Slow Moving Spring

Looking back over February entries from several years in the past, I note that I almost always write about surprise that the trees are blossoming and that surely it is too soon to be spring.  But those blossoms come every year and each year they surprise me.

But this year the blossoms are slow to come.  Even our apple tree in the back yard, usually covered in blossoms by mid-February, remains bare.

 

There are a few signs of spring around here

But they are few and far between.

The street where I took these photos is usually lined for several blocks with a beautiful canopy of blossoms.  Yesterday it was just a bunch of bare branches.  The almond orchards along I-80 are usually full of blossoms by now, but they too are still bare (or were when I drove there a week ago)

It will be interesting to see how late spring blossoms this year.

Walt had a very emotional day yesterday.  When we moved here, I didn't choose a dentist for about 20 years (I've told that story before) but Walt decided to continue going to Berkeley to the dentist we had both gone to for years (I stopped going the day he yelled at me for not flossing).  How can you give up on a guy named Hercules Demosthenes Morphopolous? Herc eventually retired and died a few years ago but Walt continued going to the office.  He liked his day in Berkeley and he liked his new dentist Zarrin Ferdowsi.

In the meantime I finally chose a dentist, my friend Cindy with whom I had worked in a typing service for many years, while she was getting her dental practice established.

But with Walt's current physical problems, he has decided that he can no longer do is long Berkeley days and that he should change dentists, so he now has an upcoming appointment with Cindy.  From time to time Cindy talks about retirement and though I usually see her hygienist, the thought of having to have a different dentist is very emotional for me, so I can just imagine what Walt feels, having been to the Morphopolous/Ferdowsi office for more than 50 years.

However, to balance that emotional upset, he had a great triumph this morning.  After Tom got his new computer set up and left, Walt could not print from it, though Tom printed from it just fine.  But this morning he discovered the one little tweak which, when he made it, started the thing printing, so now if he can just figure out a way to get his email so we can drop Davis Community Network for Comcast Cable, we'll be all set.

It's Only a Game

As I was driving to my dentist appointment yesterday, I was listening to an interview on NPR. The man being interviewed worked in developing video games and said that the last game he was expected to work on was a game which allowed the player to choose a random person on the street and shoot him.  He was to help make the blood look more realistic.

There is always a lot of talk about the effect of violence on children (and young adults) and whether it plays any role in the increase in violence we are seeing in this country.

I did some research on violent video games (leaving aside violent TV shows and violent movies) and was shocked at what I saw.  There is even this video game.

which uses actual film from the massacre.  Great fun, of course.  At least one of the recent mass murderers apparently spent a lot of time playing this video game before he went on his rampage.

I wondered what parents are thinking letting their kids play games like this--or a game in which the idea is to kill random people.

Then I thought about that infamous "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super bowl and how up in arms parents were at what their kids might have seen and how it would warp them.  You know, I saw the reruns of that infamous split second many times over many news broadcasts and I never saw any breast tissue -- and I was looking for it and was seeing it up close and personal on my television screen, not from half a football field in the stands somewhere.  (When I checked photos on Google, I did finally see what people were talking about)

Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson were under some sort of black cloud for a long time because of what they did to the psyches of the country's young people.  Yet those same parents let their kids virtually shoot people at random?  (OK, not necessarily the same parents)

When a baby is born, it knows nothing.  It learns what is good and what is bad, what is acceptable and what is not, what is normal and what is not from observing the world around him, so it only makes sense that realistic role playing games have had a part in inuring today's kids to the shock of violent crimes...that, and how often they are reported on television.  I suspect they learn more of what is acceptable from "Super Columbine Massacre" than from Roadrunner cartoons.

---

My dental appointment went well.  It's not often that Cindy says "good brushing" to me! Best part was that the posters on the ceiling had been rotated.  I am used to seeing posters of types of peppers or animals threatened extinction, or varieties of fruit (like durian), but today I got to concentrate on something different.

Whoever first got the idea of putting posters on the ceilings of dental offices was absolutely brilliant.

The Repository

I had what I guess was a rude awakening today.

My mother had a dental appointment scheduled at 2 and my cousin Niecie was going to come up from the Bay Area and give her a mani/pedi in the morning.  

