Category: Life

Yesterday, I went to the dentist to have a cavity filled and a crown replaced. I haven’t gone under the drill in a little over 9 years. About that time, I got caught up with all the work I’d lacked in my 20s, so I had cavities filled, roots drilled, and crowns attached.

It wasn’t a bad visit as far as it goes. I was a bit apprehensive, just a tad. Back in the olden days, the aforementioned series of trips a decade ago, I was in the dentist chair every month for a couple hours, so I got used to it. This time, my apprehensiveness melted pretty quickly. I even quipped to the doctor as his drill smoked cutting through porcelain and tooth material that it reminded me that I had an etching bit for my rotary tool that I haven’t tried out yet. I said I was going to go home and try it on a random ceramic tile. He laughed so hard he pierced my cheek for me. Well, not quite. I’m not that funny, although with only half a mouth working, I sure sounded funny.

But the most interesting part of the visit was getting the new crown. In the olden days of 2002, the doctor took an impression of the crown to replace and shipped it off to a lab for milling. I got a temporary cap and, three weeks later, I came back to have the cap cemented on with the special UV penlight.

Fewer than 10 years later, the dentist wheeled in a computer on a cart with some elaborate CAD software on it. He stuck a funny camera in my mouth and snapped a couple digital images. The software plotted my ha’tooth next to the adjacent teeth, and the doctor moused some lines in. He compared the shape of the tooth he was fixing to the bite pattern and smoothed some where the tooth would impact the top tooth. Then he sent it wirelessly to the tooth printer.

It’s not really a printer, but close enough. In a little cubby at the back of the office, he has a computer-assisted milling machine. You plug in a block of ceramic, and two diamond-tipped drill bits carve the crown out of it in about 7 minutes. During the process, one of the bits became dull, so the technician opened the machine and swapped it out just like she was changing the toner. A couple minutes later, the tooth dropped from the remainder of the block, and after some cleanup and firing, they affixed it into my mouth.

In 10 years, we’ve gone from precision lab millwork to an in-office computer peripheral. Frankly, I am amazed and pleased.

And sad that the pace of change is probably going to change once the commissars handle medicine and dentistry for us poor little helpless children in the citizenry.

I received an IMPORTANT post card from Laclede Gas in St. Louis. Laclede Gas is the gas utility that powers the water heater and a furnace in my old house in St. Louis (a house THAT COULD BE YOURS!).

Apparently, the automated data mining software hooked up to the new smart meters has determined that the vacant house is not using as much gas as an occupied house did. So the gas company sent me a card telling me that I had to schedule an inspection of the meter–to make sure I did not tamper with it, no doubt–within five days. OR ELSE something. As you can imagine, this is an inconvenience to me that I tried to explain on the phone with them. But there are procedures! My glib excuse that no one is showering there is irrelevant!

Now, with their first attempt to install the smart meters, they were not too quick to schedule an inspection if they determined I was using more gas than normal as their botched installation pumped extra gas into my basement store room–gas that I was paying for in addition to was threatened with an explosion by.

No, the errors that add to their bottom line are assumed to be okay.

Were this Facebook, my Doctor of Rhetoric friend would pop up to insinuate that this is a free market problem and that if only the Federal government would nationalize the industry, I would not be threatened with explosion or investigation. However, we in the real world know that’s not true. This little rant is not about corporations being EVIL!. It’s about annoyance with this particular corporate practice.

Two articles of note in the May/June 2010 Saturday Evening Post:

• The requisite paean to rail travel, “Waiting on a Train”, which goes on again about how awesome rail travel is and how it’s coming back for passenger transportation again. Overlooking, as these things do, how slow it is relative to air travel and how inflexible it is relative to automobile or bus travel. But what’s important is that central planners will decide where it goes and when it goes.
• An inspirational story, “The Town That Rebuilt Itself”, about a town rebuilding after a twister, except:
  

  “We had a clean slate, so why not do things right?” says former City Council President John Janssen. City officials envisioned a model for other communities.

  So you get the normal central bureau building it all green and following the latest dictational fads instead of letting the citizens build the city according to how they would use it. You know, the old fashioned way, before city councils got addicted to playing SimCity with their personal ambulatory Sims.

