Okay, having gotten the papers and information and rate structure from the Valuator Guy, we can now say authoritatively that it's going to cost us as much or more to have Mom's stuff valued as it's actually worth.*
This is a problem.
I mean, it's not like we want to just throw the stuff away, okay? But the VG's list of charges made it pretty clear that we're going to wind up paying somewhere in the neighborhood of $800-$1000. Leaving aside the fact that neither of us really has $1000 to spare at the moment, this strikes me as quite a racket.
He charges you $100/hour for research to figure out if what you have is worth anything? Excuse me? Am I not hiring him as an expert and do I not expect him to know about things? I can look stuff up online or get library books and do research, without his assistance.
I'm not sure what we're going to wind up doing. I still think taking the coins in to RMC is a good idea and plan to do that next week. I'm betting we can take some of the other stuff in to one of the local "antique malls" and get someone there to take them on consignment or something.
I'm going to think about that for a while.
___________________________
* Leaving aside the highly unlikely possibility that there's some kind of buried treasure in it all.
Boom!
That's a weird way to wake up in the morning. I know it's weird, because it's how I woke up yesterday morning. Our nearest transformer blew a fuse.
No power. No internets.
No coffee. I tried making it in the French press with hot water from the faucet. Ugh. Eventually the R.C. came back from her morning walk and said the power across the street was on, so I walked over to Starbucks. On the way back, I had to fight off a caffeine-deprived couple in our parking lot. They were disappointed I hadn't brought enough for everyone.
This experience taught me things. Things of little moment, but things.
#1 - The alarm clock in my bedroom needs a new battery if I really want to be able to rely on the "battery back-up" feature.
#2 - A bathroom without a window is dark, even at 8:00 in the morning. My habit of keeping a candle in there for those once-in-three-years blackouts is a good one.
#3 - Given coffee, I'm perfectly happy to survive without power for a few hours in the morning. I'd have been a bit happier if the living room fan had been working (lovely, cool morning outside but no way to draw the air inside) but I curled up in the bright morning light and read a book and life was fine.
Don't let me mislead you. The power outage only lasted for about an hour, so my willingness to live without Mod Cons wasn't severely tested.
After that, I accomplished significant things yesterday. I finished the inventory of the coin collection, pulled out and sorted the postcards with old stamps on them, and started the inventory of the "miscellaneous" box o'stuff. I got the notes written for all of the things I'm planning to ship to people. I got a couple of the boxes out of the floor and actually shipped. I gassed up my car, did three loads of laundry, and carried out a huge box o'trash.
Then, having tripped over the amazon.com website late last week and accidentally ordered five new books, I settled in to read for a while.
This morning? No boom! So far.
All I've done is drink coffee and surf the net.
Babble about the sorting of Mom's boxes and whatnot behind the cut, since I doubt any of you are that interested.
That's the fashion in which I continue to live.
I start the day with roaming through the job sites and sending in resumes for those jobs (three today) that sound marginally interesting. I check my email, scan the headlines, swallow several mean remarks about the ghastly mess Bush&Co are making of our country (I am not going to get sucked back into politiblogging*), read my email, surf through the blogs and journals of a few friends, and then I'm usually offline for most of the rest of the day.
I go to the grocery store a couple of times a week (if you're practically living on fresh fruit, you need to make at least two trips a week to keep stocked up) and hit the Farmers' Market on Saturdays (Rocky Ford cantaloupes! The world's most fabulous peaches!).
Other than that, I hoard money. Knowing I have expensive dental work in my immediate future helps me control my urge to cheer myself up with new books and toys (although it didn't stop me from having a little amazon.com "accident" the other day).
I clean sporadically (kitchen and bathroom yesterday), tidy occasionally (that drafting table in the bedroom is out of control again), and do a load or two of laundry once or twice a week.
I watch some DVDs occasionally (just finished S1 and S2 of the new Doctor Who series again and while David Tennant is good, I really loved Christopher Eccleston and I wish he'd been with us longer) and a little television (okay, mostly just Doctor Who and the show I mentioned before, Clean House.) (And sometimes Jeopardy. I love Jeopardy. I mage $30k the other day!)
