December 10, 1998

Toothguard

Last night was normal routine, on the most part, though we had no idea what to have for dinner until I got home, discovered what was in the freezer and stuff and threw together some chicken Tikka Masala and jasmine rice. We have very little in the fridge.

Had two stops on the way home, one was bookstore at the Redmond Town Center and both John and I could have sworn there was a Body Shop there, but it turned out that while there was a Body and Bath and a Garden Botanica, both of which one might argue are closely related, there was no Body Shop. So I'll have to figure out how to find one tonight as I'm entirely out of the body butter stuff. The other stop was at Target for bath fizzies and contact lense fluid.

The obsession with bath fizzies started with someone in Trip's room on tooMUSH pointed out www.fizzballs.com, which doesn't seem to be answering anymore, but it's a little on-line shop that sells bath fizzies by mail, which are basically bath salts shaped in a ball with a lot of bicarbonate or something to get them to fizz for a while. I think it's to get the scent going throughout the bath rather than just at the beginning. Anyway, I wasn't going to buy them on-line before I tried them in RL, so I found a few at Target and bought them to see what they were like.

Dinner turned out yummy. Just as I was finishing up Fezzik really wanted to go outside, so I went out with him onto the back porch, where he looked around. I got distracted for a bit by the BBQ, and Fezzik chose that moment to just take off into the dark. I yelled at him, he just ran faster. It got me pretty angry, as dinner was just about done and I couldn't leave it.

John said he'd go after him, and eventually did. Got him back just as everything was finished, so that was good.

Most of the evening was just watching Bond movies on TNT and reading and rereading books. Simple, quiet, back home kinds of things to do. I halfway regret not painting or writing, but my brain was tired. Sleep was kinda troubled, in part with the partial toothguard, but that was okay, because it was going to be fixed in the morning.

So my appointment was for 9:30 a.m., so I dropped John off before 9 a.m., got a book that I needed to read for work, and then went to my appointment. I arrived a good 25 minutes early as the awful traffic I was expecting never really happened. Oddly enough it was all in the other direction. I guess many folks go to Redmond/Microsoft and not nearly as many go to downtown Bellevue, or at least in proportion to how well the streets are set up to handle them.

Anyway, I arrived with plenty of time to read, and then went in and got the old toothguard fitted pretty nicely. Then they went through all the processes of getting the impressions for the new toothguard. They used a special crown molding compound to get the upper just right, as the normal molding compound wasn't quite good enough for Dr. Snyder. This was very reassuring, along with the fact that Dr. Snyder did the molding of the top form himself to make sure it was done correctly. The lower form his assistant did with great expertise and no problems.

This in contrast with Dr. Nelson's assistant who was surprised by how the stuff set up, completely destroyed the lower mold and used the same materials for the top one. It was a very, very eye-opening contrast.

It also turned out that they were going to be using a new type of night guard, where the inner material was softer, and would mold to my teeth, but the outer shell would be just as hard as the old one, so it would be more comfortable. So it was going to be higher tech, and likely nicer on my teeth in the long run.

When I finished and went to the front desk, I offered to put down half of the cost of the guard, which surprised the receptionist, but she was grateful for the payment. It turns out that the cost of the new nightguard, which was more advanced, and which they'd taken more time and trouble to do correctly was going to cost *less* than the one I'd so recently gotten made by Dr. Nelson. It made me very, very glad that I'd gotten Dr. Snyder to do it, and very, very mad about Dr. Nelson's office. Ah well. Life.

Deal with it one thing at a time.

Called the knee brace folks, and I get to send in what the insurance won't pay with the information, and then they'll order it and then I'll get it fitted to my knee. So that's that.

Also figured out some cool stuff about abstract classes that I'm going to apply to a few things real quick here... I thought it was a problem that the class that I was trying to inherit from was a concrete, instantiatable class, but there really isn't a good way to get a meaningful abstraction until I have another class to abstract *with*. One point doesn't make for a meaningful abstraction, but with two at least I know what the two share and what they don't. So it should make for a more useful design.

Lunch was a small party, lots of talk, lots of laughter, lots of uncertainty. Stuff has been happening for the last few weeks, no public announcements, here or elsewhere, until it's done. We'll see how it all turns out, but it's making work a little tough, and, yeah, it's been just barely over a year since we've already had one major upheaval, so, yeah, it's no wonder that I missed my last period due to stress.

But I'm taking things one at a time, now. Deal with what I can deal with, and cross if off. Now I can cross off the toothguard as something I no longer have to worry about at all. After four or five days of worrying about it in Albuquerque, it's good to stop.

[ Previous | Next | Index | Mail ]