Oh, I’m inspired, all right. Inspired to hit SurvivalBlog for more tips on what to do when society collapses under the weight of these prigs’ self-absorbed, self-righteous busybodiness.

Frank W. James on the waiting:

The soybeans, however, remain a question mark. Stuff I planted over a week ago has yet to emerge. I’ve had soybeans take as long as 3 weeks to emerge, but I don’t like it. It makes me nervous as all git out.

Every spring that I do planting, I get very concerned that I’ve killed the live plants I put in or that I’ve put seeds in too deep. Then, when they emerge or bloom, I receive a very pleasant surprise.

Of course, I don’t do it for a living, but I bet his senses are akin to when I get a new client, do the work, and send an invoice and have to wait sometimes 30 or 60 days for a check to come. When it does, whoa! It worked! Every time.

So I managed to make it up to Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield last week, and as I alluded elsewhere, I bought myself a hat with a Confederate flag on it:

I bought it to show my support for the park and because I wear hats to keep my balding head from burning when I pretend to work the land.

However, I’m sort of stricken with the notion that it might be distasteful or odd, to say the least, to purchase a hat commemorating a battle. Men fought and died for honor, state, and country on that battlefield, and I got a hat about it.

Trivializing or commemorating? You decide.

Also, two things I learned at the battlefield:

• The Old Wire Road that followed the telegraph lines and upon which both armies marched at different times quite probably did follow the edge of my property.
• From atop Bloody Hill, you can see my house.

If I got to choose my lycanthropy curse, I would choose to be a weretyrannosaurus.

Silver bullets are relatively common relative to silver 120mm shells. I’m just saying.

Ladies and Gentlemen, now that I am an industrial lawnmower kind of guy, I need hearing protection. So I bought (and exchanged a defective unit as aforementioned or aaftmentioned depending on whether you read daily or not) hearing protection.

Sort of.

Here’s the unit I bought:

They even come preset to the Dana Show (look at the photo of the LCD radio setting, it’s 97.1 FM, which is the talk radio station in St. Louis, he explained parenthetically).

Why do I say it defeats its own purpose?

Because it’s designed to protect your hearing from the lawnmower’s decibels. However, if you’re listening to a rock station, you’re likely, if you’re like me, to substitute the lawnmower’s decibels for Metallica’s decibels. Which ultimately doesn’t protect your hearing at all.

Maybe its purpose is to not to protect your hearing, but to destroy your hearing in a more enjoyable fashion.

You know, living in the country and driving down these old Farm Roads has really encouraged me to keep both hands on the wheel at all times.

So, the other day, I’m heading down Farm Road 182 towards Republic. I glance in my rear view mirror as I near the bridge over Wilson Creek and see a car pretty tight on me. I don’t like it, but as I skim the S curve surrounding the bridge, crossing the center line to straighten the curve slightly. Skimming the curve allows me to take the curve at a speed I won’t reveal since my wife reads this blog and trusts me to drive our children safely, and she would disagree whether that speed was safe. As I come down the large hill west of Wilson Creek, I see I have put distance between me and the car behind me. I’m pleased as I crest the next hill and head into the trough and then….

OH MY GOD, IT’S A FREAKING EMU RUNNING INTO THE ROAD! And not a regular emu, a freaking methed-up Carbondale emus. Running out of Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield as though General McCulloch himself we pursuing it. On a collision course with my truck speeding along.

I slam on the brakes. The bird, just off my front left headlight, dekes one step back toward the battlefield and takes flight. Now, the bird is eye level, windshield level, and I duck to the left as it barely clears the roof.

By this time, the truck is mostly stopped, and I mash onto the gas to avoid the turkey landing on the roof and to make sure that the cars behind me don’t rear end me. The turkey, which I recognized as a turkey belatedly given its actual height did not exceed the hood of the truck and that it freaking flew, survived. We survived.

I call it a draw.

