I went to the dentist two days ago for a cleaning. While I was there, he said one of my molars that had lots of fillings in it was breaking apart and had decay in it. He said it needed to be crowned. Dang. It’s the lower left side of my mouth again. (Warning: Clicking that link leads to a closeup picture of my mouth.) On my way out, the front desk person asked what time of day I needed for an appointment. I said I needed afternoon. She said that normally I would have had to wait for January, but it just so happened that someone had just called in and canceled for yesterday. Dang.
I was dreading this dentist visit more than usual. The tooth that needed crowning is the last one in the back. I’d have to open my mouth really wide. That’s the hard part for me. My jaw muscles always hurt.
It took lots of drilling, five molds of my teeth, and an extra round of numbing. At one point the dentist said: “You have a really strong tongue.” At first, I thought it was a compliment. Then I thought that maybe what he really meant was: “Keep your stupid tongue out of the way.” But I now have a temporary crown in.
Here’s something for the memory archive: temporary crowns are like sandpaper and damage my tongue. My tongue ends up hurting more than my teeth or gums. I smoothed this one out with some fine-grit sandpaper. Remember to do this immediately when you get home next time you get a crown, Brad. Remember.
Yesterday was Memory Quiz Day in my Religion classes. I tell my students that after they finish their quiz, they should put it face down on their desk. I also say that if they want to write or draw on the back while they’re waiting for others to finish, that would be okay.
One of my sixth graders drew a portrait of me on his quiz. He showed it to me after he was done. I think it’s very interesting to see what an amateur drawing of you looks like, because without photographic drawing skills, people tend to draw caricatures. Your main features are exaggerated. You learn what thing draws peoples’ attention first.
So what do I see? I still have noticeable hair on the top of my head. I’m smiling. And I have a lot of eyelashes.
My banana trees are bigger than they’ve ever been. The wet summer was good to them. I’m using a banana leaf in chapel today, so I wanted to show a picture of me standing next to the trees. They’re truly gigantic, so I had to post a picture here too.
I’m showing the giant banana leaf and a tiny sedum leaf and talking about differences between people. The first part of Romans 15 is the text. It should be fun to drag a leaf to school. I didn’t want to cut it yesterday and let it get all dried out, so I’ll be going out in the dark this morning to cut it. I hope I don’t scare Yard Cat too badly.
Yesterday I think I proved that I don’t gratuitously kill rodents rabbits.
I had just left for school in the morning, and saw something moving in the street. It was a rabbit. It was running toward my truck instead of away from it. As I got closer, I figured it would dash to the right or left, but it didn’t. It was coming straight for me. I did something that surprised me: I braked.
I’m assuming the rabbit got away unharmed. I didn’t hear any thumps or see its broken body in the street. Am I a softy? Maybe I just didn’t want rabbit blood on the undercarriage of my truck because it could cause rust or something.
There’s a new Prince of Persia game out! Actually, I think it’s been out for a while, but I’m not real current on video games anymore. Hmmm… that makes me kind of sad. Anyway, I was at Best Buy yesterday and saw this new Prince of Persia game for Xbox 360. I last played Prince of Persia, as you may or may not recall, in 2007. I wondered out loud if it was the last game. It wasn’t!
So far, I’ve only played it a couple of hours. That breaks down to about $15 per hour. But the more I play it, the cheaper this entertainment gets! Can it get cheaper than the per-hour price of cable TV? I doubt it. But I’ll give it a go…