I watched that show Dail mentioned, the one on BBCAmerica. "How Clean Is your House?" I was expecting a British version of Clean House. I was not expecting to be treated to the sight of a family living in a place they said had not been cleaned in 16 years--or close-up views of a bathroom that proved it. It was the most sincerely disgusting thing I've seen in years (and the primary reason I tore apart my kitchen and bathroom and cleaned them yesterday).
Sporadically, I tidy. On today's schedule is the final sorting of All Those Boxes in the living room. I need to sort out the Things To Be Shipped** (so I know what boxes I need) from the Things To Be Appraised And Sold. The R.C. is pretty firm about all of those coins needing to go into the To Be Sold category, even though I still think they're cool to look at.
I guess she's right. It's not like I'm going to burst forth as a major coin collector or anything, so there's no point in keeping even just a handful of them for that once every year or two moment when I might want to look at them. Technically they were left to her, so if she wants to get rid of them, that's her choice.
Anyhow. We got the name of an appraiser a week or so ago, from a woman working in an antique place. For some reason the R.C. is convinced that we need to be careful not to be robbed by this person. While I agree that having an inventory of the stuff we turn over to them is just sensible, I can't understand why she thinks a bonded and insured firm is going to risk their business and reputation snagging any of our not-very-valuable junk?
If the entire pile o'stuff, aside from the Hummels, is worth $500, I'll be very surprised. (The Hummels are worth about $5k at retail, but we won't be selling them at retail and I figure we'll be lucky beyond lucky to find someone willing to take all of them off our hands for $1-2k).
Still. I made the commitment that I'd handle sorting and disposing of the stuff so, while she's more than willing to help, I think it's time and past time I dealt with these last few boxes.
And then I read and read and read.
Having finished all of the available Tolkien, I picked up Spacehounds of IPC at the used bookstore the other day and that got me started re-reading all of my E. E. "Doc" Smith books again.
Long-time readers know that I have a fondness for Golden Age SF (and detective) stories. I'm regretting that most of my SF&Fantasy is in boxes in storage but I know that in order to bring them out, I'm going to have to choose some hundreds of other volumes to pack away.
I'm not sure I'm ready for that yet.
And yet--I know that storage unit is in my immediate future. I have boxes full o'stuff (of the nonbook variety) that need to be sorted and disposed of. Old financial papers to be shredded, old school yearsbooks & debris to be tossed out, that kind of thing.
As soon as I have the living room floor cleaned of the current load of boxes, I'll get started.
____________________
* I actually started politiblogging during a previous stint of unemployment when I had lots of time, not a lot of money, and a lot of energy to burn off. But that was PM (pre-meds) and now that I have my thyroid balanced and no longer suffer (enjoy?) those manic bouts of frenetic mental energy, it all seems so futile....)
____________________
** I've decided to ship the detritus of Dad's army career to my brother. Of the four of us, I think he's the only one that might be interested in having that kind of thing.
And, Jonathan, a closer examination of the pictures revealed that most of them were taken in the camp "near Kimpo" and "Yong Dung Poe" although his spelling isn't reliable. There are a few from Seoul and a couple vaguely labeled "in Japan" but I think that's about as much 'location' information as we're likely to get.
He drove a truck at a quarry for the 811th Engineer Aviation Battalion, which was apparently a "SCARWAF" (Special Category Army with Air Force) unit that helped build and maintain runways. I found some information -- here (scroll down to "Background on SCARWAF") and there -- online.
So, stuff has been happening.
Not a lot of stuff, but stuff. Sending in resumes, taking calls, even scheduling interviews.
I have two on Friday and (go, me!) one is a second-round interview for a place I think I'd really like to work. The money isn't fabulous (about $7k less than I wanted to start) but it's not in Boulder and seems like a nice group of folks. Eleven employees which counts, in my recent professional life, as a huge number of coworkers. The work sounds reasonably interesting--it's a nonprofit association, not an environment I'm familiar with but not a problem.
