I am tired. Really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really tired.

I mean really tired.

Last night I went to bed at about 9:00. I fell asleep almost immediately and then woke up again at about 10:30. Then again at 11:00. Then again at 11:30. And so on and so forth.

My teeth were the reason, of course.

The pain has been constant over the last couple of days. At times it’s been as close to excruciating as my limited pain receiving experience has gotten. It sucks. I’ve tried ibuprofen, acetaminophen, and whatever the hell Aleve is made out of. They all knock it back a little, but not enough. At least not enough for me to sleep much last night. I still have percocet from the first attempt at a Dental visit and I haven’t cracked open the bottle yet. I don’t want to, but tonight might be the night. I hope not.

I have done a little research into “sedation dentistry” and have decided to pin my hopes on it. I have a consultation at a place in Andover on Wednesday. My hope of hopes is that the doctor will hear my tale of gag-reflexive woah and say, as a light shines down from the heavens upon him making him look like he has a sort of halo over his head and maybe a pair of angel wings sprouting out of his back, “I’ll take care of you. I’ll fix your problems.”

Let’s hope so. Please please please please please please please please please please please.

I feel sleep deprived enough to have my judgment affected. On the first full day of my marriage to the beautiful and talented and amazing Jenny my wedding ring fell off in the shower. Each shower since then I have removed it and put it on the bathroom sink while showering, and then shortly (if not immediately) after getting out I have returned the ring to it’s rightful place on my left hand.

Today I got out of the shower and was in a hurry because my sleep deprived self had been a little zombie-esque and took too much time getting into first gear this morning and was worried about making Jen late.

When I got to work I noticed that I didn’t have my watch on. I stopped in the bathroom on the way back from dropping my lunch off in the kitchen and while washing my hands realized the ring wasn’t there. It’s still on the bathroom sink.

I feel terrible. That ring is a symbol of my feelings for my wife. It is a symbol of our marriage. It is a symbol of our love. And I have not had it on my finger since about 6:35 this morning. I won’t have it on my finger until about 6:45 this evening. 12 hours with a ringless ring finger. I hate myself right now.

I’ve been tired enough today that I have been chugging caffeinated beverages since before 8:00am. My hands and my eyes are jittery. (Yes, my eyes. You read that correctly.) I am exhausted but too wired to worry about falling asleep. I just can’t think 100% clearly. This sucks.

To top it off, the tooth pain has actually been different since I got up this morning. Generally it has just been a wicked powerful ache. Today, however it has added the bonus factor of being really sensitive. There are two teeth in question here, both on the upper left. One actually broke off at the gum line a few years ago. The root is still there and has been hurting a bit. The real problem is two teeth back from there where a cavity is forming around a filling. Today when I take a drink (of a caffeinated beverage) it hurts whenever the liquid touches that tooth. That’s a new one for me today. My teeth have always been a little sensitive to cold (especially the broken tooth. I wonder why? Duh.) but it’s never felt like this before. I can definitely live with it, it’s just an added flipping of the dental bird.

Oh well.

Tonight I will be able to keep my shit together long enough to get home and eat some tacos with the wife and kids. Mmmmmmm tacos. I learned many years ago that for some retarded reason when I have a tooth ache it is much worse on an empty stomach. If I have a bite to eat the pain lessens. How do you spell psychosomatic? Over the last two or three days that has still been the case, it’s just that the lessening doesn’t last as long. Still, I can honestly look forward to tacos as a kind of homeopathic (how do you spell placebo?) remedy in this case. That’s pretty cool. After the kids go to bed Jen and I are going to play around with some more programming in C#, but I don’t think I’ll be up for more than an hour or so. I want to try and go to bed a little early (again) and hopefully be too tired to notice that I’m in pain.

Tomorrow we have to get new school shoes for the kids. After that we’re going to risk taking them to the movies to see the new Harry Potter flick. I will definitely be covering a certain boy’s eyes through a certain Inferi scene. (note: I went to a Harry Potter glossary site to look up the proper spelling of inferi.) After that it’s dinner with the newly moved to Haverhill Geyers. We missed out on seeing their new house last weekend, hopefully things will work out better this weekend. I know we had something on the agenda for Sunday too but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was… was it Harry Potter? Had we planned on that for Sunday originally? I can’t remember.

As for right now, I want to go home. Simple as that.

You’ll never watch sesame street the same way again:

Sometimes I suck so bad it hurts. I suck so bad I want to crawl into a little ball and hide until people forget about how bad I suck.

