pop-in
January 29, 2014, 8:30 P.M.
A brief post to remind myself that I keep a diary. I have been doing some writing, but it's
not necessarily stuff I want to put on here. So I thought I'd pop in with a sort of
"maintainance update".
With the severely cruel weather this winter has been inflicting on us, there hasn't been a
whole lot to do, other than hunker down. Go to work, come home with a load of ideas for
stuff to do in the evening...and then spend it like always, vegging over the computer screen.
Keep the cars running in the cold. Shovel snow. Weekends are about running errands quickly
before the bad weather hits, and then go home and try to keep warm.
To that end, I did some baking last weekend; made a fudge marble cake with homemade
chocolate buttercream on Saturday, and on Sunday, being bored, I found a recipe for dinner
rolls online and proceeded to experiment a bit. I had everything I needed, because I bought
instant yeast to try no-knead bread. But the problem with no-knead is timing. I don't feel
like messing with it in the evening and baking it in the morning, and that's really the only
way, timing-wise, it would work. So I found this recipe for 1-hour dinner rolls and gave it a
try. Took a little longer than an hour, and I probably worked the dough too hard. They came
out sort of like ciabatta--a little tough, but very tasty. Not bad for a first time. Spouse made a
delicious burgundy-pepper roast beef (spoon roast) with mashed potatoes & gravy, and for a
vegetable he did oven-roasted carrots with fresh thyme. Along with the dinner rolls, and the
marble cake for dessert, it was quite the sumptuous Sunday dinner.
Keeping the oven busy helps keep the house warm and results in delicious things!
I had my condition management visit at the doctor last Thursday morning; they pushed the
colonoscopy issue, the weight issue, and the advance directive, decided that none of my
meds need to be adjusted at the moment, and said to come back in six months, barring any
issues in the meantime. Nice med students again this time, and a nice long visit with the
Doc.
Then, in the afternoon, I got extremely buzzed. A judicious amount of orange-scented
nitrous oxide turns a root canal into a mini-vacation! Seriously, it went well. Despite having
had many oral procedures over the years, it was actually my first experience with a dental
dam. I understand that a lot of people hate them, but I loved it. No crap flying around my
mouth and landing in my throat!
I have been having a lot of residual pain from it, though. They may have a free hand with
the gas, but they don't go crazy with prescribing opiates. "Take four ibuprofen" was their
advice for pain management. I could have pushed, I suppose, but since I don't get much
relief from codeine anyway, I didn't bother. I would just as soon go home and take some
good old aspirin. Unfortunately, it is stubbornly refusing to settle down. Throbbing a lot, and
eating is painful enough to actually slow me down, LOL!
I have to go back on the 20th for my crown; they actually mill their own crowns now, and it
will be a 90-minute visit, a 60-minute break while they make the crown, and then another
30-minute visit to attach the darn thing. Ugh. I will be there from 2:30 till nearly 6:00. If I do
leave for the break, I haven't a clue where I'm going to go to kill an hour. Maybe the
northside library...
In my quest for personal betterment, I came up with a daily exercise to push myself a little. I
like to call it "Watchwords". Here is what I came up with
So that is my new thing. I am currently doing slips of paper and putting them back in the
same container, but I will be transferring them to some river stones or something, I think,
just for the aesthetics. The nice thing about this exercise is that if I get tired of the words, I
can always think up some new ones!
So that's my little thing I developed to jump-start my brain into doing something positive every day. Yeah, I'm weird. Deal with it.
Anyway. That's what's up.
Reading: "The Adventure Girls at K-Bar-O" (1936), by Clair Blank, and "Dorothy Dixon and the Mystery Plane" (1933), by Dorothy Wayne
Listening: Lemonheads, Pearl Jam, Randy Newman, BoDeans
At Random:
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