Out the window go the beans

2005-02-09 - 11:41 p.m.

I wrote an entry last night, but I was silly and wrote it directly in the Diaryland window so it was lost. And it was bedtime so I didn't have time to rewrite.

But anyway, today was pretty much an all around crummy day. First thing I went into my dentist's office to have him look at my freshly rechipped tooth. I don't know why, but I didn't expect him to do anything but look at it today and perhaps set up an appointment to fix it later. But no, he fixed it today. Actually that's a good thing, but I really hate having dental work done and it wasn't cool. But my tooth is fixed again and hopefully it will last longer this time.

I told you that I think the reason for my tooth chipping is the fact that I have a bad habit of chewing my lips, right? I've tried to quit doing this, but I've never been successful. So I came up with a plan. I made a deal with myself: every time I bite my lip I owe me five push-ups and I'm not allowed to eat unless I'm debt-free. Yesterday I did pretty well and only ended up having to do twenty push-ups. And today I've only done five. So yeah, this seems to be working. Again, let's hope it lasts!

OK, so after the dentist, I ran a few errands including the grocery store and the post office and then went to my periodontist's office which is conveniently within walking distance. I actually purposefully chose a dentist not within walking distance just so I wouldn't be tortured by having to pass by them on my way to anywhere, but I didn't really have a choice about my periodontist--this is the one I was referred to. Anyway, I went in hoping that she would look in my mouth and tell me things didn't look so bad after all, we could just wait and see. I didn't seriously believe that would happen, but a girl can hope, right? The first thing this periodontist did was pull down my lower lip, take one glance at my gums and say, "Oh, this looks bad." Great.

So she charged me $175 to poke at my gums for five minutes and then sent me out to make an appointment for surgery. I'm going to have a "free gingival graft." If you want to see what I'm talking about (warning: gross teeth pictures) you can go here. Apparently I have a combination of the first two problems on the page. But they can't fix the first problem until they fix the second. So if cutting off the roof of my mouth and sewing it to the front of my lower teeth doesn't completely sate my desire for oral pain, I can go back and have it done a second time. I made an appointment to have it done in mid-March. I'm so scared of this, though. I start crying every time I think of it. And it's really expensive too. And I don't have any vacation time from work. I'm hopefully going to talk to my scheduler tomorrow and see if she'll be able to accomodate me at all.

So after all this I got myself home and had a good cry and then tried to clean myself up for work. When I got to work it was really slow. I hate when it's really slow. I'd rather it be really busy. But you have to be careful what you wish for. The whole computer system went down for several hours right about the middle of my shift. The orders came rolling in but there was nothing we could do about it. We sent up the urgent stuff by writing out the labels by hand, but basically everything in the hospital is computerized so we were at a pretty good stand still for quite some time. And then the computers came back up and suddenly we had to catch up from all the down time. I thought for sure I'd have to stay extra but we worked hard and it was a slow night underneath it all so we were able to catch up pretty much by the time it was time for me to go. So no overtime for me. Too bad.

And then I came home and made cookies to take to work tomorrow. I played around with the recipe a bit. I used applesauce instead of butter and then got so excited about it I chopped up an apple and tossed the bits in too. The dough was so yummy I'm surprised they ever made it to cookies, but I'm not sure how well the final product turned out. I think maybe the applesauce caused them to be a bit on the rubbery side.