I'm less excited about Friday's other interview and if they hadn't emailed me three times and called me once I wouldn't have remembered sending them a resume at all or bothered to respond when they sent me an email inviting me to schedule an interview. The money's closer to what I wanted, the location is equally as attractive, but the company's business is a yawner.
The recruiter from last week? I did a phone interview with her, a follow-up interview with one of her coworkers, and eventually we all decided I wasn't suited for that position. (I was so not excited about the location.)
Hmmm, what else? I think I killed one of my marigold plants, my last remaining sunflower is spouting a third blossom, I've failed to quit smoking twice this summer, and I've developed an absolute mania for a show called Clean House on the Style Channel and have been watching a fair amount of (gasp!) daytime tv in the last week.
What is it? People send in a video proving that they live in absolute chaos, anything approaching a pigsty, and this group goes in, makes them throw stuff away, makes them sort out 'treasured' possessions for a garage sale, then takes the proceeds and uses the money to redecorate the house, organizing what's left of the 'stuff' and usually putting in new furniture.
I'm not sure why I've become so fascinated by the show, but I have. It's like Changing Rooms except that the drama comes when the crew make these hoarders and packrats and compulsive shoppers turn loose of their debris. People fight tooth and nail to keep the dumbest shit. Four year-old calendars, five broken vacuum cleaners, 22 beanie babies, dozens of pairs of shoes or housecoats, ratty old posters, fifteen ugly lamps, gifts they received five years ago that were never taken out of the boxes, etc. They curse and cry and carry on ridiculously. Over broken things, as often as not.
And they fight the crew.
Even though they had to submit a video and agree to the whole process, they fight like mad.
One family was so acquisitive that even after five commercial-sized dumpster loads of trash and a massive garage sale where everything that didn't sell was hauled away on a charity truck, their entire basement was still full of bins and bins and bins of stuff they refused to turn loose of. (At an estimate, I'm guessing 50 big bins.)
It's--perilously close to "reality television," a genre I abhor, but Niecy and the rest of the crew just fascinate me. How they can go into such pigsties week after week.... (Also, I'm in decorator-love with the designer, Mark, who turns out some fabulous rooms.
So, yeah, I guess that means I've been watching a lot of television.
The Fabulous New Hairdo (picture somewhere in an entry below) continues to please. I'm not sure it's the most attractive hairstyle I've ever had but it sure is nice and cool and easy to take care of!
And, if anyone's wondering, the Dental Man appointment went--fine. They took the series of x-rays and want me to make an appointment with the hugely expensive "specialist" to discuss my options. And another tooth is giving the occasional twinge, so I need a new filling, I can just tell.
Teeth. Ugh.
Other than that--the usual. Reading.
This past week? The Hobbit. That was fun, so I reread the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Then I reread the Silmarillion and now I'm about halfway through Unfinished Tales. I've been feeling very Tolkien this week.
I sure am boring when I write blog entries at 11:00 at night.
As I was driving myself off to visit the Dental Man this morning, I got yet another call from yet another recruiter, urgently wanting to talk to me.
I left her a voicemail after I got home. We'll see what kind of job opportunity she has in mind after she calls me back.
I am so popular this week!
Posted by AnneZook at 02:06 PM | Comments (0)Aren't we Little Miss Popularity today?
After yesterday's preliminary phone interview (from a recruiter) for one job, I spent an hour this morning doing an online "assessment" (and if anyone can tell me how algebra and word problems are relevant to my job, I would appreciate it) as a prelude to another phone interview this afternoon.
The testing process was interrupted by a phone call from yet another prospective employer, wanting to schedule me for an interview next Tuesday.
Still! The calls are coming in! People want me! Or, at least, they want to check me out and think about wanting me, which is a start.
I think it's probably The Hair. Psychically, the world can just feel that I got a new haircut and don't look like the same shaggy dog I did when the week started and consequently the world is more interested in knowing me.
I wasn't terribly coherent in this morning's phone call--I'm afraid my brain was too busy wrestling with whether Jack or Jill or Mary made the most money if Jack makes double what Mary makes and Jill makes Mary's salary plus $8/hour. I suspect that Jack, being the only man in the bunch, made the most, but the answer sent didn't offer that option. (Word problems? At my age?)