Among the things I found during the big Office Reorganization was a box of old, old black and white snapshots of my mother's family that had been torn out of someone's photo album (the black page still sticking to the back).  Many of these photos are duplicates of ones I already have and in any case, I have a ton of photos here to go through "some day" and definitely don't need to add these to the four big boxes I already have.  As Niecie has become, with Peach's death, the family historian, I thought she would like to have the photos.

Every time I post one of the old photos in the private family group on Facebook, Niecie is the one who gets all excited and happy to see the old photos, so I told her about this big box of photos and she said she definitely wanted them.

So when I knew she would be at Atria, I took the box and went there early, an hour before the dental appointment.  Niecie was delighted and suggested that we go out to the lobby and look at them there, since there was a table and better light.

My mother was pretty much OK, though when I was going to get coffee for the 3 of us and asked if she wanted cream in her coffee, she threw her hands in the air and said "you guys figure it out.  I don't even know what you're talking about."

So we settled in at the table and Niecie started looking at the photos, asking with almost every photo "now who is this?"  Sometimes my mother knew, almost always I did because I've been seeing them all of my life.  As I answered her questions and corrected her guesses it occurred to me that with Peach and Kathy gone, I am the only one in the family who knows all this stuff!!!!

I do have a couple of cousins older than I am, but they have always lived at a distance and I don't have a clue how much they know about our grandparents when they lived in Inverness and the people who visited them, or what Peach and I looked like as little kids, or how to tell the babies one from another based on the date of the photo.  

I can.  And I think I am the only one in the family who can. (I call Niecie my cousin, but in reality she's is the daughter of my cousin Shirley, who would have been able to identify all of these photos, had she not died of cancer several years ago).

That's a pretty heady responsibility.  When I die, the IDs of all these photos dies with me.  I don't know that anybody cares, but if this family is typical of many other families, the people who really are interested and care, won't realize they care until everybody who can answer their questions is gone.

That's certainly what happened with my father's side of the family.  I inherited the scrapbooks of my godfather, my grandfather and my father and I don't have a clue who is in the photos and what is happening.  This is particularly sad in the case of my grandparents' vaudeville scrapbook, filled with many of the stars of the company they were members of, but I don't have a clue who they are or, in the case of informal photos of this group, what was the occasion for the photos.  That is all lost to history now.

But it seems I am now the only one who can keep the memories of my mother's family alive, through the remaining photos.  She can remember some of them, but not all of them.  I can figure out most of them.

It just feels weird to realize that.

As for the dental appointment, it went very well.

To my surprise there was no resistance.  Maybe her defenses were down after a morning with Niecie and then our session with the photographs.  I just said "it's time to go" and she followed me.

It was kind of endearing, though, that even though she didn't know what was happening, she still had the dental nervousness.  "I'm very nervous and I don't know why," she told me.  When I asked her about it, she said "I don't know where I'm going and what's going to happen to me."

As for the appointment itself, it was a perfect example of why I love Cindy so much.  I remember when I first went to her after >20 years of not seeing a dentist and fearing that my teeth were about to fall out.  She had been a friend for years, but not my dentist.  She scheduled me for the last appointment of the day so there would be nobody in the office except me.  Years later she told me that she should have taken a picture of my teeth because she had never seen such a thick piece of plaque behind my front teeth and was sure a photo could be published in a dental magazine, but she didn't want to make me feel uncomfortable.  She truly changed my life and I now brush, floss, and see my dentist 3 times a year.  She also took care of me herself until she felt I would be comfortable seeing a hygienist.

So she took my mother to the back of the office, where dental procedures are done, and she was very gentle with her, examining all of her teeth, then asking if she would mind if they cleaned them.  My mother agreed and Debbie, the hygienist cleaned.  Then Cindy came back in and asked if my mother would feel comfortable having her teeth x-rayed, which she agreed to.  A full mouth x-ray was done.  Debbie told me she would be taking 18 x-rays, which would not have to be repeated for 5 years, which I told her meant it probably would not have to be done again.

While the x-rays were being done, Cindy talked with me and said she'd like to study the x-rays and then meet with me about the condition of my mother's mouth.  She asked if I thought my mother should be at that meeting and I said no, so we have that ahead of us.

