Look Like a Pirate Day

I snuck out of the house this morning at the crack of dawn and, surrounded by thick fog, headed over to Cindy's office to get the temporary crown for my tooth. I considered bringing the headphones for my iPod, but decided not to take it. I regretted that decision as soon as I got in the dental chair and learned that this procedure was scheduled for 2 hours. Gleep. I had NO electronic gizmos with me...not even my cell phone.

But as it turned out that was a good thing. The procedure involved a lot of "do this, then sit and wait for 5 minutes..." moves, so Cindy and I got a lot of time to visit and get caught up on family, friends, health, and gossip. I just love going to Cindy's office when she is going to do a procedure because there's never a bit of pain (not even the injection of novocaine) and it's the only chance we have to get caught up on each other's lives. (Of course all that getting caught up on friendship comes with a hefty dental price!)

When all the prep work had been done, she imbedded my mouth in that cementy stuff and when it had time to harden she said "ok--open your mouth," when I discovered that I couldn't! I did eventually manage to open my mouth, but it was a really weird sensation to find my mouth cemented shut!

One of her dental assistants made the temporary crown, which is a nice shiny silver color and makes me look like a pirate if I smile broadly.

Arrrgh, mateys!

I woke up around 6 this morning, coughing. I tend to cough all the time anyway, but this was feeling different. There is an ominous feeling of "that darn cold" churning up in my lungs and I'm hoping that I'm not getting my annual cold. Fortunately we still have about half of the crate of oranges we bought last month, and I have been consuming lots of vitamin C. Everybody hold the good thought, though I do feel those nasty little mucus guys trying to set up camp.

Hey...I have a question to toss out to all of you knowledgeable folks here. I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea yesterday. The 2 existing Lamplighters histories have lengthy indexes in them, in which you can find out which shows every single person who ever performed with the Lamplighters for the 35 years the two books cover was involved with. We will now add 25 more years worth of people and the index could take up 40% of the allotted space in the book.

I got the brilliant idea to put the entire index on a CD, add extra photos that won't fit in the book, and give people the option to buy it as a stand-alone or with the new book.

I thought mass producing some 500 (a number I pulled off the top of my head--it could be more) data CDs would be dirt cheap, but someone has suggested it would be very expensive. Does anyone have experience with this sort of thing and have a very rough ballpark estimate for whether it would be dirt cheap or "oh my god I can't believe it costs that much" expensive.