Torrefaction

So, the new basement bathroom was finished a few months ago.  We decided to do without a tub, because we have a decent bathtub in the upstairs bathroom.  Of course I wanted a family-size jacuzzi as well as a shower, but we don't have that big of a house or that much money, so we ended up with a nice normal-size bathroom with a BIG walk-in shower with a built-in bench, so I can sit down to shave my legs. Ahhhhh.

A week after the downstairs bathroom was finished, the bathtub upstairs decided to spring a leak in the outflow pipe, pouring cups of water down the wall of the NEW bathroom.  Houses and cars enjoy screwing with their owners.  So the bathtub has been unusable while we noodled around figuring out if our skills were up to doing the plumbing job ourselves.  We finally decided that they weren't, so we had a plumber out yesterday morning and he replaced the outflow pipe and took care of a couple of other things and all is well now.  Price: four hundred and fifty samoleans.

While that was going on, I broke off a hunk of one of my back molars, by eating a cracker.  That tooth has been mostly made of metal filling material for 20+ years now.  The remaining enamel was mostly icky gray color due to staining from the metal.  Apparently I got a fresh cavity in there someplace, and so part of the enamel just cracked off. Those of you in your late 30's and up already know what this means, right?  Oh yes, I get to have a crown! 

A crown, for those of you lucky enough not to know this yet, is basically a prosthetic tooth.  They saw the old busted tooth down to the gum line, and then they mold what's left and then stick a temporary crown in there.  After a couple weeks of not chweing on the temporary crown (which begs the question, why stick it in there? It's my back molar, nobody can see it) the new, permanent crown is ready, and they pull out the temporary and glue in the permanent one. 

Dental work always sucks, but I really drew the short straw yesterday.  My regular dentist takes that day off, so I went to someone else.  He was nice enough, but when I said "I don't get numb with novocaine" he didn't have an alternate drug like my regular dentist; he just gave me SEVEN shots of the stuff.  Even then I wasn't totally numb and since a crown involves drilling away pretty much your entire tooth, well, OW. But that was the easy part. 

See...I have a thing about folks putting stuff in my mouth.  For certain fun activities, I've learned to work with the concept, but for the dentist...well, I'm still not very ok with it.  Breathing, for me, is a fundamental form of self-expression.  It's important to me.  It's important to my subconscious, which doesn't listen when I explain to it that the rubbery tooth molding glop filling my mouth is a good thing, and that four minutes of keeping my jaw clamped tight around it isn't really very long at all.  You know you're having a bad day when the single thing you can be proud of is that you merely retched and drooled on yourself in front of total strangers, rather than vomiting on yourself in front of total strangers.

And then I got to write them a check for (after insurance) five hundred and seventy bucks.