Friday – ARGH!!!!

Last Friday was a challenging ordeal. It began at about 2:00 a.m. when I woke up with the whole right side of my heard throbbing in pain. The root cause (literally) of this discomfort being a tooth that had a filling several weeks before. The dentist mentioned at the time that he had barely hit the root and that if there were problems with it, I might need a root canal. I was having a sinking feeling that a root canal was in my immediate future.

I drug myself out of bed at about 5 a.m. took a shower and got ready for work. On the way to the park and ride I stopped at Safeway to pick up some aspirin, because the only thing I had at home was Advil PM. That wasn’t going to get through the day.

While I was there I picked up a hot chocolate at the Starbucks, I couldn’t eat anything and thought the milk would help my stomach. Anything cold was out of the questions since the cold would only aggravate my tooth more, it possible. It took forever since the two people working were doing more conversing than cranking out the hot stuff. It felt like I stood in line forever, but it probably wasn’t all that long, it just felt like it.

On to the park and ride where I got the bus driver from Hell. He decided to cop a total attitude with me. Not the morning for that and we got into it bit. I did make a complaint to the local bus company when I got into the office, but I still haven’t heard back.

Into the office to wait until I can call my dental provider for an emergency appointment. Interestingly, my provided informed me I could be seen as an emergency but it would cost an extra $20. Really? I of course agreed, it’s not like I could wait weeks to be seen. I did point out that if the dentist hadn’t nicked my root doing the filling I wouldn’t need an appointment. The customer service person suggested I mention that when I paid my bill. That turned out to be good advice. Goes to show you should poke at every corner.

I madly bang away at work to get a mailing out the door before I have to leave for my appointment. Got out just at the last possible moment.

Dentist informs me that yes I have a bad tooth and will need a root canal. Now here’s the deal, I have really good teeth, but bad plack so I need deep cleanings three times a year by a periodontal hygienist. Think root scraping, and an hour in the chair. I’ve heard all the worst stories about root canals: 8 hours in the chair, horrible pain, failed procedures. I told the dentist all this and let her know I didn’t think I could sit in a chair for hours, and then have to have the tooth pulled later. She really listened and agreed to pull the tooth, but wanted me to give it a try and she would stop at any time and do the extraction. I agreed, reluctantly. Aside from the one shot in the roof of my mouth it was amazingly pain free, and it took just under an hour. Of course this was just the first half of the procedure. The will finish it next month.

Of course by the time the dentist is through the pain is already starting to come back. I go out and wait to be called to pay my bill and my medical reimbursement payment card wouldn’t go through, so I had to pay out of pocket. I then head over to the pharmacy with my prescriptions, one for a pain killer and one for antibiotic. And the payment card still isn’t working so more out of pocket money. I pop those puppies as soon as I get them and head home and into bed. I hit the sheets a little after 2:00 p.m. and slept like the dead for 6 hours when the pain killer wore off. More antibiotics and pain killers, and back to bed.

I was never so glad to see a day end, at least not in recent memory.

Where Are We Centered?

I was listening to NPR (OPB-Oregon Public Broadcasting) the other day, no shocker there since I usually listen to NPR whenever I’m in the car and in the mornings when I’m getting ready for work. The host was interviewing an author about his new book on maps. One of the points the author made was that over the centuries maps have been centered relative to what the maker or user felt was most important. So it might be Rhodes which was the center of trade a really long time ago, or Jerusalem for obvious reasons.


So this gets me to thinking. It’s no wonder so many people act like they’re the center of the universe, they’ve been using their GPS! As soon as they pull up the GPS what does it show you? Where you are, and where are you? In the center.

I think we need to come up with a new center. But what should we center on? Not Hollywood, not New York, or London, or Tokyo, or Hong Kong or any other of the world capitals or centers of business and money. We need a center that focuses us on a wider view, one that focuses us on something apart, but something we want to care about. So we need an app! (I can’t believe I’m saying that.) We need an app that allows us to center our GPS on something like the neighborhood school, the community garden, animal shelter, or food bank. We’ll call it TrueCenter.

2012 and the End of the World

OK, I’ve been thinking, yes it happens from time to time. Anyway, if this is the year the world ends we have really screwed up and missed a huge opportunity. Why, oh why, are we holding elections?

We could have done away will all the debates, political ads, party politics and extremist emails. No Obama said this, Romney said that, and the analyst’s take on it all. No more cares about the state of world banking, or what China is doing. Pack up all the troops, all over the world, and bring them home to their families. No more talk about budgets or taxes. Put it all away because it’s not going to matter anyway.