I listened while Cindy tested the gum pockets and most were 3 or 4, but a couple were 7 and I think I heard her say one was 10.  She's also lost 2 teeth, Cindy says.  So I'm sure she would like to do some work, but the question is, I think, how much dental work you do on someone who is 97.  I'll find out when we have our meeting.

So she's had her annual exam, she's had a CT scan and she's had a dental appointment and, depending on what my meeting with Cindy reveals, she may be free of medical interference for awhile.

The Sweat of Our Brow

Walt has been working like a dog in the back yard, trying to clear away shrubbery so the new fence can go up, working with the tree folks to came out to find out why your big tree had decided to drop a branch and leave one on the verge of dropping, and just cleaning up the yard in general.  Each night he comes in, dripping with sweat, his shirt drenched.

Ned put the finishing touches on my office, moving all the slides to the top shelf and all the scrapbooks up on the shelves.  

He also had made this great shelf unit for my desk.  

He also moved all the cords on the floor up to the wall, so the dogs, who have made the space under my desk as their beds, won't unplug anything.

The guy has thought of everything.

So even though I myself made countless trips back and forth from the living room to the office (about 30 steps each way...whew!) moving more stuff in, I had no reason to be sweating and exhausted by the time I put dinner on the table.

This was a delicious dinner, which I did not expect it to be.  One of the things I love about Blue Apron is eating foods I have never eaten before, which I expect to hate and then discovering that it's really quite good.

This was crispy cod with squash.  The cod is breaded and fried and then topped with a salad of arugala mixed with quinoa and toasted almonds.  The whole thing sits on a bed of marinated summer squash, sliced and then added to vinegar, dijon, garic, and olive oil.  After you take the squash out of the dressing, you then put the rest on the arugula salad.

It was delicious.

But, as always, I was dripping sweat before the dinner got on the table, huge drops of sweat rolling into my eyes and temporarily blinding me, at least for reading the recipe.

The problem with Blue Apron dinners is all the prep work...which is, of course, what makes them so good.  By the time I have peeled and chopped and tried to cook things so that they all come out at the same time, I sometimes long for my reliable "Joe Special" which is just hamburger cooked with spinach and egg...one stop shoppping.  However, I am learning how best to do the Blue Apron dinners, which is to take breaks.  That may sound silly.  The work involved isn't all that much, but when I start sweating and my back aching, I just have to walk away and sit down for a few minutes....and I'm hoping that all these healthy meals are gradually making me more able to handle the work of putting them together!

I also shouldn't feel bad about how many trips I made back and forth carrying stuff to put away.  After all I had an almost 2 hour rest while I visited with my friend Cindy.  Of course my friend Cindy is also my dentist and most of those 2 hours were spent with her hands in my mouth, but  I honestly look on my trips to the dentist as restful visits. We get caught up on our lives, I get to vent about my mother, I hear about her trips to the Netherlands to visit her father-in-law, who also has dementia.  We compare what our kids are doing. She was filling 3 small cavities and I left there looking like I had a permanent sneer from all the numbing, but all the numbing means zero pain and only minor discomfort, so I don't mind.

The end is in sight as far as my office is concerned.  I am going to be left witha lot of  "miscellaneous sundries" that have no place...and had no place in the old office...and I'm going to sese how many of those I can actually throw away.

But I can see the living room again and that is a nice thing.

---

And just to get political for a minute, in this day and age how does ANY politician think they can get away with ANYTHING when there are cell phones and fact checkers behind every corner.  What was the Trump machine tinking of allowing Melania Trump to plagiarize.  Paul Manafort, campaign chairman, denied allegations that Melania Trump plagiarized a Michelle Obama speech on the first night of the Republican National Convention, calling the accusation "just really absurd."

But you can play the speeches side by side and they are word for word identical in a big spot.  You think I'm going to believe that Melania (who says she wrote thes peech herself--anybody believe that?) just channeled Michele Obama and somehow came up with the identical words?  Give me a break!  American people aren't that stupid....or are they?  These days I don't know any more.

The Ides of May

This has been a weird day, with little glitches throughout.

