The dental visit yesterday was pure medieval torture. To be fair, the new dentist was very careful, and did good work. But I got two teeth ground down for crowns, and temps slapped on there until next week. The grinding part is brutal, but the temp crowns are the bad part. They’re roughly like the dental work you’d get if you went to a dentist in Cuba or North Korea: very rough, not perfectly shaped, and not permanently glued in. They actually look like they’re tacked in with a giant clump of silicone gasket sealer from a car parts store, the stuff you use to tack on a valve cover gasket. And I now live in fear that anything I eat will snap loose one of these things. It’s going to be a long week, a long week filled with many slimfast lunches and dinners.
I think all of the initial fixits for the journal are done. If you ever flip through the old entries and find a busted one, let me know. Two features I’d like to add are some kind of paging links at the bottom, and the ability to add tags to articles. The first is easy, the second is hard. I probably won’t do either until some point in the distant future, because that’s the way things work around here.
I really wish I had my old VW back. Not the gas 2-door I had in Seattle, but the diesel 4-door I had back in Bloomington. This was a car that I could drive like I stole it, and still get 50 MPG city. Diesel is five bucks a gallon here, but even at $50 for a 10-gallon tank, that’s 500 miles CITY on a fill-up. I’m surprised every single VW diesel from the 80s hasn’t been resurrected and put back on the road. I’d expect to see more Rabbits than Hummers these days.
Speaking of stealing cars, I’m still picking away at GTA4. I think I have 13% done; you need about 20% done to get into Manhattan (aka Algonquin.) The missions are starting to get harder, so I might hit a wall soon. The biggest difficulty is actually finding time to play, since I’m too busy with other projects. And I think it’s Tuesday, but it’s actually Wednesday, which means I have a conference call in an hour, and I better get a move on.