There were at least four math questions that didn't seem to offer any sensible answers, but I'm not good at math, so the problem was undoubtedly my imperfect remembrance of my misunderstood math classes 30 years ago. (One of them I finally left blank in complete frustration.) Many of them seemed irrelevant to real life.
4(-2)2+8(-2)(2(-2)+6=
-11(3/2)(.12)(-12))=
What the assessment program really needed was an answer option for, "who cares."
And what's up with this one:
FROG is to DINOSAUR as WHALE is to [BIRD, FISH, FOX]
I mean, what is that all about? Whales are mammals, so "fish" isn't really the right option except it's better than the alternatives because a whale really isn't like a fox unless they were thinking about the mammal thing, in which case fox was the correct answer, but dinosaurs were, I think both mammalian and reptilian (although maybe not because I'm no dinosaur expert and maybe dinosaurs were before mammals and I really do need to do something about my grossly inadequate knowledge of--stuff), so the frog-dinosaur thing wasn't necessarily about that kind of thing and in the end I just chose "fish" because I didn't have enough information to make a more informed selection. Also, some people don't know whales are mammals. (Are all whales mammals? I'm pretty sure they are. When I get a job again, I really should buy a book.)
Anyhow.
Mostly they were selecting for "sales personality" and although the temptation to cheat was fairly strong (it's so easy to select the correct answers if you know what someone is searching for), in the end I answered all of the questions pretty honestly so I don't expect today's interview will lead to anything. I don't have a sales personality and I'm proud of that fact.
With all of the excitement, I've barely had a chance skim today's job offerings, much less send out any resumes. Today's listings, as you might expect, look tantalizingly full of possibilities. I managed to bookmark eight or nine on my first, hasty sweep through a couple of sites. I hope I'll find time to go through them more carefully later.
I have a dental appointment at 11:00 today (Just a series of x-rays, so no drilling.) before my 3:00 interview, so I don't really have an unlimited amount of free time.
What I do have, I'm giving to you. (Aren't you feeling special?)
Yesterday's used bookstore run netted me three new books for under $10. Not bad. I think I showed remarkable self-restraint.
I have friends (Yes! I do!) who are interested in the store, so I may get to go back soon.
This is one of the good kind of used bookstores. The kind full of little nooks and crannies and hidden corridors and rooms that you have to know about in order to visit. The kind where someday they'll move that stack of half-full cartons of books from in front of that old crooked door and you'll be able to open it and find a whole new series of rooms full of books to buy--or maybe an alternate world where you'll wind up going on a quest to conquer an evil dragon-killing prince and freeing the dragon population from fear and servitude.
That kind of place.
I'm not going mad, though. Just because I have two interviews scheduled doesn't mean I have a job or an income and I'm keeping that firmly in mind. The 15 books I put back yesterday will not be coming home with me any time soon.
I'm actually pretty excited about next Tuesday's interview, though. I like the sound of the organization, I like the location, and I like the sound of the job.
And now, the dentist awaits and I suspect he'd prefer it if I brushed my teeth before showing up.
Life, I mean. It's trundling along as usual around here.
The bathroom needs cleaned, the laundry needs done, I still have a few ads collected in this morning's search of the job sites* that I haven't responded to, I have a stack o'stuff to take to the post office (letters, parcels, etc.), most of which are "late" and yet here I sit, writing boring blog entries.
That's so me these days. (Well, all days.)
So, what's new? Well, after last week's orgy of Going Out To Lunch, I've been very restrained this week. Not a single lunch out! I hit the Farmer's Market on Saturday morning and I've been gorging on Rocky Ford cantaloupes (3 for $6!) and watermelon all this week.
Still, it hasn't been an inexpensive week.
I spent $135 yesterday on my hair. I was sick to death of it, so I went in, had six inches or more chopped off, got it colored, and added (subtle) highlights). I'm not really sure yet if I like it. It's a pretty extreme change.
