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celebrating with Triscuits
Saturday, September 6 2014
For five or six years now, I've had an occasional twanging pain from the molars on the left side of my mouth, molars that all were filled by a drill-happy Iranian dentist in West Los Angeles fourteen years ago. That twanging had gradually gotten worse and worse through the years, and for the past six month or so, I have avoided chewing food on the right side of my mouth. Today, I accidentally chewed something on the right side of my mouth and had the usual twang of severe dental pain. But then a weird feeling lingered, a feeling that suggested something was stuck in my teeth. So I took out the trusty professional dental pick that I keep at my Woodchuck computer workstation and proceeded to pick and prod at the gaps and voids in my teeth. And then something odd happened. A chunk of tooth fell out of my mouth. It was about the size and shape of a lemon seed. It was discolored on one side but didn't have any particular smell. Running my tongue along my teeth, I found the chunk had come off the inside of my 2nd top right molar, the one next to the crumbling ruin of the wisdom tooth that received a root canal (but no crown). That tooth was now more sensitive to heat and cold, but I found that chewing food on the right side no longer caused any discomfort. I celebrated by eating a half box of rice Triscuits, enthusiastically chewing on both sides of my mouth. It was so great to get the right side of my chewing apparatus back!
That guy down on Hurley Mountain Road who has been trying to capture Phoebe, the three legged cat who escaped into the forest back in June, called today to say he would be trying again to capture her this evening. He said he hadn't wanted to use the trap, because he didn't want to piss her off. Apparently she is super smart, though she has a weakness for wet food. For whatever reason, his attempt tonight ended in failure, but it's looking increasingly likely that Phoebe will soon be back in our upstairs bathroom.
Down in the greenhouse basement, I've been working to clear the rock all the way down to the latest flat level discovered in the rock (some 5.5 feet down from the original bedrock surface). Sometimes when I removed rock, it ate into the support for a large nodule of rock (a mix of shale and bluestone) that stands precariously near the north end of the girder that holds up the wooden floor over the eastern half of the downstairs. It seemed prudent to reduce the size of that nodule (which weighs hundreds of pounds) so that it would be less of a risk should it some day topple over. So I began removing the easy bits, many of which could be plucked off by hand. Unfortunately, though, it is part of the rock that the floor-supporting girder rests on, so if it were to be completely removed, the girder would have a risk of collapsing. For now, I removed the loose bits and pried out some larger pieces, but there is still a coherent stack of rocks between the core of the earth and the north end of that important girder holding up the floor.
This evening, I smoked some of my dwindling stash of marijuana for the first time in months just because it seemed like the sort of thing I should do while Gretchen is in Toronto. Meanwhile, the laboratory was full of critters. Today Celeste the kitten took an interest in chunks of moss harvested from the north end of the house. She brought them into the laboratory and batted them around on the floor. They were heavy, cold, and wet like dead animals, and initially I thought they were hair balls. But then I saw that they were bright green on one side.
Tonight it rained solidly for the first time in weeks. It was enough precipitation to cause me to get everything out of the excavation in the greenhouse basement on the chance that it might flood.
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