting that otherwise her 9-year-old son and all the other boys coming to his birthday party would have to play inside.
Especially when they're soaked in topical anesthetic.
I don't know why it is that lying down on a cushioned chair for an hour should leave me dazed and feeling like I've been beaten about the torso by two or three big guys with baseball bats. It started this time when the dentist put the needle in my mouth and said, "Don't try to hold your breath, this is going to take a minute or two."
But the amenties are much better -- safety glasses so that I don't get any overspray in my eyes -- and the aforementioned topical, several steps up fron just pressing really hard on the injection site with a finger or numbing it with ice. So we're not talking Hillerich and Bradsby, just whiffle bats. Someday, they will be nerf bats. Yeah, and Ari Fleischer will open his mouth and the truth will come out.
The project for today was replacing a bunch of crumbling filling in an upper left molar and cementing the crown back in place that got pulled out last time around. But most of the time I spent listening to the conversation among everyone in the office about the new space they're moving to -- apprently the main feature of the color scheme is "Happy Yellow" with acents of dark green, gold and some other colors I forget. The dentist hates most it it, one person likes it. But all the colors they really liked, when you looked at the chips next to the carpet, "they looked like dog vomit."
Even with ordinary fillings (no ceramic for this one because it's likely the tooth won't last anyway) the procedure has changed since last I played this game. Or perhaps my new dentist was just winging it. After drilling out the old filling she spread on some kind of UV-curable plastic instead of the usual thermal isolation layer -- I guess when the novocaine wears off completely I'll find out whether it works.
It's about three hours later, and most of the feeling is back in my mouth -- including the gums where wedges got stuck in to stabilize the banding that held in the front part of the filling. But I'm not supposed to eat on that side until tonight or tomorrow when the amalgam sets up. (Needless to say my original Idea of baking some crisp-crusted pizza for lunch was right out.)
Next up, that gap on the bottom left from my last dentist, where food always collects and inflames the gum whenever I eat anything interesting (for some reason ham is particularly bad) and then we'll start talking longterm strategic plan. I passed on a July 3 appointment, but I'm sure I'll get to spill some blood in a patriotic fashion anyway...
My valves are in the wrong place. They're right where any sensible phlebotomist would want to stick a needle and drain my blood, and that's bound to interfere. "Feel that roughness?" said the nurse as she placed my finger on the inside of my left elbow. She'd already gotten a dry hole on the right side, and this one wasn't looking good, "But it's the only vein you've got to use."
Gusher. Once the second needle went in, no problem. Not even that little twinge that usually comes every time you press the red rubber ball. I was bleeding like a champ, done in no time (I don't know how long, because the church has thoughtlessly taken down the clock in that room).
Oops, I spoke too soon. The last vial of blood for testing needed filling after the main bag and the first four tubes well full. and nothing. "Squeeze." Nothing. "Squeeze." Maybe a little. Finally the nurse called it a day and milked the rest from the tubing. I got an egg salad sandwich at the canteen and went off to lunch.
Giving blood has gotten much more complicated lately. First there was the bit about having to figure out whether the time you've spent in a list of 20 countries since 1980 adds up to 90 days or more. Then they stopped letting you fil in the form answering questions about what legal and illegal drugs you've taken, what diseases you've been exposed to, and the habits and ancestry of your sex partners -- a mind-numbingly bored and somewhat embarassed medical technician has to read the questions quietly while you try to remember which answers are supposed to be "yes" and which ones "no".
Well now they've decided to make things even more efficient by "putting it on the computer." So when you've read the "What you should know" list and totted up your Creuzfeld-Jakob Disease exposure index, you get a manila folder marked CONFIDENTIAL with nothing in it. You take your place on one of the benches in the hall and inch forward seat by seat, until you are called. Then a nice lady sitting behind a laptop computer at a desk with a wireless access point on it thanks you for coming in, apologies for the wait, and asks you to say your social security number out loud so everyone in the room can hear it. This identifies you to the database in the laptop, so instead of spinning the screen around to face you, she reads off your SSN, birthdate, address and phone number, and asks you whether those are correct. Then you sit for a minute and a printer on the desk spits out a perfect replica of the form you used to fill out by hand, complete to the "if you are a woman, have you ever been pregnant?" You would think their database would know.
You put your form in the file folder and sit on in line on a row of chairs to get your blood pressure, pulse and temperature checked. And a fingerstick for anemia testing (the tech nicely didn't put the lancet right on the ball of my index finger). Then another line for the personal questions and the bar-code figleaf that lets you admit to being horribly diseased without embarassment.