I've generally avoided having really short hair since that one disastrous cut that revealed that, sans long hair, I look very butch. (Every time I looked in the mirror, I saw my father looking back at me. How is it possible for someone to look exactly like their mother and their father?) This cut isn't quite that extreme and so far I'm loving the idea that I can dry-and-style in five minutes instead of 40.
If I had a job, that would be a massive saving of time in the morning.
(If you care? The Hair.) (Excuse the lack of make-up. I hadn't actually intended to share my face online today.)
The R.C. isn't mad about it. Her only criteria for "good" or "bad" in a haircut is whether or not any hair shows any potential for getting close to covering all or part of one of your eyes. She has a phobia about it or something. Since this cut features a swath of bangs that I need to practice styling to sweep across my forehead, but stay out of my eyes, she's not loving it. I can live with her displeasure, though, since I blew my new 'do dry in 3-1/2 minutes this morning. She knows what I look like, so she doesn't need to look at me.
Tomorrow I'm back to the dentist. To pick up the (grossly expensive) temporary "appliance" I have to wear until the tooth extraction site heals up fully (6 weeks or so) and to have a full set of x-rays so that Dental Man can figure out what else he might want to yank out.
Price tag for this visit: Unknown.
It's been an expensive week and I've barely left the house!
Sigh. I know at least two more have to go. It's very sad to contemplate the impending whack to my credit card.
Dental Man is also very, very anxious to finally undertake capping my front four (top) teeth. He's wanted to do that for years and to be honest, they need it. They're grossly crooked. But caps! So pricey. I'm not sure how to break to him that I really don't feel it would be wise for me to undertake $5k or more of dental work (some of which is cosmetic) before I'm employed. (And yet, looking better might help me get a job, age discrimination or not, no?)
I sure wish I'd gotten over my Dental Phobia at any point in the last ten years when I was employed and had the caps done.
The R.C. wants to go to Halfprice Books today. Part of me is salivating, it's my favorite used bookstore in Denver, and part of me is cowering in fear at the damage I could do myself even at half-price. I've been resisting a growing urge to hit the manga store for the last week. I've only had two new manga books since the Great Unemployment of '07 hit. And only two new "other" books--the coin one and the Hummel one, in the last six weeks. (Oh, yeah, and the Potter book.) I'm having some serious withdrawal pains. Five books in five months! That's a starvation allowance.
For me to avoid general shopping is easy. To try and avoid buying books is so difficult. Mostly I accomplish it by avoiding bookstores altogether. And amazon.com.
And, okay, I still have two or three books I bought before the GU of '07, but one of those I'm still afraid to read (Bradbury's sequel to Dandelion Wine), once I'm almost done with (LeCarré's Absolute Friends), and the other (Secret Societies) was just a "research" book for the novel I'm pretending to write and a waste of money, even at the sellout price of $2.99.
It's probably not a coincidence that most of my "hobbies" and leisure pastimes involve things I have to buy books for.
________________
* Did I mention that I had an interview scheduled for yesterday? I did.
But I didn't go. Monday evening I emailed and cancelled, a thing I almost never do. After researching the company's website and such, I had a bad feeling about it being a churn-and-burn sort of sales organization. I mistrust a company whose website focuses on hiring instead of the service/product they have to offer their client(s). No reputable company that could be considered a "good place to work" should need to do that much hiring.
This week, excitement abounds.
Monday, the R.C. and I caved in and went to see the latest Harry Potter movie. Not because we actually wanted to see it (we've been less-than thrilled with the movie adaptations) but because it's showing at one of our local IMAX theatres and was advertised as 3-D! I love a 3-D experience.
Mostly. This one? Not so much. It's not that I don't have the patience to sit through a movie that's 2 hours and 20 minutes long, because I do, but it has to be a movie I really want to see. I should have thought of that before.
And the 3-D thing? 20 minutes toward the end of the movie. A very truncated fight scene at the Ministry of Magic.
When the lights came up, I popped out of my seat and dashed for the door with a sense of having been released from confinement.
At $13/ticket, I don't recommend the IMAX Potter experience. I didn't really need to see a lot of sweating, teen-aged faces three stories high and I felt like the spectator at a tennis match, swinging my head back-and-forth to try and catch the action happening in different parts of the screen.
