My tooth seems to be better, even though I bitched and moaned a bit about it on the livejournal yesterday. Saturday morning I went in to get a resin filling replaced and ended up instead getting an emergency root canal. It was actually part one of a root canal, and I have to go back in next Friday for the rest of it, and to get a post put in so I can get a crown made. This means that, depending on how much my insurance kicks in, you all are getting donations made to the Human Fund instead of Christmas presents this year. The worst part of a root canal is paying for it. I’m doing fine pain-wise and eating pretty much whatever I want with no problems whatsoever, but my stomach is tied in knots thinking how much I’m going to have to lay out to this guy for the work. I know he said the root canal is about $550, the post is about $250, and the crown is about $850, but the question is how much the insurance will screw me when it comes time to whip out the checkbook. It would be nice if I had to only pay like 30% or 40% of that out-of-pocket, but insurance is such a fucking scam these days, I’m sure they’re going to bend me over the counter on this one.
Now that I’m not spending my evenings dumping tube after tube of Anbesol into my jaw, I’m actually chipping away at the writing a bit. The Vegas book continues to progress. I am putting photos into the layout and fixing the little crap that didn’t transfer over right, like all of the straight quotes that need to be moved to smart quotes and whatever else. I was initially pretty bummed because I pulled in everything but the last little story, and the whole book was only 126 pages. I was really hoping that it would be closer to 160 or so. Granted, I do have the fonts Metal Cursed down to 9 or 10 point, and more pictures will break it up a little. But still, I want this thing to be a book and not a pamphlet. I’m about done with the last story, which was a last-second addition since the piece I wrote about shooting guns in Vegas turned out to be too lame to include. Anyway, still no word on when this will be done, but it’s getting there.
It’s almost turned into fall, but not quite. Fall is always my favorite season, and brings back a lot of strange memories of a lot of different eras in my life. I will be happy when it’s consistently light jacket weather and it’s the kind of weather that makes me want to hide under the covers in bed and read on a brisk Saturday morning, as opposed to “why is it so damn hot at the end of September?” kind of weather.