Not One Crown, but Two

Yicky dentist stuff follows, so you may want to skip to the next section of dentists creep you out.

Both teeth are on the upper right side of my mouth. One of them is the front-most tooth - yes, the big incisor! I got three separate shots which numbed up the upper right of my mouth all the way up to my nose. It's really weird to have a numb nostril. I don't remember when (if ever) I've had the top of my mouth numbed before, but the big difference is that it left my tongue alone, which meant I could feel the drilled-out teeth during a respite in the work.

The shots were kind of difficult, though not nearly as much as I'd feared; it's been at least six years since my last filling, and I had a really lousy dentist (or so I recall) as a kid, so I am kind of a wimp when it comes to the dentist, despite the great one I had as a teenager.

This new dentist is pretty good, though. He doesn't quite explain things as much as I'd like, so I will remember to ask more questions next time (such as, "So I paid for the whole crown during my first visit, right? I'm not going to get socked for another huge bill today, am I?"). But he handled the injections like an ace, and seems to have done a fine job with the teeth. This evening, the numbness having worn off, the teeth basically feel fine. My mouth is kind of sore, but I think that's because of the injections, which ought to heal up pretty quickly.

So: Many years ago I chipped my upper right front tooth. It's a clean chip, running vertically along the tooth - along the "grain" if you will. I had it filled in, but it gradually wore down over the years so that I had a sort of "dent" at the end of the tooth. Well, that's a thing of the past now: He basically filed away the end of the tooth and replaced it with the crown. So now the tooth comes down farther than it did before, which feels very odd! I think I'll like it in the long run, but I'll let you know when I get the permanent crown in the couple of weeks.

Boy, dentistry is expensive. My health insurance pays 80% of basic fillings, but only 50% of crowns, which are far more expensive (the incisor crown especially is quite pricey). How strange to sink all this time and money into little fillings which are smaller than a pinky's fingernail. Well, it pays off in the long run.

It took four hours for the numbness to wear off. I was pretty sick of it after two and a half.

My Windows machine at work went belly-up.

Its CD-ROM drive was nominally working, but I couldn't boot off a CD which Tom could boot from on his machine. I wanted to uninstall Windows 2000 and re-install NT, but was unable to do so. And, Win2K was crashing on me a lot, way more than for anyone else. Finally, it gave me a blue screen of death whenever I tried to boot it, so I decided it's time to junk it, and I grabbed a machine from my former boss' office to replace it (with my new boss' blessing).

Well, wouldn't you know it: I quickly determined that the power supply on the new machine is dead.

So, I took a really ridiculous step: I removed the power supply and replaced it with the supply from my old machine. Who knew if it would work? I mean, Windows machines are basically designed to prevent you from doing as much as possible, especially if it's something useful. Well, it worked! I was amazed.

Of course, the new machine has only a single, 1.2 Gb hard drive, which is not really sufficient. So I wanted to add a second drive from my old machine. But I can't get the damn thing to recognize the second drive. Moreover, I can't get the new machine to boot from a CD, because it's got some sort of wacky BIOS which doesn't give me the option to boot it from a CD! What a big waste of time!

I'll see if I can sort it out tomorrow. But it sure does make me appreciate the Macintosh all the more: Macs have simple sequences to boot from floppy or CD, they automatically detect all sorts of devices, and their innards these days (i.e., since the advent of the G3) are pretty straightforward. Why does anyone bother with a Windows machine? Who wants to go through that sort of hell?

I'm still pretty wiped out tonight, despite getting a good, long night's sleep last night. I figure I'm just starting to feel the accumulated stress of work last week, thinking about the dentist appointment, and the endless apartment thing. Early to bed again, I think.