Maybe real soon now "the computer" will have a touch-screen interface, or a voice synthesizer, or something that will actually make it a useful addition to the process. But I'm not holding my breath. Bad for oxygenation, y'know.
It's amazing how small a patch of ground you can get bewildered in if you try hard enough. Yesterday evening I was coming back from a walk in the park when I made a mistake about the right trail back from the plateau that leads to the North Branch Nature Center. Earlier, I'd been trying to find a path over the top of that thousand-foot ridge that (quite clearly with a map handy) lies between Elm St and the road to Middlesex, so I really truly didn't want to go that way.
It seemed like an easy thing to cut back around a thicket at the head of a ravine, across a low ridge and down to the main trail. The sun was clearly visible on one side, the ridge on the far side of Elm St clearly visible on the other. No problem.
Well, at this time of the spring, none of the minor trails is clearly marked, except maybe by the cropped tops of spring bulbs and the occasional pile of deer scat, and it turns out there are two or three shallow ridge lines inside that thicket. Imagine my joy at crossing each one in turn and seeing nothing resembling the footbridge to North Park Drive. Also imagine my growing certainty that I had missed some obvious marker and was about to pop out in someone's back yard, like for instance the folks who felled a tree across one of the spur trails and put a big wooden gate at the bottom of it.
It's clear that the area I spent a solid half hour traipsing uselessly around was no more than a couple hundred yards on a side. Can't wait till the leaves block the long view and the ferns fill in chest high....
Back when I was a kid. You got to wobble the tooth around with your tongue, and then one day, usually in the middle of school, the tooth flipped free so you could feel the underside. Now the replacements are much more difficult to get, and nary a quarter under the pillow -- unless it's, say, a 1916 Standing Liberty and the pillow belongs to your dentist.
We must have had a dentist before Dr Foster, but he must also not have been very inspiring, because at least one of my baby molars didn't last nearly long enough to fall out. There was maybe half a tooth left when Dr Foster pulled it -- perhaps not the most auspicious beginning to such a crucial relationship.
My nemesis was a tallish bespectacled man, with grey hair from an early age, hands the size of softballs and pictures of his son playing hockey on every available wall surface. That was when mouth guards were just coming in.
My love for malted milk balls -- they were the first treat for which I dared approach the Sears candy counter alone -- and lack of interest in brushing the teeth that didn't show guaranteed him constant return visits and constant trouble. I really couldn't understand why someone with hands that size had taken up dentistry (20 years later I went to a softspoken practitioner a few blocks closer to downtown with hands the size of sparrows).
But really it wasn't Dr Foster's hands, or even the late-19th-century drilling apparatus or the picks and chisels that fomented my rebellion. What led to us squaring off on opposite sides of the classic adjustiable chair as he chased me around the tiny examining room was the needle.
It was one of those classic metal-and-glass hypodermics that would get refilled as needed from the novocaine bottle, and I really didn't like it. I didn't like its looks, I didn't like the pain as Dr Foster rooted around with the tip to find just the right spot near a nerve, I didn't like the injections. In fact, once after I gave a particularly graphic description of the taste of mixed novocaine and blood oozing back into my mouth as the plunger was depressed, Dr. Foster said he didn't like it either.
And that was even before the root canals...
While I was on the phone with Julie's mother this morning, an immaculate maroon sedan came down our driveway. A middle-aged man in a winter coat got out from behind the wheel with a sheaf of tracts in his hand, a conservatively-attired woman from the back. I think the sweater under her blazer matched the color of the car.
I watched carefully from the upstairs window, still on the phone, while the back doorbell rang twice. Several minutes passed, and eventually the passenger in the front seat began to fidget, so the couple left. I breathed a sigh of relief -- getting saved in one's pajamas at 930 in the morning is nobody's idea of a good time.
The tract for this visit was "Would You Like to Know More About the Bible?" (no, thanks, read it cover to cover in theology class). Quite a change from the last visit's "You're Going to Hell" -- I wonder if they do a Bad Cop, Good Cop routine?
The New York Times reports that my former top-floor neighbor, the one who sent his workmen onto my roof on a regular basis and put an air conditioner through our ostensibly common wall, has been arrested:
"A Manhattan man was charged with kidnapping after he pulled a knife on a 63-year-old real estate agent, bound him with duct tape and put him under the floorboards of the suspect's TriBeCa apartment, the police said last night.
The floor of the apartment, which is in a renovated 1862 firehouse at 160 Chambers Street, is equipped with a trap door, Sgt. Dennis Ferber said."