This piece excerpts a book that echoes something I tell myself for solace:

Even on their own terms the politics and business of the world were absurdly evanescent. One week politicians, people who worked in the City, and people whose job it was to report their doings would all be kept out of their beds by a financial crisis which, six months later, would be little talked of. By that time perhaps there would be . . . a corruption scandal in local government, which would then be followed by a flurry of public concern over crimes of violence, which in its turn would be pushed out of people’s minds by their fury over some proposed new tax; and so it would go on. Each of these things would seem important for a time, then each would pass away and scarcely matter again except to historians. In fact, the truth is that most of them made little or no difference even to the daily lives of most of the population living through them. People immersed in this stream of ever-changing events were filling their minds with . . . ephemera and trivia, what people in electronics mean by “noise.” (254)

…

It is not as if were no alternatives. Time spent listening to great music, or seeing great plays, or thinking about issues of lasting importance, was not in this category. In those cases the object of one’s activities retained its interest and importance for the rest of one’s life. If I spent an evening listening to Mahler’s Third Symphony, that symphony was still going to matter to me in six months’ time, or ten years, or thirty: it was part of my life, for always. In fact such things more often than not increased in interest and value with the passage of time. If I spent two or three months saturating myself in, let us say, recordings of Mozart’s piano concertos, and then did not return to them like that for another four years or so, I would find when I came back to them that I engaged with them on a deeper level than before. And the same was true of most great art. . . .

There were times when I felt, after all, that I was living to the full in face of death. Many men of action who are also writers have described the bliss induced in them by the sound of bullets smacking past their ears, and said that it intensified their awareness of being alive to an intoxicating level. The things that came closest to doing this for me when I fully realized I was facing death were my love affairs and friendships, philosophy and the arts.

I’m pretty steeped in politics these days from the sidelines, and I get pretty agitated when I muse on the direction of the country and the inevitable and possibly in-our-lifetimes collapse of the Republic.

But spring is coming. The days are warmer, and when I spend time outside plotting and planting, I can hear the neighbors’ horses nickering, the cattle lowing, and the occasional punctuation of an ass. My children smile, I can wrap my arms around my wife (after washing up), and I can spend the evenings with a book and a glass of wine.

Throughout the sweep of history, people have lived their lives. History books tell of the ascents, descents, and failures of nation-states or city-states, but that narrative is only clear to the individual when read in a history book. One person’s influence, unless one becomes a ruler, is minimal. One should participate, but remember what is important to the individual person and to enjoy the joys of life more than one suffers from the disappointments and heartbreak of trying to turn the march of history.

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

One, two.

(Link to one seen at Marko’s.)

I agree with the overheated NBC commentators. Truly, I never will forget where I was when I saw on tape delay when that one guy, or maybe girl, overcame a tremendous obstacle in the personal life or maybe it was an injury to skate, ski, or otherwise compete against all odds and won a medal or maybe just won by competing and coming in 11th. It’s a moment etched into my short term memory until….

Hey, what’s the weather forecast for this week?

The online/print organica from Price Cutter Stores is entitled Liv Organically:

Sure, I know it’s harder to trademark something spelled correctly, but I hate to see expensive print publications spelled like they were created by 12-year-olds on a cell phone. Especially when they first bring to mind not produce but a slightly overweight woman in a frock with long, tangled hair.

A killer whale kills a trainer in Orlando, and all the quotes in the article are supportive of whales:

Killer whale expert Nancy Black said the whale could have been playing and the incident could have been an accident.

“They are very intelligent creatures. They have emotions, and feelings. Maybe it was unhappy in the situation, maybe it was bored,” Black said.

But this particular Orca has killed before:

Tilikum, the whale believed to be involved in Wednesday’s incident, was also involved in the death of a part-time trainer in Canada in 1991.

In 1999, a 27-year-old South Carolina man somehow entered a whale tank at SeaWorld Orlando after park hours and drowned. Daniel Dukes, who was carrying false identification, was found dead with a bite below his waist, according to autopsy results. He was bitten by Tilikum.

If we were a civilization on the upswing, Tilikum would be lighting lamps in Florida tomorrow night. But we’re not, so this beast will get passed along to another park and will lie low for a couple years before it snaps up another extra from the human race.

(Link seen on Althouse.)

Sorry for the light posting the last couple of days, but I am sick like the dog, again. Having children is like managing a medieval urban rat rodeo with accompanying exotic coughing flea chorus. I’ve been sick more times this year than I have been in the past decade.

Now pardon me while I wrap a blanket around myself again and watch yet another piece of children’s programming.