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tooth-loosening bite of bread
Sunday, March 27 2016
Bright and early at 10:00am, even before Gretchen had left for her weekly shift at the Golden Notebook in Woodstock, I had my weekly mentorship session with my mentee. In the past, he's shown zero inclination to do any work outside the sessions themselves, though today at least he'd done some homework: successfully cutting up pictures of animals and putting them on a transparent background so they could be used as avatars in this game we're building. If he learns nothing else in this mentorship other than how to use Adobe Photoshop, I guess that's really not too bad. For today's session, I had him continue with his image work while I struggled to get the Phaser game framework to successfully update the locations of other avatars (ones not being controlled by the current player). Eventually I got it working, but the network latency was terrible. It's looking like any game using this code will have to be hosted on a local computer and played by players connecting to it across the local network.
Once my mentee was gone, I turned my attention to that web development assignment I'd gotten as part of the interview process for that animal rights organization. By the late afternoon, I'd fixed all the little problems with it and cleaned up the code to the point where I could "ship" it to my interviewer.
Gretchen later asked if I wanted to go out to dinner with her, Susan, and David, but the non-stop socializing over the past four days had taken their toll and all I wanted to do was putter around my laboratory and take a nap.
In other news, today when I took a bite out of some very chewy french bread, I felt my "punk rock" tooth give a little, and after that it seemed to be looser than it had been, wiggling back and forth as much as a sixteenth of an inch. This tooth has a long and terrible history. Back in the fall of 1994, a friend accidentally smashed a chunk off it while dancing with a beer bottle in a mosh pit in Blacksburg, Virginia. The damage was soon fixed with filling material, though the tooth eventually died, turned grey, and then, in the summer of 1998, absessed. (I remember massaging pus from an eruption on my gum during the drive to Ann Arbor that would eventually lead to my meeting of Bathtubgirl.) The absess eventually cleared up on its own, though the tooth didn't receive a root canal until June of 2000. In the spring of 2003, the tooth was fitted with a problematic crown that in 2013 was replaced with a new one. Unfortunately, the untreated abscess destroyed the depths of the tooth's root as well as some of the bone of the socket that holds it, so the tooth hasn't been tightly fixed in my head for at least 18 years. But I've never had a problem using it to bite through tough foods. After today's experience, though, I'm going to have to train myself not to bite such foods using the left side of my mouth. Hopefully the tooth will eventually tighten up somewhat on its own. If only for cosmetic reasons, I'd rather not lose it.
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