Category: Generic

Clean on One Side

The great summer of dentist appointments continued today (this summer’s healthcare fun is teeth, last summer’s was headaches. I’ll Take this summer over last any time). I had a super thorough you-have-tons-of-gum-disease cleaning on the right side of my head. I go back at the end of next week for the left side. After that we talk implants. Exciting!

Goodnight

I had a super crappy nights sleep last night. It didn’t stop me from having a really busy day today that saw me accomplishing a whole bunch of stuff from my to-do list. Now that it’s after 10:00pm though…. Robbie is toast. Goodnight, all!

Roll Over

My morning commute was one for the ages. More accurately it was a suck for the ages.

I was on my way to our Foxborough office which is about 74 miles from home. I was on route 495 South and I was making excellent time. I was 4.5 miles away from work at about 8:25am or so with my GPS giving me an ETA of about 8:35 when the traffic in front of me stopped. Stopped dead. Boom. I was a little more than two miles from my exit onto route 95 North.

50 minutes later I still hadn’t reached my exit. I was inching toward exit 33A when what I wanted was a little further away, exit 33B. Unfortunately it was right at 33A where the huge ass dump truck had rolled over. The small portion of the highway that wasn’t blocked by the truck was completely blocked by all of the dirt that spilled out of it. Route 495 was closed and traffic was detoured onto route 95 South. That was the highway I wanted, but it was in the wrong effing direction.

All of that detoured traffic turned 95 South into a parking lot. Everyone tried to get off and turn around at the first exit which caused a two mile backup and utter gridlock. My GPS told me to turn around at the third exit which almost melted my brain. Once I reversed course and was on 95 North, where I wanted to be, it was gridlocked again as everyone tried to get back on 495 South past the accident site.

Instead of getting to the office 20–25 minutes early, which was the pace I was on before reaching the accident, I got to work 45 fucking minutes late.

You can read about the highway closure here, but it doesn’t come close to expressing how completely and utterly infuriating the entire experience was. Oh, what a fun way to start my fucking day.

Dolly

I have never been a Dolly Parton fan. Musically, particularly. 9-to-5 was a good enough movie (back in the early days of cable TV it was on at least one of the movie channels at least 10 times a day every day for decades) so I guess I was okay with her as an actress. Country music makes my brain hurt though… a lot. I mean… a lot. I just hate it. It makes my skin crawl. It’s physically painful for me. So no, I was not a fan of her from a music perspective. Sorry.

I do recognize a total bad ass force of nature when I see one though and she was one. Not just a force but a positive force. Super heroes aren’t real, but she was and that was close enough.

Rest in peace, Dolly Parton. The grim reaper totally took the wrong 80 year old. 

In an attempt to make this even more about me, I never went to her theme park, Dollywood (which I believe is the number two theme park in the US behind Disney World? Is that right? I think it is), but I almost went once and I was really close to it another time. 

In my senior year of high school the music department was trying to plan a trip and the music director wanted to take us to Dollywood. He gave two reasons. First, while no one in Massachusetts in the late 80’s gave two shits about country music (we were the last market in the country without a country themed radio station and I was epically proud of that), it was one of only two really truly American forms of music. Our music director said the other was jazz, which is true to a point but I believe the correct answer is blues given that jazz and rock and roll and all of its derivatives evolved from blues. Whatever. The second reason was, obviously, that whole awesome-amuesment-park thing. We didn’t end up going. We went to Richmond, VA instead. There was a high school music competition/festival/thing there at the time and our concert and jazz bands played as well as all of our chorus groups. If I remember correctly, the jazz band (with a certain red head soloing on tenor saxophone) kicked some serious ass that week. Also, there was the Kings Dominon amusement park near Richmond and they had like three water flume rides and a stand up roller coaster with a full loop that kicked 30000 flavors of ass.

