Liralen's Adventures Through Life

The dentist had noticed that I had some significant bone loss around a few teeth, so he scheduled me for an extra-long session with the hygenist. I was not looking forward to that, either... but went in today to get it done. Lucky for me, the bone loss is mostly from my habit of grinding my teeth. Even with a toothguard, the loss has been pretty significant, but it's not periodontal disease, thank goodness. I don't have the inflammation, nor do I have significant plaque buildup, and my gums are healthy as can be. The hygienist was amazingly thorough, delved into places that she was even surprised she was able to get to, and ended up finishing half an hour early. She also cut the bill to just two-thirds the original quote, simply because I didn't need anything more than what she'd done. She also gave me the usual goodie bag of brush, floss, flossers (for my bridge), and toothpaste. Plus, she gave me the added assurance that my bridge was on solid, and no worries there.

I'm not sure how I forgot about this in that last entry... but I finally finished my Tuscan Sunflower Shawl. Took about four months, and I ripped it out twice to get it to go right. It's a knitpick.com pattern, and I used the Comfy cotton yarn for it. I love the texture. It was pretty much what I wanted it to be, but a little too small for me. Luckily, it's going to be a present for someone who is smaller than I am, and she loves sunflowers. I managed to finish it, wash it, and as you can see, pin it out to dry using my lace wires. There were a few painful points to the pattern itself. One was that the increases weren't regular, they weren't done the same way with each repeat of the pattern, and going with what had gone on before was why I'd had to rip it back once. The other really painful bit was that each and every petal at the edge had to be done with a different piece of yarn. You had to cut the yarn at the end of each petal, which meant that I had to w

Just been on a kind of recovery schedule... taking it easy, mostly, but trying to get some physical work in to let me sleep at night. Yesterday I spent hours on the rose garden, wedding, watering, and dead-heading in full sun, and it was wonderful. We've had a month of rainier and wetter weather than we're used to, which is nothing compared to what we used to get in Seattle, but here it was pretty unusual, so it's been nice that this week we're back to high-80's during the day and 50's at night, so that it's comfortable to sleep. Today I got to write with Amber a little later than usual. I had a good long walk through the whole neighborhood, too, along with a much needed two hour nap. I'm just wiped and not exactly sure why, but I'm sleeping when my body seems to really need the sleep. So that's all to the good. I also had about fifteen minutes of TF2 gameplay with Jet. We usually play around 7pm mountain time through to about 8, just when

I had a crown that had a hole in it and I was NOT looking forward to replacing it. At all. But I went into the dentist this morning and they took off the old crown. There was a small cavity underneath it, which they quickly removed. They built it all up again, and then took an impression of both the inside and the outside, and then made me a temporary crown and put it on. It hurt doing it, for all the doctor did a great job of applying the novocaine, to the point where I couldn't feel my tongue or that side of my mouth; but now it hurts a lot less than I thought it would. They adjusted everything beautifully, and for all that they tore up my gums pretty good getting it in and clearing out all the old stuff, the tooth itself doesn't hurt as much as it used to or nearly as much as it did when the old, badly made crown was put in place. I suspect that the cavity was starting to affect it a little, and having it covered up well, now, makes it happier. There were a lot of small

Yesterday I had our monthly Cabinet meeting, and it always takes a lot out of me, but we got through everything on the agenda and got out of the meeting with three minutes to spare. I really am aware of how much people sacrifice to get to these meetings, so I try to make the best use of their time. But it left me pretty flat this morning, but I was up at 6:50 to meet up with Amber, a friend of mine, whom I word war with at 7 am every Thursday morning. She's a lawyer so has to get to work by 9 on that day at least, so we just get the words in before she leaves for work. Right at 9 am, Gina showed up with 10 pounds of white grapes from the vines in her backyard and all the ingredients for jelly. We did two entire batches of grape jelly, five pounds of grapes per, with one package of pectin and a lot of time and a very nice food mill. PickYourOwn.org has a very nice recipe that details the whole process , and the Sure-Jel people have a very solid recipe for the jelly. So solid I

A friend of mine had a ton of crabapples on her crabapple tree. They were the larger variety, thank goodness, but she and her husband had bagged them up in bags that had nearly seven pounds of the little suckers in 'em. They brought them to church to give away to anyone that would take them. Several people took home bags, including me, since one of my younger friends at church said that crabapple jelly was the best thing ever, and my friend, Mimi, had actually served me some of her crabapple jelly on goat cheese on crackers and it was very tasty indeed. The thing is that every single crabapple had to be cleaned, and the blossom and the stem cut off. I also threw out every one that had a worm in it, and every single one that wasn't quite good anymore. There weren't that many of them, but all of them had to be cut into in order to figure out if they were any good or not. That is probably what took the longest time. The next thing I had to do was just cook 'em in