While perusing twitter I saw this from @BoingBoing, “Atheists who’ll take in your pets after the Rapture http://url4.eu/Js4Q“

Here is a link to the actual site, Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, USA.

One question…

WHY THE HELL DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT???

Sedation Dentistry… is it the solution to my dental work problems? Is it a dream come true?

I don’t know, I’m hoping you can tell me.

Seriously, if you wander across this silly little page and have actually gone to a Dentist who heavily sedates you and then does all of your dental work in one sitting could you tell me how it went? I found a few places near me that do it and I’m going to pick the one with the best press and schedule a consultation. My teeth are hurting quite a bit and I really want to stop taking over the counter meds all day every day trying to keep the pain under control.

So if you’ve done it, tell me about it. There has to be a way for me to beat this effing gag-reflex garbage that I’ve been screwing myself over with since I cut my first baby teeth. It sucks, I’m sick of it. I want to feel like a grown up at the Dentist’s office for a change.

Anyway, massive subject change…

How is this for a rock band’s rhythm section: Dave Grohl on drums and John Paul Jones on bass. (That’s the guy from Led Zeppelin, not the American Revolution period sailor)

Check this out: Them Crooked Vultures

Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy died last night.

Say what you will about Ted’s personal life, he fought for the causes he believed in and always stood for his constituents.

It’s the end of an era.

Happy Trails Ted

One of the first things that brought my wife Jen and I together was a love of The Beatles. Any time we go on any drive of any significant length, The Beatles are our soundtrack. Our first dance as a married couple was a Beatles song. I can go on and on.

Last night we discovered that Jen’s father, who she did not know growing up, met The Beatles in 1964. He won a radio contest and had his picture taken with the band. Neither Jen nor her mother have seen the picture, but one of her cousins, who she recently met for the first time in ages through Facebook, confirmed it’s existence.

My wife’s dad met The Beatles right during the insanity known as Beatlemania.

She is sooooooo cool!

CNN.com is running a cool story that discusses some brain studies dealing with different senses. There is a section on your sense of direction (not very good), your sense of smell (your nostrils appear to be in competition with each other), and on tone deafness. I found this one very interesting.

My wife and one of my best friends are tone deaf. Jen complains about it now and then. She seems to think that there is something wrong with her because she can’t sing in tune. I disagree. My friend Larry is in the same boat, but he was a music minor in college and had to take a course that required a great deal of recognizing different sounds, including pitches. How did he do it? He trained himself. As with everything, practice makes perfect. The more he worked at being able to match pitches with his voice the better he got at it.

This story doesn’t go into detail, but it does say that it is possible to teach some one who is tone deaf how to hear specific tones. I knew it all along. It just takes practice.

Here’s the segment from the article (I have removed the links)…

Some people are really bad at singing a song they’ve heard, and scientists are figuring out why.

The phenomenon, called tone deafness, refers to people who do poorly at distinguishing between different musical tones.

Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, looked at images of the brains of 10 people who tested as being tone deaf, and 10 people who were not…

Previous research has shown that people with lesions in the brain pathway that connects perception and motor areas of the brain have trouble with language, said Psyche Loui, instructor in the department of neurology at Harvard University. People with damage to this area tend to have problems with repeating words they hear.

The new study in the Journal of Neuroscience also found that the pathways in this brain area, which usually have top and bottom branches, were implicated in tonal recognition. In fact, scientists could not identify a right-top branch in any of the 10 tone-deaf participants.

“The better you can tell the difference between two tones, the larger that particular brain pathway was,” Loui said.

The findings do not mean there is no hope for tone deaf people, however.

“I think there’s a lot of music training in general that could help enlarge these pathways,” Loui said.

In fact, a treatment for tone deafness might also help people with speech disorders such as dyslexia, she said. There has been evidence that people with dyslexia have same auditory processing problems as people with tone deafness, she said. Her lab showed last year that children with musical training performed better on dyslexia tests.

On the other end of the spectrum, some people have perfect or “absolute” pitch, and can name any musical note they hear. Diana Deutsch, psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, has found people who speak “tone” languages, with words that change meaning entirely depending on tone, seem to have a greater likelihood of perfect pitch. More speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese, two tone languages, tend to have perfect pitch than English, for example, she said.

In theory, in Deutsch’s view, it should be as easy to call a pitch “F” as it is to say that an object is red or blue.

“If you assume that there’s something missing in our environment in terms of early exposure to the right types of sounds, and that it is bundled in with speech, then the whole thing makes sense,” she said.

Practice. Practice. Practice.