Prying and Poking

It's been an interesting day.

I started off with a dental appointment, to get my permanent crown. I asked my dad, before I left, how Dr. Howell would get the temporary one off. He said he would just pry it off. When I told Dr. Howell this, he said, "Pry it off?! You're making it sound as if I use a crow bar!" He went on to explain the importance of "double-talk", how he also said that I might "feel a little pinch" when he's giving a shot of novacaine, rather saying that it's going to "hurt like heck" and how he says that I'll feel "a little pressure" instead of "I'm going to rip off your jaw". It was very entertaining. Fortunately, it was completely painless and I was out in a half hour, without an anesthetic. All my warnings to people at the office about the likelihood of my being cranky in the afternoon after the novacaine wore off were unnecessary.

Not long after I got back to work, I got an invitation to go have Indian food at Tandoor Indian Restaurant from LK. I picked him up and his co-worker, S, and we had an excellent meal. MS had picked up an Entertainment book for me at the IBM Club and I debated long and hard whether I should use the coupon today for lunch or wait until I can get a 2 for 1 dinner. It's amazing how much effort I put into agonizing over such things.

After being told that my work related plans were insanely ambitious, it was clear that it made sense to scale them back and take the weekend off. That was the best decision so far this year. I really need the break.

For the final event of the evening, I eagerly booted up my laptop to blog and the backlight didn't come on. I spent lots of time trying to figure out if I simply needed to press a function key to get it back into a normal state. My dad finally tried poking a plastic fork tine in the little hole for the sensor that detects when to turn off the backlight when it's closed. It came on for a second, but it hasn't since. There's probably something wrong with that switch and I'm probably going to have to get it repaired. Since it's my only development machine, it is dreadful timing. Well, it's good in the sense that I didn't plan to work this weekend, but bad for Monday. Ugh.

One correction: Apparently the stilts are used for taping and spackling the tops of the walls with nine foot ceilings, not the vaulted ceiling. The stilts aren't the kind one might see in the circus that would be useful for vaulted ceilings. They probably just used ladders for those.