The only thing on the schedule was going to the dentist at 1 p.m., but when they called to ask if I could come at 2 instead of 1, suddenly I had time to Do Things.

Yesterday was the day when I found my mother sleeping at 1 p.m. and just left her laundry for her.  I really should go and make sure she actually is alive.  By the time I got to Atria (slipping in the back door), she was not in her room, but it was lunch time, so I just slipped out again.

There was lots of time before the dentist, so I stopped at Supercuts and got my hair cut, something it has been sorely needed for weeks now.  As she was shampooing my hair, my cell phone rang and started a long back-and-forth between me and my friend Ellen.  I didn't get her call, but checked later.  She wanted to know when a particular photo I had taken of her and her wife Shelly was taken.  I told her I didn't recognize it and didn't think I took it  I wont bore you with all the details, but the discussion is still going on and she still insists I must have taken it.

I was happy with the cut...I probably lost a pound, she cut so much off.  The last time I had it cut was right before we left for our Mediterranean cruise, so it was way overdue for a cut.

When I finished there I still had an hour and 15 minutes before my dental appointment so I drove out to Michael's craft store to pick up a few things I wanted.  Miraculously, I got out of there in 20 minutes and under $50.  I didn't have any lunch because I didn't want to "dirty" my teeth before my appointment.

I drove back to Cindy's and still had 20 minutes to wait, but I had brought a book, so I was fine with that--I'm always happy when I can sit somewhere where I don't have to do anything and can do some guilt-free reading.  I'm reading a free sample of Bob Hope's biography.  I saw the author on Theater Talk this week and it sounded fascinating, but the kindle version was not cheap, so I wanted to see if I really thought I'd read the whole thing (it's also quite thick).  While I am enjoying it, I probably won't buy it.  I think I will lose interest eventually.

Funny thing about Bob Hope (who, the author says sadly, stayed in the limelight too long).  Recently there was all this brouhaha about the Oscars -- I can't remember what anniversary it was, but one of the big ones. 50?  Lots and lots of talk about MCs over the years and was Carson better than Billy Crystal, and remember that really awful year, etc., etc.  In all the talk I don't remember hearing ONE person mention Bob Hope, who hosted the damn thing for nineteen years!  In fact, I remember wondering if Carson could live up to Hope's reputation.  It was kind of like ... can you have New Year's Eve without Guy Lombardo?  Can you have an Oscar telecast without Bob Hope?  And now nobody remembers him at all.

But I digress

The teeth cleaning appeared to go well.  I really like Kristina, my dental hygienist.  We always get caught up on each other's lives when she's cleaning my teeth.  Cindy has posters on the ceiling, which rotate throughout the year.  This time it was this elephant poster, which I really liked (can't believe I found it on Google images!)

The more I stared at it, the more I realized that the contour of the elephant's back matched the contour of the tree and pointed that out to Kristina, though I said I knew she probably didn't look at the picture much.

After Kristina had finished her cleaning, Cindy came in to break the news that I have a couple of small cavities and must come back in July to have them filled.  (She said that as a dental hygienist, Kristina is not permitted to tell me that, though she was the one who told Cindy that I had cavities).

From there I went back to Atria, where I found my mother sitting by the dining room and sat with her.  I wanted to get coffee, but you can't GET coffee in the damn place any more.  Forget about a cookie or something like that. I discovered that you also can't visit with my mother in the alcove there, especially on bad memory days, which today was.  When we are in her apartment, she spends an inordinate amount of time talking about the beautiful flowers in her apartment and the leaves on the trees outside the window.  With those two topics not possible, we had nothing to talk about at all.  I only stayed 15 minutes and then left.  The good thing is that she has no concept of time, so she had no idea that I stayed such a short time.

If she would ever...just once...not ask me who the cute little girls are on the back of my phone, I would be so happy, but it's like another knife in my heart every time to know that she has no awareness that she has great grandchildren, or that she has ever seen them.

At home, we had a refrigerator that was filling up with leftovers, so I just heated a shrimp, rice and kale dish for Walt and leftover mac and cheese for me.  We don't have a usable table for two right now, so he ate at the table and had brought down a TV table for me.  My bowl of mac and cheese was so hot, I bobbled it and turned the whole thing upside down on the floor.  To show how bad Kraft dinner is, not even the dogs wanted to eat it.  And I had a right regular good ol' tantrum, briefly.  I heated more mac and cheese and ate that.

