Sorry. Been busy with house and work and school and band and garden and Wikipedia and Inauguration and California and and and and. You know the drill. Still around, though, and getting the blogging bug again. This’ll have to be a short post, though, as I have much to do yet tonight (like watch a storm roll in, woo-hoo!).

I’m posting some stuff that has been languishing in my “drafts” file for a while. A more typical update should come sometime this weekend.

There was a bit of a glitch in my web hosting this morning. Things are back to normal, though. Sorry for the delay!

OK, so yes, I am posting more on my ongoing dental saga. It’s a notable situation in my life at the moment, though, so tough cookies.

Last night was the initial wave of treatment on #12. After a very bitter topical anesthetic and some injected lidocaine the dentist and his assistant got to work scouring out infected portions of tooth. (Even though I couldn’t feel a thing, I could hear every scrape through bone conduction; this was rather unpleasant.) Because the infection has reached the pulp as well, a simple filling is inappropriate, so I have an appointment on Super Duper Fat Tuesday to get started with the root canal.

There is a temporary filling in there now to protect the exposed tissues. It feels a bit weird, mostly because I had just gotten used to the minor gap left when the original tooth broke. It looks natural at first glance, though further examination reminds me of the germ at the center of a kernel of corn.

More on this later, as things develop further.

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I have created a monster…

We’ve been looking at houses lately, thanks in part to the price cuts that result from poor sales and in part to a super-sweet benefit of the ol’ employer (forgivable loans for down payments!). Sadly, though, just when we find a neat place in our price range in a qualifying neighborhood, it gets sold FAST. (Aside: we should so market this. “Find a buyer! Just pay us $X; we’ll feign an interest in your place and somebody else will snatch it up!”)

In discussing our situation the other day, we considered that maybe it just isn’t time for us to buy just yet. I attempted to be facetious and sent Fred a link to the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, saying “let’s just buy some cheap land and get one of these”.

I didn’t expect him to fall completely in love with the idea.

Granted, those are brilliantly efficient designs, especially on the mobile-sized plans that don’t waste a single cubic inch. They don’t cost very much, their energy efficiency is just sick — one woman averages $5 PER MONTH for all of her cooking and heating fuel needs — and they can theoretically go just about anyplace. I would love to have one of these (the Weebee!) as a vacation home or as a little writing studio or something, but I don’t know that I could stand to live in one full-time.

Fred’s coming around. We’re still thinking small — it’ll save us heating, cooling, and electrical costs, plus it’ll be easier and faster to clean and it will prompt us to ditch a bunch of stuff we don’t actually use — but he’s no longer talking about chucking all our furniture and moving into a hundred square feet.

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Yeah, writing studio. What of it?

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New server is running pretty well as long as I remember not to emerge world very often. (After all, it IS only a 333MHz processor.) I’m still kinda sorta maybe thinking of installing distcc and having my work box do the heavy lifting on behalf of the home server.

That said, I see that Apple’s Time Capsule — you know, the OTHER bit of hardware Stevie introduced the other day — would consolidate storage and all network infrastructure into one pretty pretty package that maxes out at only 30W (less than either the drive enclosure or the laptop). I just don’t think I’m ready to drop $300 or $500 on it, though.

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Time to go; have to eat my very soft lunch.

Messing with tags and such. Historically I haven’t really used tags, and when I upgraded to the current version of WordPress I sorta migrated all my categories to tags. As a result, some tags are over-represented, and some useful tags are not present at all. As I have time I’ll be fixing that.

Also: this blog is currently #1 in the Google results for “grab the fire extinguisher”. w00t.