A Whole New Year

Ups and downs and ins and outs and twists to make Stephen King proud populated the last year. Great friends were seen again, new ones were made, and towards the end I found a man who can make me laugh like a crazy person, smile like a fool, and who can also challenge me in several different ways.

I lost track of a couple friends, and lost a few to the grave, along with a near brother that I will spend the rest of my life missing.

2011 promises to bring a new set of challenges and decisions, its own collection of laughter and tears. Hopefully more of the former than the latter.

With all of the stresses and tears of the last year, I could very easily say "I can't take another year like that one."

But you know what? I can. It's what I do, I take everything life throws at me and I make things work anyway. Sometimes it resembles a simian making amorous overtures to a football, but it works.

And though I'll hope for a year with more joy than sorrow, I don't think it's so wrong of me to be proud of the fact that no matter what 2011 brings, I'll wrestle it to the ground and make it my proper little bitch, because that's what I do.

I'll leave you with an Irish blessing that I've always loved, as my wish for all of you for the new year:

May the road rise up to meet you,
May the wind always be at your back,
And may the Lord hold you in the palm of his hand.

Whether you're religious or not, that right there has a certain ring to it. Here's to a fresh year, let's make it a great one.

New Toys

So I got an iPod Touch for Christmas (thank you fam!) and I've been playing with it since. It's actually a rather handy little piece of tech, but so far, other than having a sound track at work to help me keep from losing my mind it's mainly been the world's most expensive Scrabble game.

I've been challenging everyone I can think of to games of Words With Friends, because it's fun, and because it also helps keep me from losing my mind at work. Of course Until recently I've also been on vicodin, so my skills haven't really been up to par.

This has resulted in me losing several games.

DM: You know, we really ought to up the stakes on this.

Me: You only say that cause you're beating me by a bajillion points.

DM: Yep.

It's a good thing I'm well versed in smartass and enjoy it, or he'd be toast.

QOTD: Christmas Edition

SIL: "No more automatic weapons until their ages are in the double digits, ok?"


"Santa" brought the nephews a belt-fed full-auto Nerf gun.... because Santa is awesome like that.

Merry Christmas, Everyone

I'm just going to do a quick update and let you get back to your holiday gatherings:

Thanks to a few very kind, very generous people, The Nephews will be getting some extra Santa gifts... I'll get pictures tomorrow when they're opened and post them.

Mouth is healing, slowly. Stitches inside the mouth feel REALLY weird especially when one is across the hole where a tooth used to be and vibrates like a harp string whenever you rinse, which is often because infections suck. When the oral surgeon says "you'll have some pain in the joint of your jaw" he ain't kidding, and I'm not sure if that's because of how the nerves in that area work or if he just pried my mouth open that hard. Most of the pain at this point is actually there, rather than in the area where the tooth actually came out... the teeth in front of the dear departed are pretty much only tender when I chew.

Vicodin is my friend. This is the first time I've had to take vicodin that I had to regulate things so that I was still functional, last time I was able to just say to hell with it, take the full pill and pass out for a few hours. There's been some trial and error finding the balance between being in pain and grinning stupidly at customers telling them their shirt is preeetttyyy.

Doing my cig count is kind of interesting too, since my attention span has shrunk considerably due to the drugs.

"Twenty two, twenty four, twenty six, man I want some steak but I can't chew it but I'm so sick of soft foods except we'll have pie at Christmas so that'll be good.... shit where was I?"

Anyway, I'm finding it way too easy to ramble so I'll end here and tell you all to have a Merry Christmas, hug your loved ones, and eat something crunchy for me.

FarmGirl's Continuing Adventures In Advanced Dentistry

Longtime readers probably know to what I'm referring, and if you don't, ask someone or go look it up, I don't feel like doing a recap.

Last week I broke a tooth. Since it was Friday night, I wasn't going to get in to see my dentist till Monday at the earliest anyway, I decided to go ahead and go for Tuesday, which I already had scheduled off. I could suck it up that long.

Called in made the appointment, requested the chill pill that keeps me from running screaming from the building a projectile vomiting all over the parking lot... and got told they can't call in a script because it's been too long since they've seen me. Call my GP and get the script. I got this information Monday afternoon (because I sleep during the mornings since I work nights) and would have to leave for my appointment Tuesday morning no later than six am.