The only thing that comes as a surprise is that anyone would be willing to testify against him; the only person I've ever met who had a good word for him was a onetime co-worker who had previously slung carcasses at the not-entirely-corruption-free Fulton Fish Market.
is the ultrasonic scaler. When Dr Foster first put hands the size of small hams inside my mouth, the tooth-cleaning tools of choice were steel chisels, picks and rasps (kept by the dozens of each kind in divided drawers in a tall cabinet) and some kind of power tool that ran by a series of belts on a multi-jointed arm, all black paint and metal pulleys like the elongated monster spawn of a classic singer sewing machine.
The motor started slow, and revved up to a low-pitched growl -- the same tool was used for the really big, hi-torque drills -- and gave you a sense for better or worse of connection to an earlier age of dentistry.
But the ultrasonic scaler puts an end to all that barbarism. In a mere few minutes of chalk-on-blackboard squealing, it does what in the old days required a miniature jackhammer in one hand and the other to brace the patient's skull against the leverage.
Now, when it feels briefly as if my brain is being pureed down to its constituent molecules, I think of the good times with the old belt-and-pulley machine, when the polishing head was on, spreading abrasive and mint, or when one of the big side mills was rumbling gently against a particularly thick layer of calculus. Not of the jaw-dislocating gape the thing needed to get to your back teeth, or the inevitable slips of the bit against mere gum, or the bone-deep soreness that stayed with you for a day or two after the rattling and crunching was over.
Maybe all I really miss is the smell of machine oil.
Well, it's
supposed to come back at the end of next week, but going from mid-20s to a high of 74 just ain't right.
I am learning, however, that wearing khakis in the woods during mud season is kinda dicey, even if you tuck your pants into your boots. The major paths through the park are very clearly marked for the moment, because a season of packed snow and ice has insulated the ground beneath, lifting the still-frozen trail above the rest of the mire.
Except where it hasn't.
"I understand why some people become terrorists, says my former neighbor. She's not talking about the PLO, she's talking about the SBA. For the last year or so she's been trying to shepherd a loan application through that fine organization so that the five-unit co-op I used to live in can fix the front where the cast-iron cornice fell off and the back where the bricks are rotting, and the inside stairs, which list decidedly to starboard. Oh, and pay for decontaminating all that soot and dust from the unpleasant incident five blocks south.
She's calling me because there's some question about my taxes from 2000 and 2001 that absolutely has to be answered before the loan can go forward. And now I'm calling the SBA guy to find out what's going on. He's out, but he calls me back. It's policy, he says, it's not really a problem, he says. Three or four times. Happens in thousands of cases. Only twice. All I have to do is take my returns in to the local IRS office and have the first page stamped. Then send them to him. Well, not to him, to his local office. No, a different office. But they'll be forwarded to him. Or to someone else, but he's made extensive notes on the case file.
It's really not a big deal, he says, just procedure. It might take 30 days, or maybe six months. All the deadlines are long past anyway, albeit not for reasons under my neighbor's control. So it's quite likely, once all the paperwork is filed, that they'll look favorably on the decision to reinstate the review of whether to reinstate the loan application. Just this once.
What really scares me about this? He was working very hard to be nice and friendly and helpful, and mostly succeeding.
Yesterday moring, afternoon and evening, I wrestled Ilisp into submission. I'm not declaring complete victory, but at least it's not offering active resistance. As usual, I was struck by how many other things you have to know how to do before you can do even the apparently simplest stuff on a Real Computer -- and how cool it is that sometimes things you have no right to expect will play together, do.
It all started when I wanted to write a little snippet of code to prove a stupid point about probability. Lisp is my language of choice, but the fancy development environment I've been using on and off (mostly off) for 14 years doesn't run under OS X, so I had to type everything by hand into a creaky free unix version. "Never again!" I vowed and went looking for something better.
Something better that didn't cost a few hundred or a few thousand dollars, that is. Enter Ilisp, a free (!) package that lets you write and run lisp programs in an Emacs window, thereby making use of every whizzy text-editing tool known to humanity, and programmers too. Add OpenMCL, a free (!) stripped-down version of the Lisp I was using before, shake, and presto!
Oops. First I download a new copy of OpenMCL. My mac kindly puts the folders on the desktop, where they're of no use to me. Open a shell window and move them where I want them. Here is where something just works: I copy the url of more stuff to download into the shell, tack "ftp" onto the front, and everything just happens. Then I learn the miraculous incantation that is "tar foxczv" or some such (aka "stuff these new files into all the existing directories without disturbing what's already there") and, wonder of wonders, I can type "openmcl" and something happens.