The time I was really close was earlier this year on The Great American Road Trip I took with my beloved wife. We were in the same town as Dollywood. I don’t think we ever got close enough to see any of it, but we were close enough to see a bunch of road signs telling us we were almost there.

That Time of Year Again

It is a little on the early side for this, but tonight the annual binging of 9/11 documentaries has begun. Jen found a new one on Hulu and we’re watching it as I type this. It focuses on small groups of people who survived together being reunited 25 years later. It’s brutal but it is also heartwarming. That’s hard to wrap my head around, but it works so far.

Why do we do it every year? Honoring the memories of those who didn’t make it out? Honoring the trauma of those who did? We were 100s of miles away from all of the events that day so maybe we’re just thumbing our noses at the memories of how scared and helpless we felt. I don’t know. I don’t think I want to know, really. We do it every year and we’re not going to stop any time soon.

In other, unrelated, and much happier news, the U-Haul trailer that Bellana rented to move most of her stuff to California is packed and ready to be picked up to start its journey West. Bellana worked her ass off over the last few days go get everything ready. They are coming to get the thing tomorrow. She is at her dad’s tonight (it is his birthday) but she sent my wife a text asking if we could run to the store and pick up an Apple AirTag and put it into one of the boxes so that we can watch the trailer as it travels across the country. Ain’t living in the future fun?

Okay. I have a super long day in store for tomorrow and it is getting late so I am going to go to bed. Good night, everyone.

Weird Day

Today was a weird day. Nothing bad happened. Nothing went wrong. Everything was fine. Despite all of that though, it was super crazy stressful. Like, woah! The stress! I did score some Letters to Cleo tickets for a show in November though so that’s cool.

Office Stuff

I worked in the office today. It was the first time in over three weeks. That’s crazy. I went on vacation for the last week of July, and then I had the tooth pain nightmare complete with antibiotics that made me feel sick all the time, and then I had the two teeth extracted and couldn’t really brush my teeth for nearly a week along with another round of antibiotics that made me feel sick all the time.

I just didn’t feel up to working around other people. I felt well enough to work, but not well enough to feel like I could be out in public.

My company wants us in the office 40% of the time but the technical end of it is actually 40% of the month. So this month I’m doing all of it at the end of the month. I generally try to do it by the week but this time I’m going by the book and doing it for the month. What does that mean? That means I’m in the office four days this week. That’s what I used to do pre-pandemic. It used to be normal. Now? Now it’s suck.

Doctor Teeth

I’ve written about tooth aches and teeth extractions and dental psychosis a lot lately. That didn’t stop me from going to the Dentist yet again today. 

After a lifetime of not being able to have dental x-rays without puking all over the place, I must have set a personal record today by having a shit load of them. I lost count but it was six? Seven? Eight? Something like that. I am literally glowing in the dark right now. The poor tech kept snapping pics and I kept sitting on the very edge of yacking only to have the image not be usable so we had to take it again. That happened a lot, but the tech thought we had enough… only for the dentist to ask for two more… which became three more because one of them didn’t come out. It was simultaneously an absolute nightmare but also weirdly pleasing because we managed to take so many of them. I am serious, I had more dental x-rays today than in the rest of my life combined.

What did it amount to? Let’s put it this way… I now have a solid plan for dental work for the rest of 2026 and an outline of a plan for all of 2027.

Yeah… things are that bad. At one point the dentist said she was going to set up a consult with her implant guy. She actually used the words “implant guy” and somehow that made me happy. I’ve always assumed I had implants in my future but I never had the courage to endure the dental visits that would be needed to get that actual work done. Also, they are fucking expensive. I figured I’d get one this year then another next year and then by the time I was 70 years old I’d have a full set of teeth, or something like that. Turns out I now have a doctor who agrees with that plan. 

We start implementing the new plan two weeks from today. It’s going to suck in epic fashion but hopefully the end results will be worth it. I’m sick and tired of pain and I really don’t want to lose anymore teeth. Let’s do this thing.