Man whiskers

I woke up in a better mood than I went to bed in.  I think I needed to put my dispirited mood in writing in order to move past it.  Today’s optimism allowed me the opportunity to see just how blah I made the past week seem; I actually had an eventful weekend, and I’d hate to leave a woebegone post up for more than a minute.

This weekend I put almost all of the hardware on the cabinet doors.  I’ve got about half a dozen pulls left to drill and screw in, but I’m almost there.

I picked out the start of my herbs and veggies for the season with Ellen and Mike Sunday morning…

And I remained completely indecisive on fabric for the wingback.  This beauty sits in the living room taunting me to make a decision.  I’ve finally decided to go with the fabric sitting across the bottom of the chair in the photo.  I don’t have time to get to the store until Thursday, however, so I’m likely to change my mind by then.

Lenny’s bath this morning was a successful one.  I snapped a few photos after he was moderately dry, and realized he has man whiskers.  They’ve been creeping in for the past two weeks…low and behold he’s got a little poodle in him after all.

We’ve ventured to pet stores on a few occasions now, and the overwhelming response is usually, “is that a red lab?”, and I smirk and let them in on the secret.  I love Lenny past the moon and if he continues to wire and curl I’ll love him just as much….but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t content with his looks favoring his mom.

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Blah blah blah.

That’s how I’m feeling tonight.  Chris has been in Ireland the past week and a half, and he’s returning next Saturday.  The woods of Scituate are feeling more isolated than ever, and I can’t wait for him to get home.  I’ve been in a melancholic funk since he left.  The weather is as foggy and dewy as my mood, and it’s left Lenny smelling like….wet dog.  Bath #1 coming in hot tomorrow morning.

Chris’s absence has affected more than my mood.  I won’t apprise you with photos, but our grass is embarrassingly long.  Though I’ve thought several times of approaching the task myself, the fear of a resultant allergic fit necessitating a week out of work has kept the thought at bay.  I’m hoping my father-in-law makes a trip with the rider before the neighbors start picketing.

I’ve got nothing good for you, so I searched the archives of photos for an interesting case. I had a patient that hated the look of her four front teeth.  Veneers for four teeth will run you around $5,000 in our office, which, believe it or not, is probably the most affordable you’ll find them for.  That wasn’t in her budget, so I agreed to use white bonded filling material to re-shape them (with the caveat that this is temporary until the veneers are in her budget….they’ll likely chip and break down before that happens).  This isn’t the easiest of tasks; bonded fillings are more technique sensitive than old-school silver ones.  It’s a difficult material to shape for esthetic cases like this one….so I was really happy with how this turned out.  The veneers will still be an enormous improvement from my handy work here, but I think it’s indisputable that those front teeth are more attractive than they started out.  The hollywood-white smile isn’t for everyone, but it’s what this patient was after….and she went home happy.

Before:

After:

I’ve got some home improvements I’ve been chipping away at…more soon.

Pride, Nostalgia, and Staples

A week ago Chris and I took a day trip to NYC to see Dan Mills on broadway.  You read that correctly, a day trip.  We left around three in the afternoon, and returned just short of three in the morning.   Chris was a trooper and did all of the driving.

Dan Mills is the understudy for Carl Perkins’ character in the Million Dollar Quartet.  Though he’s not an actor, he was sought out at one of his shows, and ended up with the part.  Since he’s the understudy, you can’t plan ahead for tickets seeing as he never knows when he’ll be on.  Day trip it was.

http://www.milliondollarquartetlive.com/

My only regret was not packing everyone I know into the car for that trip.  The show was phenomenal, and I had an uncanny sense of pride being able to watch one of our favorite people entertain an audience on broadway.  It was an unreal experience.   Though I didn’t get any pictures, I ripped these off of Justin on Facebook:

After the show we had a quick drink with Dan and some of his family/friends.  I couldn’t stop thinking about Dan’s unique opportunity to share his talent with others.  There are few of us who can take all of our hard work and efforts to succeed and put them out there for others to observe and enjoy.    I felt so honored and proud to be able to share in this chapter of Dan’s success.

This weekend was UConn Dental School’s graduation weekend.  A year ago today, I was ending that chapter of my own life.  Though most days spent trapped in John Dempsey hospital had me wishing time away to push me ahead in the countdown until it would all be over, it was hard to walk away.  I didn’t expect to have such a difficult time saying goodbye.  The endless hours of studying, grueling med school exams, frustrating patients and resetting denture teeth 492 times over to appease ornery professors made it easy to want to leave.  Yet, the comradery that exists between a small class of forty students going through four very long years of dental school together is incomprehensible.  Even today, there are so many times I pick up my phone after a difficult or stressful procedure and text or call a classmate for input or reassurance.  Looking through the pictures of the new graduating class today brought me back to this time last year, and I missed it.

I spent the better half of the day removing staples from a wingback chair in the first leg of reupholstering it.  All I can say is that it’s a good thing my hands are insured.  This will likely be both my first, and last, hardcore reupholstery project.  Stay tuned for the results.

A New Batch

In case facebook didn’t paste this all up, down and sideways on your feed, Lenny’s taking house calls these days.

Chris is in Texas this week.  Chris and I haven’t had cable in a year.  The Bravo and HGTV withdrawal was painstaking and difficult.  Though I thought I was cleansed, this week I discovered the free trial of Hulu Plus.  Our TV is connected to a Mac mini, so it streams the internet.   Last night after shedding a few tears over three emotional episodes an emotional episode of 16 and pregnant, I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt for filling my brain with crap and decided to be productive.  I think I need a reverse cleanse so that I might one day again enjoy the smut that use to serve as my self-esteem boost and send me into a mindless trance.  Oh Real Housewives, how I miss you.

To redeem my self-worth, I took Lenny on a field trip to the office, and whipped out a new batch of these:

I’m building my collection before selling them.  I’m thinking by this fall my inventory might be up enough to start to profit off of all of the ribbon and hardware I’ve invested in.  We’ll see.  While I was snapping the photo of my newest collars, I looked over my shoulder to find this:

And if that didn’t melt your heart, maybe these will:

(The “flea” was a gift from Paisley over at the McLouth house)

A Healthcare Family

This Sunday we attended Tammy’s graduation from nursing school.  Though her classes don’t finish until the beginning of June, it was a really exciting day for her. Tammy has her bachelors in political science and art from the University of New Hampshire, but went back to school in a fast-track nursing program that started last March.  Though I know what it’s like to study tirelessly and endlessly over monotonous scientific jargon, I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to go back to school to do it years later.  I can’t imagine it, but I can most certainly respect it.  We now have two nurses in the family…my mom included.