I nearly forgot to put a title on this post.
The way the last couple of weeks have been going, it's a safe bet that you can guess how Friday went. If you guessed 'more dental work', then you hit the nail squarely on the head. It has been two weeks (now a bit more than that) since my root canal, and I had gone back to Family Dentistry to get the molar in question cleaned out, built up, and have a temporary crown installed. Ordinarily, this isn't such a big deal because once the nerve's gone (i.e., post-root canal) you can pretty much dig around inside the tooth without a whole lot of trouble, but for some reason I kept feeling... things... down below that tooth, or at least early on I did.
I'm really not sure what they were. My working hypothesis is that the heat generated by the drill bit was traveling down into the jawbone past the region that had been numbed, and into the places that hadn't been knocked out by the novocaine. The molar in question is quite a bit closer to the front of my mouth than usual, which is why this was a new experience. After turning up the flow of cooling water a couple of notches, however, that problem was pretty much solved.
What really got me was the modifications that had to be made to my gumline to fit the temporary crown over the built-up post. I realized that things were amiss when I kept feeling Dr. Hong packing that little black thread down under the gumline to push the flesh back, and I don't normally feel that. Or, if you want me to be perfectly accurate, it was whatever he was doing immediately before that which hurt like hell. I found out after the fact that he had to trim away part of the gumline to get a good fit, which is what I think I kept feeling. By the time I looked in the mirror after getting out of the chair, I got a good look at where he'd been cutting and poking around.
I'll be honest with you, if he'd told me what he was going to do before he started cutting away bits of skin I'd probably have broken down crying because I'm just about at my wit's end when it comes to going to the dentist these days. I'm pretty much resigned to losing about half of my existing teeth by the time my body turns thirty-five regardless of what I do. I'm also concerned about my remaining sickleave because I seem to be burning through quite a bit of it these days, even though I make up the hours before and after. I'll have to go in to work and talk to my boss about it soon. I didn't do much on Friday night, just some reading and laying around watching the Food Network because going under the drill for any reason always knocks me out. At least when the chair's all the way back, it minimizes the pressure on my lower spine.
While I was passed out on Saturday morning, Lyssa and Hasufin journeyed westward to visit our local farmer's market, just a few miles away. The thing about farmer's markets is that you really should get there early if you want to get your best pick of the produce. On the weekends, I generally don't get up before 0800 unless the situation involves long distance travel or firearms, so sad to say I missed out on this particular trip. I was privileged to reap the benefits several hours later, however, in the form of tasty farm butter, fresh strawberries, and a small spinach and cheese quiche (courtesy of Trader Joe's and the freezer). Coupled with some coffee from the French press I rescued from my office a couple of weeks back, it was a pleasant way to start the day, indeed. Saturday night was the reboot of the Mage: The Ascension campaign that went into hibernation late last year when all of us got too busy to sit down and game, as life around the holidays is wont to do. To get things rolling again we had a couple of new players join in, namely, Jarin's newly Awakened Dreamspeaker, Jason's cross-dressing, shapeshifting Son of Ether alchemist, and to make things even more interesting a three hundred year old Ventrue vampire whose electricity was inadvertantly shut off, played by Laurelinde. Mix that in with a prelude that took place in a strip club that used to be a gay bar, a stolen BMW doing 95 in third gear up route 95 in Maryland, and a precocious eight year old innocently wreaking havoc using a cracked communications satellite, and we had a night that was as entertaining as it was hilarious. Later in the evening, Hasufin arrived with chocolate covered espresso beans and homemade strawberry ice cream in hand to join in the fun and games as Something slewed around the state of Maryland causing trouble whenever it crossed paths with the innocent. It's nights like these that make me proud to have so many good players: I had just as good a time running storylines off the cuff as I did watching what the players were going to do next. By the end of the night, we'd eaten too much pizza, gotten torqued on way too many espresso beans, and laughed ourselves silly.
Next up: Writing part two of this adventure and seeing how the players handle it.
Sunday brought with it... not much of anything. Because I seem to have taken two days out of the week to recuperate and recharge my power cells through reading and contemplation of my belly hair (because navels are so 90's), I didn't accomplish a whole lot of anything. I caught up on my reading, did the dishes a few times, enjoyed Lyssa's cornmeal pancakes with four-berry jam (the lightest, fluffiest things I've ever had the pleasure of eating!), and watched television. Later in the evening Lyssa and I tried to go to the mall to wander around a bit after dinner but discovered that most everything closes at 1900 local time, so all we could really do was go to Barnes and Noble to browse the new books. Books being my weakness, I walked away with a pair of new releases that I'll get around to reading... I'm guessing sometime before the end of 2008. Time will tell.
It's interesting: I sit down and get a decent amount of writing done, and then start petering off. I wonder if it's because my temporal memory is strongest at the front and weakest at the back, or maybe it's because I slow down as the weekend draws to a close (and don't want to bore people with too much in the way of in character game happenings). Or maybe I should pack it in and get to bed.