Shortly after that, Walt was setting the coffee pot up to start at 6:30 in the morning and bobbled the cup that the coffee grounds go into and dumped them all into Polly's bowl.  He had his own mini tantrum.

Then I watched some TV and at some point went to check something OnDemand and the screen froze.  I could not get it to do anything, not even to turn off.  Normally, I would go into my office and watch the little TV, but the little TV is in the living room, and not plugged in.  

So I came into the computer and worked on a project I've been working on since last night.  I finally got it to where I wanted to print it in Word Perfect, which tells me that the .jpg I was trying to use was not the right format.  I decided to print it from PhotoShop and it printed fine, but I forgot to indicate that I needed it in portrait orientation, not landscape.  When I went to run it a second time, the printer was out of paper and I realized I don't have a clue where my printer paper is.

That's when I decided this was not my day and the best thing I could do was finish this entry, post it (I hope) and hope that by the morning the TV would have fixed itself.

Look, Ma

Remember that old commercial?  "Look, Ma, no cavities!"

Oh right.  "Look, Ma" isn't the right title for this entry.  I have a cavity.  A baby cavity.  But a need-to-be-filled hole in my mouth anyway. 

I knew I had it.  I've been feeling "something" for the last week and figured it was probably a cavity, but knew that I had a cleaning appointment coming up and figured it could wait that long.

I love my dentist.  Seriously.  I love going to the office.

A long time ago, before I had "readers," I recounted my dental history, which included being yelled at for not flossing, and being so humiliated that I decided never again to go to the dentist (which was a lot easier than flossing, of course!).  I come by this attitude naturally, since I am the daughter of a mother who a few years back decided that she didn't like the sales pitch of her dentist and that at her age, she didn't need a dentist and would never go again.  So far she has not.   I hope she doesn't get serious problems.

I met Cindy, my dentist, when she first arrived in Davis, a new graduate of her dental program, and was trying to set up her practice.  She was working in another dentist's office and to make money while she was establishing a practice, she worked in the typing service where I worked.  It was a small office and all of us became good friends.  

We got together frequently for social events, and I always arranged that I sat at the other end of the dinner table from Cindy.  By that time I had broken back teeth, halitosis, and lots of plaque.  I didn't want her to notice. I couldn't chew and learned how to eat using the roof of my mouth to grind the food. I had given up things like corn on the cob, apples, spareribs and anything that needed to be bitten with the front teeth. Also at that time I went through periods of such pain it would keep me awake all night, but I still refused to see a dentist, because I figured I had destroyed my mouth and to repair it would cost too much money.  Walt never said a word about my not going to the dentist.

Anyway, I reached a point where I thought my front teeth were about to fall out and couldn't bring myself to call Cindy (who by this time had her own office), so sent her a letter to confess my dental mis-deeds.  She called and asked if I wanted an appointment.  By the time I was working for Sutter and had dental insurance.  Good thing or I would now be toothless.

The day of the appointment, I was a total wreck.  I couldn't tell anybody I was going, but because I was convinced that I would return home missing several front teeth, I left a note for both my boss and Walt warning them of what it would be like when I returned...and then went to see Cindy.

Bless her, she scheduled me for the last appointment of the day, so I was the only patient still in the office, and you could not ask for a kinder, more gentle touch.  I learned, for one thing, that dentistry had advanced a lot in the 20+ years since my last apointment.  For one thing, it was now pretty much painless.

As it turned out, my self-diagnosis was wrong.  I was not going to lose my teeth, though I had the biggest plaque deposit Cindy had ever seen.   She told me years later that she was sorry she had not taken a picture of it because it was certain to be published in some dental journal.  But she didn't want to make me uncomfortable.

Over the next several months, I put at least two of her three daughters through college, but fortunately the dental insurance paid for a big chunk of it.  By the time my mouth was up and functioning, I was leaving Sutter and losing my dental insurance again.  Perfect timing.