On to Ilisp, which I download more or less the same way. And then: all the documentation files are in one weird format or another -- you can turn them into more readable forms, but you have to read them first to understand how to do that. Then you have to learn how to use Emacs's "info" mode to read the files you just made. Well, no, first you have to figure out where to put the files so that Emacs's info mode is willing to look for them.
Then it's just a matter of figuring out which parts of ilisp.emacs to stick in your emacs initialization file (you can put it all in because osme parts are incompatible) and which parts of a couple of other files (guess which ones, it won't be obvious) you have to change so that Emacs and Ilisp, working in glorious concert, can find OpenMCL.
That was about midnight. I got a little 12-line window with OpenMCL running in it and quit. Today, I have already learned that if you make a terminal window bigger, Emacs automagically adjusts to fit. Maybe tomorrow I will learn how to use some of Ilisp's eidting commands. But don't bet on it.
No, I'm not talking about Dick Cheney or Richard Perle. It's the smell of rotted flesh that pours into my mouth when the dentist pulls on a crown that should have been firmly cemented in place and shows it to me, post and all. "No offense," she says, "but that stinks."
I'm familiar with that smell (and taste) from the week back in college when I missed my Milton exam because half my face was swollen up so that I could barely see out of my left eye, and my old nemesis Dr. Foster came to my rescue. This time the bugs have been munching away under the post, safe from light, air, flossing and Listerine. Who knows how long the party has been going on?
Better yet, the bugs will probably keep partying down for a while. This is where strategic dentistry comes in. "I could clean out the hole and do another root canal and put on another crown, but there's not enough tooth left above the gum line. In five or ten years you'd be right back in the same place." Call it $1900 not very well spent. Or she can do a desultory wash-and-burn, cement the old crown back in place, and start scheduling me for an implant for not that much more. Oh, goody.
I've had what you might politely call a mixed history with dentists, but more on that later.
I took Lunch to the vet this afternoon to see about his new bald patch -- he's been chewing at his flank and pulling the hair out as he sits with us watching TV of an evening. The vet decanted Lunch from the carrier and felt him all around, checked his pulse and respiration, looked at the bald spot (it's not inflamed or scabrous) and asked if he'd been under stress lately, or whether we'd changed his diet in case it might be a food allergy. (We did switch catfood brands a month or two ago.)
Sometimes cats do this kind of thing, he said. You can treat them with cortisone or psychotropic drugs or even hormones, but often that can do more harm than good. So keep watching him, he said, and if the bald spot gets worse or he starts plucking the other side or the hair doesn't grow back, give a call. As soon as I opened the carrier door, Lunch climbed right back inside.
It was a pretty slow day at the vet; there was a very quiet woman wearing black wool gloves with a cat in a cardboard box, moving down to Florida next week, where she hoped to find a place to live and a job, and to find out from a game warden whether her cat would be a danger to birds if she let him outside. And another woman with a classic german shepherd and a looseleaf notebook to record all of his treatments and regimens -- "Most people aren't that organized with their kids," said the lady behind the counter.
And a couple of families -- the one in an exam room when I arrived, where you couldn't tell if the mewing noises were coming from the big tan fluffy cat or the mostly-asleep two-year-old in the car seat. The other waiting on the blood-test results for their dog, and would the surgery be next week or the week after? I wish them well.
After complaining loudly most of the way to the vet, Lunch was pretty quiet on the trip home. He even seemed to be asleep when I stopped at the lumber yard. Or maybe he just wasn't talking to me.
Of all the advances in dental since Dr. Foster and I faced off across an old Charlie Chaplin-style chair, the one I like best is the camera wand, a little stick with a couple of bright lights and a lens on the end that takes digital pictures of your teeth. For one thing, it doesn't hurt even a little. For another, you get to be a kind of exhibitionist without anybody being able to recognize you. And the distorted, oddly-lit pictures don't really tell you anything, but the very fact of their existence is way cool.
The impulse to start blathering finally broke through when I was coming back from the first visit to my new dentist, who had looked into my mouth with a mixture of motherly concern and the complacency that comes with knowing that one's financial future has just been assured yet again.
"Some more caps, inlays, onlays..." For the teeth that probably won't last too long anyway, metal fillings, ceramic for the ones that might stay. She dictated the initial survey results to an assistant as she first poked and scraped my teeth and then jabbed a tiny plastic spike into my gums (six times for each tooth) to check for periodontal disease. It became clear to me that here was a narrative thread that could last for at least a couple of years.
Apparently I'm lucky and don't have a familial predisposition for gum disease. That means the spike met fairly firm resistance within a few millimeters of each jab. But I brush too hard, and I eat the wrong things. Did I mention it's going to be a long ride?