Ho-hum.
Yesterday I went with a friend to pick up some Craigslist finds she wanted in nearby Parker, Colorado. First, let me say that Parker has grown a lot since the last time I visited it, 15 or so years ago. It goes to show how clueless I am that I didn't realize it's practically a suburb of Denver now. In fact, we wound up about two miles south of the building where I worked for four years, back around '90.
Neither of us knew precisely where we were going, I have the world's worst sense of direction and am thus unqualified to navigate a turtle across a living room, much less a friend around an unfamiliar town. (There are people who can announce, "I've never been here before" and still navigate you directly to your destination. Those people frighten me.) We squabbled, we sniped at each other, and we enjoyed the occasional bitter silence.
At one point, a plastic piece popped off the open back door of her van and we scurried around in the street, trying to avoid traffic and figure out where it had gone.
Then we went to Target and I availed myself of the bathroom facilities while she bought a shower rod.
Then we went to Whole Foods and ate lunch.
Then she bought fish while I cooed over the Rocky Ford Cantaloupes now available and made plans to come back and buy great armloads later. (I was walking home from Whole Foods and while that's only half a block, half a dozen cantaloupes makes a heavy load.)
A good time was had by all.
As though our dubious friendship hasn't been tested enough for one week, today we're carpooling to Boulder to eat lunch with another friend. Sushi! And she wants to go to some other place she's heard of up there.
I have maps but little faith that today will work out any better than yesterday. (OTOH, yesterday we didn't have a map, so maybe I'm being too pessimistic?) (If I can pull myself together early enough to hit Grease Monkey on the way to her place, maybe I can drive and she'll have to navigate?)
On the Good News front, I got a call back from that agency I applied through a couple of weeks ago. I thought, given the long silence, that I'd been passed over. Turns out that their client had been traveling and only recently became available to review resumes. They loved mine, thought I was fabulous, but overqualified. They thought I'd be bored stiff so--no interview. (I informed the agency that it's been my experience that jobs expand to utilize the capabilities of the people in them.) The agency likes me, though, and wants to keep my resume in case of another opportunity.
It was nice to get a call like that. A sort of affirmation that I am, indeed, an acceptable candidate.
Because I know y'all find it so fascinating. (Not.)
Some weeks (months?) I just don’t have that much that's interesting to say.
I'm still brooding on Monday's interview and Wednesday's polite email notification that the company hired someone who was Not Me. Not to be all arrogant or anything, but when I was in my 20s and 30s, I was essentially offered every, single job that I interviewed for. In fact, I occasionally had difficulty convincing some would-be employer that I was serious in turning down their job offer.
As we've all noticed, I'm not really seeing that kind of action during this stint of unemployment. Nor did I see it during the last stint. Or the stint before that. All of which have happened in the last four or five years.
So, you tell me. Is this a sign of the dreaded Age Discrimination or just more evidence that, cooked numbers and cheery speeches aside, the corporate world knows better than Bush&Co. that things are not only Not Good, but Not Looking Up?
Most people I know agree that these days you can't find a job unless you know someone on the inside. In fact, the last four jobs I've gotten, I've gotten through a reference from someone already employed by the company, so that's looking more true the more I think about it.
And (speaking of past jobs), She called me the other day. With questions about a software program She was finding Herself unable to work. No matter how often I tell Her that there are manuals and instructions for everything, She never goes to look until I tell Her "there's a manual for that." In this case, I wrote a User Manual for this software program since it came without one. I put a printed copy in one of the Information Books and left the electronic copy on the computer harddrive. During training, I pointed the manual out to Her, making sure She knew it was there.
Yes, I'm a little bitter. Not only did I mostly train myself to use all of those proprietary and/or obscure software programs, but I wrote comprehensive manuals for all of the ones that didn't already have manuals. And I revised and simplified some of the other manuals. She shouldn't be calling me five months later, asking for help. I write good manuals, but I can't do anything about someone too dumb to read the manual. (Nor can I do anything about the fact that She and Bernie alienated the only other "expert" they had access to.)