I now see Cindy and her hygienist, Christina, three times a year for cleaning.  I'm still not religious about brushing and flossing, but between us--and having those frequent appointments, my teeth are in relatively good shape, except for the baby cavity.

As I said early in this entry, I love going to the office.  The staff is strictly female.  I don't know if that's deliberate, or coincidence.   The atmosphere is like going to a beauty parlor, with the radio playing, interesting posters on the ceiling and paintings on the walls.  You sit in a chair that has a wonderful view of the lawn outside the office.  

As the hygienists work, there is chit chat back and forth and just a very friendly feeling.  When there is more major work to be done, the patients are taken to the back office, where Cindy holds court.  I actually enjoy when I have more work to be done because it gives Cindy and me a chance to get caught up on what is happening with our families.

In my biking days, she and I used to ride about 10 miles around Davis nearly every morning.  Hot or cold, she would be there with her bike and I would drag my body out into the morning air and follow her out into the country and around town.   It was really a special time and I did all of my best biking during those days.   I don't miss going out on a cold winter morning and riding 10 miles, but I do miss the camaraderie we had at that time.

Now our camaraderie comes over crowns and other dental paraphernalia.   But I don't dread it.  I look forward to it.

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.

Getting Over the Guilties

I don't know why I don't feel bad when I sit down and watch television in the middle of the day, but it just feels wrong to sit down and read a book.

But today, I found a guilt-free way to spend a couple of hours enjoying a book. Take along an audio book to play while you're having 2 hours of dental work done.

Instead of my normal cleaning, I was scheduled for the first of two appointments to have root planing done. I was a little nervous about it. I remember back in the 1970s when our neighbor had root planing done. I remember seeing him with cottong packed in his mouth and looking like he was in a lot of pain.

In the years I have been seeing Cindy, I can truly say I have not had any painful procedures done, so I wasn't exactly a basket case when I got to the office, but I was more nervous than I would be for a cleaning.

My hygienist, Christina, was going to do the procedure, which I had been told would take 2 hours. She shocked me by saying that she could see from my chart that I had my last root planing in 1993. Huh? I had root planing before? I truly have no recollection of having it done. But I also don't remember any painful procedure, so maybe this wouldn't be all that bad.

And it wasn't. The entire right side of my face was frozen from the novocaine so I just lay there, listening to a Michael Connelly book while Christina did her thing. The time just flew by...harder for her than for me, I think, since she took a break after an hour to do some back exercises. Me? I was so relaxed I nearly fell asleep in the chair.

It was a little weird because she kept asking me questions. Not only could I not hear her because of the ear buds, but I couldn't answer her because of all the stuff in my mouth!

She sent me home with a bottle of stuff to swish around in my mouth, a discount coupon for a Sonicare toothbrush, and a promise to see me again on Monday, when she will do the other side of my mouth and I'll hear two more hours of "The Concrete Blonde."

I stopped at CVS Pharmacy on my way home and bought a new $150 toothbrush. It's weird to think that I'm going to need the read a manual to figure out how to use the damn thing. But it's supposed to be the very best way to keep the gums from dying off, so I guess I will do it.

I came home to spend the afternoon immersed in my big project, which I had not intended to do, but which was necessary. And I planned a soft food dinner -- Spam and mashed potatoes. Funny how people turn up their noses at Spam. I remember it as being one of my favorite meals when I was growing up and, of course, Walt grew up in Hawaii, where Spam is king, so we both enjoy Spam for dinner now and then.

I went back to working on the project after dinner, and so late into the night that I was too tired to finish this journal entry until morning, after I'd watched the DVR recording of the very emotional latest episode of Project Runway.

---

And then there is my continuing parking ticket saga. It has been forgiven, as I said, but there was no response to the message I sent giving my opinion about why this shouldn't even be an issue. OK, it was a little snarky, but not a lot.

I am soon going to be the most credentialed person ever, since not only is the Department of Theatre and Dance going to make my own special placard that I can place in the car when I'm on campus, but the newspaper editor decided to make an exception for me and have personalized cards printed for me. I'm glad she's going to do it, which will eliminate all problems in the future, but it is such overkill. At the most I will need 2 or 3 cards, in case the first wears out