Yeah that wasn't going to work out on the whole happy pill thing. I know my dentist. I like my dentist. I figured I could reach down and grab a pair and get through a crown or an extraction with him, if I had to.

Then I got there, and he looked at it, said "that's gotta hurt" took some xrays and basically said I have an infection in all of my back molars, both sides. Tooth had to come out.

Now, the last time I was there we wound up with one dentist sitting on my chest and the other doing some kind of voodoo dance to extract some of my teeth, because the roots are *strong*.

In the interim, my favorite dentist has had a heart attack, his son (the one who did the voodoo dance last time) wasn't in the office Tuesday, and he basically said "I can't do it. We're sending you to an oral surgeon."

That totally helped my whole "don't freak out" mantra.

So after five minutes or so in the parking lot trying mostly unsuccessfully not to hyperventilate we headed over to the oral surgeon's office. Where we waited. And waited. And Waited.

Actually we waited less than an hour but to me it felt like forever.

The nurse came out and explained to us that the surgeon, after looking at the pretty pictures of my teeth and hearing about how I was behaving in his waiting room (pretty much like a scared rabbit, shaking in my seat with occasional leaps to the bathroom or outside) had decided that deep sedation was the best way to go.

It's expensive, but it's best, she said. You're more relaxed and things go better, she said.

Looking back I think the surgeon was afraid I was going to wind up backed into a corner and biting. Which may not have been all that far off the mark.

So yeah, I got knocked out, and I gotta say, as far as minimizing stress and keeping me from freaking the hell out in the middle of a procedure when I haven't been given a mild sedative, it's the way to go.

The worst part of the whole thing was the waiting, and the groping for a vein for the IV. Apparently I have difficult veins, which I didn't know before this because I'd never had an IV.

He wound up going in the back of my hand which actually hurt me less than the playing around he'd been doing in the crook of my arm.

Then he pushed the "mild" sedative and I approached that state of "ok doc you can cut my head off now just put it back when you're done"... then he pushed the knockout drugs and the next thing I knew, they were waking me up telling me I'd done great and it was time to go now.

Best. Drunk. Ever.

On the flip side, stitches in your mouth feel really weird, my stubborn nature will overcome not sleeping in over 24hrs, then being knocked out for an hour and woken back up, because I have to do Christmas shopping damnit!

Oh, and I look like I took a bat to the right side of my face... no surface bruising but it's swollen like crazy.

I plan to say only "you should see the other guy" when people ask. From the sounds of things I'll be seeing the OS at least once more, and I don't know whether he's going to just sedate me or knock me out for that one, but we'll see.

Meanwhile, vicodin is my friend.

*ETA:

I have a whole new reason to love the oral surgeon aside from the "lets just knock you out and when you wake up it'll all be over with" bit... a few moments ago my phone rang, and it was his office number. I figured they were calling to make sure the pain meds were adequate and I was right... except it was the surgeon himself... "How you doing? Pain medication doing enough? No excessive bleeding or swelling? Any questions now that you're not doped?" .... Yeah, I officially approve of this guy.

These Are Awesome

Due to lack of actual content, I was cruising the web today and came up with an excellent linky AND thinky.

Meet Vi Hart, who, if she ever decided to become a math teacher, would get me to actually take another math class.

Check out the doodles section of her site, that's where I've been engrossed. I have no idea what the maths actually are behind this stuff working but they do and they're fun, even if you aren't artistically inclined.

I've been playing with pencil and fountain pen for a couple of hours now... I'll probably move on to some anagrams later, just because I do words better than math or drawing, but the doodle games are an excellent diversion.

A New Addition

I'd like to introduce ya'll to a new cast member for the tales and stories here, someone who will probably play a large enough role that he gets his own introduction and his own nickname.

He's going to be an invaluable source of snark and giggles, at least for me.

Ya'll say hi to Darlin' Man. We're... dating? Seeing each other? Doing an environmental impact study on the eventual possibility of our cohabiting? (We're not entirely sure that any one locale can handle the two of us for an extended period. The snark seems to wilt the plants.)

Whatever you want to say that we're doing, we're doing it together, and I really like that.

He also reads the blog, though he doesn't participate, so ya'll behave.