So basically if the world is ending, what are all these newly elected people going to do? Why are we fighting over the national healthcare program, or the immigration policy, or who says what about whom?

Instead, we could take all the money being given to super pacs and have a great party! Let’s just chill, make a few margaritas, fill the wading pool, listen to the birds sing, and enjoy the sunsets. In the end, (pun intended) even if the world doesn’t cease to exist, this is probably the tack to take anyway. We’d all be a lot more happy.

Driving improvments?

I hardly ever pay any attention to TV ads, especially car ads, or sports ads, or reality show ads, or ads for wrestling. Basically I just tune it all out or fast forward on my tvo. (How much do you love tvo!!!)


For whatever reason, I happen to catch a little piece of the description for some new and improved car. It seems that if there are adverse road conditions ahead you will receive a vibration from the driver’s seat.

Well, as you can imagine this sent my imagination off into some funny and strange areas. Remember that movie Crash where everyone was getting into car crashed because they found them sexually stimulating? It now seems your car can give you a little extra boost in that directions. Kinky!

After more than a century of developing and improving driving instruments to make driving safer, we’re right back were we started, driving by the seat of our pants. Really, did no one on the design team ever think of this? LOL

Where are we headed?

I’ve been noticing some strange things in the news lately. OK, I know there are always strange things in the news, that’s what makes a lot of them news. It jsut makes me shake my head and wonder where we're headed.

Some of this stuff is what you’d have expected to see in the Dark Ages where science was the enemy of the righteous man. You know the kind of thing – the sun can’t be the center of the solar system because the Church says the earth is. Or we can look a little closer in history where, regardless of selected breeding in our farm animals to improve breeds, evolution can’t be real because God created us in his image. You know little gems like that.
Jump a few centuries or decades ahead and now science is under attack not because its conclusions are wrong, immoral, or blasphemous, but because they’re incontinent. Recently North Carolina has made it illegal to report on or make accurate projections on rising sea levels that will impact their coasts. This was quickly followed by Virginia demanding terms such as “climate change” and “global warming” be removed from a bill before voting. Then this morning I hear that a federal court has struck down EPA rules that limit cross state pollution.
So in North Carolina the legislature was apparently under the pressure from developers who want to develop coastal properties and sell them without future owners having any chance of knowing their properties could be under water in the near future. In Virginia, republican lawmakers are pushing their party’s stance that global warming does not exist. And, in the federal case polluters don’t want to be responsible for what happens to the toxins they spill into other states.

It’s all really about greed. Rather than do the right thing and building a better future for everyone, it gets down to me, me, me, me. And, now, now, now, now. When did we stop being innovative, forward looking, and driven to be the best? Just exactly when did this happen to American? When did we become smaller, blind, and without sympathy for our fellow man? When did we become so individually self-centered?
More importantly how do we get our big ideas, and change the future attitude back? How do we move back to a place where “he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother” is the aspiration of all? Where we leave a better world for our children and not just a bigger bank account? Where we inspire our children, and each other, to dream in big and without self centered blinders on?

I’m just wondering, and hoping we haven’t let the sun go down on the great experiment that is the United States.

2012 and the End of the World


OK, I’ve been thinking, yes it happens from time to time. Anyway, if this is the year the world ends we have really screwed up and missed a huge opportunity. Why, oh why, are we holding elections?

We could have done away will all the debates, political ads, party politics and extremist emails. No Obama said this, Romney said that, and the analyst’s take on it is this. No more cares about the state of world banking, or what China is doing. Pack up all the troops, all over the world, and bring them home to their families. No more talk about budgets or taxes. Put it all away because it’s not going to matter anyway.

So basically if the world is ending, what are all these newly elected people going to do? Why are we fighting over the national healthcare program, or the immigration policy, or who says what about whom?

Instead, we could have take all the money being given to the super pacs and have a great party! Or, let’s just chill, make a few margaritas, fill the wading pool, listen to the birds sing, and enjoy the sunsets. In the end (pun intended) even if the world doesn’t end, this is probably the tack to take anyway. We’d all be a lot more happy.

Bottle of water vs fireworks

Ok, I have some more issues with national security. I can’t take a bottle of water onto a plane, but I can go buy thousands of dollars of fireworks without showing ID or proof of what I plan to do with it. I can transport them anywhere and no one is going to care about it. Now really, does this make sense? Let’s just forget that spending that much money on something you’re going to burn is just crazy anyway!

So, I guess if money is no option, terrorists should just skip the fertilizer order, and the chemistry classes, and web searches, and go to the neighborhood fireworks stand and everything I need is right there. In fact I could wait until the last day of sale and get everything at a huge discount!

I’m just saying, this is nuts!!