Also, I'm tired of Her calling me and asking where in the electronic files something is. Everything is clearly labeled, either filed under the client's name and sorted by project, or under "company business" and sorted by project. Just look.
In addition to asking for help, She also wanted to say She had a line on a temporary project, if I was interested. Which was incredibly nice of Her and makes me feel a little bad about dissing Her.
It turned out to be a three-day job in Los Angeles, working for someone who couldn't guarantee they could cover my lodging and with no mention of travel expenses being covered, so not exactly a plum, but who knows? I haven't contacted the person yet (I was a bit distracted by the oral surgery there for a day or so) but maybe I will. A couple of hundred bucks is a couple of hundred bucks, right? (I'm assuming the job will be worth at least that.)
And, speaking of my mouth, it's fine. I never really have a lot of problems post-dental office work. Beyond the crankies because I couldn't really eat anything for 24 hours, I had no problems.
They always offer prescriptions for great pain meds and I'm always tempted to take them up on the offer, but I rarely do. The good stuff is expensive and, to be honest, I've thrown away so much unused medicine in my life that I'm to the point where I'm not even pretending I'm the kind of person who would take and/or abuse it.
I had plans to have lunch with a couple of friends yesterday and decided to go in spite of the missing tooth and the inability to actually eat. After all, if you can't go to lunch and visit with friends when you can't eat, can barely talk, and don't want to open your mouth and reveal your lack of dental accoutrements to the world, when can you go?
It was fun, but I think I'll let any other dining plans wait until I'm actually allowed to chew.
Today (brace yourself for the excitement) I'm doing some laundry. And rewriting a letter I sent my niece a couple of weeks ago. It's weird--I had a strange feeling about that letter, even as I dropped it into the letter box. Normally I just post my letters and stroll off, secure in the knowledge that the Post Office knows how to get paper from Denver to Kansas City. This time, I had a weird, uneasy feeling about it. And, sure enough, I talked to her today and she never got it. So annoying.
Later, I plan to eat something.
So, the week commenced, and various pains ensued.
First, the 'SciFi' channel's Saturday night movies. Sands of Oblivion seemed to offer some promise. A sort of The Mummy rip-off, with Cecil B. DeMille wrapped into it, it purported to be the story of an ancient demon transported antiquities looted from Egypt to be used in a movie set.
There is much (much) I could say in this movie's disfavor, but I'll just say that any movie? That has the nerve to offer, during the climactic battle, the sight of the 'hero' doing battle with paint people who are wafted from the walls of an ancient tomb? Should never have been made.
Seriously. Paint people. The demon waves his hand, the essentially two-dimensional layers of paint peel themselves from the walls, and they fling themselves at the hero. To defend himself? He smacks them back up against a wall or stomps them flat against the ground. This seems to be sufficient to defeat them.
Next up was Boa vs. Python, a movie that offered promise only because of David Hewlitt's name at the top of the credits. He was good, even better than you might expect, given the entirely ridiculous dialogue he was given to deliver. The movie itself? Was so entirely lame that eventually I found myself rooting for the giant snakes to eat everyone. (Except David.)
I broke a tooth. Fortunately it was one upon which I've already had a root canal, so no pain ensued. But. I had an interview scheduled for Monday.
I'm not going to say that I didn't make the cut for the job because I looked like a backwoods hillbilly or something, but I suspect that, my graceful explanation aside, it had something to do with the matter.
Today? Was my dentist's appointment. A mild-mannered lecture or two later and I find myself more-or-less committed to about $6k worth of dental work. But first, we're fixing the current problem.
Oral surgery ensued. It was as quick and painful as anyone could wish (meaning very and absolutely) but that doesn't change the fact that right now my dentist is home diving into roast beef or lasagna and I'm sitting here packed with gauze and thinking it might be easier just to go to bed now and give up on the day.
I've spent the last five hours thinking longingly of all the food I should have eaten this morning, wishing desperately that I was allowed to brush my teeth, and hallucinating about sucking down giant glasses of ice water.
Also? The bill? $1,600 and change. For the temporary dental appliance I have to wear until the extraction site is healed up enough for a permanent solution.
That hurt.