You always take the weather with you

You know what's weird? Denver has had a crazy winter of seemingly ceaseless snow so far, and yet when I was there, it was pleasant and sunny and most of the remaining snowcover disappeared.

But now? I'm back in California and guess where the freak snow is falling?! Oy.

It's been sort of a fucked up winter all the way around, hasn't it? Oh global climate change, you silly joker.

Tangentially, that's one thing I've just never gotten used to about California, especially coming down out of the Sierra into Sacramento. Snow and palm trees just don't mix in my mind. And yet, here they are.

I'm back. Honest.

So, I'm back from vacation. And it was lovely. Really!

I always have such a complex mix of feelings when I go "home" to visit my family and when I leave again to come back here-home. I mean, I love my family, of course, so I can't help but confront the question of why I live so far from them, what I'm doing with my life, and all the crazy muck that dredges up.

And maybe because of that, there's usually a little bit of relief when I throw myself down on my own couch again, because I don't have to face these questions and feelings again for a while. Out of site, out of mind.

So it's a crazy carnitas platter of emotion, spiced with some salsa of regret, topped with the guacamole of love, a side of refried comfort, covered in melted relief and wrapped in a tortilla of guilt.

At any rate, upon arrival in snow-covered Denver, Mom picked me up at the airport and we headed straight to the mountains after a brief pause to repack and load the truck. Sunday on the slopes was crazy -- avalanche control had closed I-70 for much of Saturday, which meant everyone came up on Sunday to ski, and I had never seen such lines at the lifts.

But the weather cooperated, the crowds eased on Monday, and Caden tore up the slopes with us the 2nd day while Grant hung out in the village and lodge with the, uh... stepsisters. Which is the right term, but just feels so strange to use. Anyway, we all had a terrific time.

And the rest of the week went by too quickly, with some time at the zoo, Denver Art Museum, the planetarium and Imax, school auction setup, and all the miscellanious activities that fill up a family's busy routine. So unlike my own routine, which is hollow in comparison and doesn't seem to be filled up by any amount of metaphorical Mexican food.

I'm not dead

(3/16/2007)

I didn't hit a tree.
I'll update soon.

We never change do we no, no

And by we, I mostly mean me, being totally strung out before taking time off.

I'm leaving Saturday (at 6am) for a week with the fam back home-ish in Colorado. It's going to be fun, I've been looking forward to it for months, I'm taking my snowboard gear and we're heading straight for the slopes when I get in at noon. So that's all the good and the yay and the yippee and the can't wait.

But the flip side of that is, of course, that I'm coming down to the wire, again, at work, trying to get stuff done and prepare everyone for my being out. It's true, I may not be that adept at time management, but I've been working really hard to get this stuff dealt with. But between Jury Duty, dental hell, and all the usual day-to-day whackiness, I'm not left much time for things like documentation, requirements feedback, training, etc. And of course, again, I'll be out just as new stuff is rolling out, leaving people who are less, um, familiar with stuff, to handle things on their own.

And I haven't even begun to get my stuff together for the actual trip. The stress! The lack of sleep! No wonder I have no problem sleeping on airplanes -- it'll be such a relief once I've made it that far.

So anyway, I'll be out of touch for a week or so. If anyone cares. I'm just sayin'.

More Happy

I don't drink Pepsi. In fact, I hardly drink soda much at all anymore, but when I do, it's Coke. However, you may recall me mentioning a Pepsi commercial filming that I walked into the middle of a while back. Well I just saw the end result on TV and it's all San Francisco shots. In fact, a good chunk of it takes place on my street. Watch carefully as he rolls down the straight tree-lined stretch of Lombard below Coit Tower and you can see my apartment building very briefly. So that's cool. Watch the ad (but drink the Coke).

The Saga Continues

Well, boys and girls, I still have my tooth, such as it is. It may be hollowed out, filled with gutta percha, built up with some magic fake tooth material, and covered in a temporary crown, but it's still embedded in my upper jaw bone. So that's something.

After undoing all of the original work from a few years ago, the dentist seemed pretty confident that the root wasn't cracked anywhere, which is what would have forced a complete extraction. He said there's still a chance this one won't work, in which case he'll still have to take the tooth, but he's optimistic. Of course, he also said that the best we can hope for is that this one will only last about ten years, and then the tooth will probably have to come out anyway. Which, jeesh. I was tempted to say let's just get it over with. But upon further reflection, I'm happy to put off the additional pain, both physical and fiscal, until the semi-remote future.

But let's talk about pain for a moment anyway, shall we? So, I know people who've had root canals and claimed it wasn't so bad. I, however, distinctly remember, as I've mentioned, the feeling of my nerves being plucked like guitar strings. The dentist claimed this time around wouldn't be so bad because the tooth was already dead and all. Ha. I learned several things during my 2 hours in the dental chair on Friday.

1) Dentists lie. I already knew this, of course, but continue to be duped repeatedly because they seem so nice, I give people the benefit of the doubt, and I'm stupid like stone.
2) I metabolize novocaine (or lidocaine or xylocaine or whatever the hell local anesthetic they use) faster than the ordinary person. Basically he'd get about twenty minutes of work done before I'd jump, white-knuckled and wide-eyed, at some jolt of pain mumbling "Mpphh-hmmmm" when he'd pointlessly ask "you feel a little something there?" So he'd shoot me up again and off we'd go. At one point, he just gave up and would warn me about certain things, saying "You'll probably feel this a little, sorry about that." No wonder people would just die of dental infections before anesthetics were discovered.
3) Apparently the jaw bone is highly ennervated, which more than makes up for the lack of living nerve inside my molar.
4) One of the levels of Hell without a doubt involves laying on your head in a dental chair, blinding light in your eyes, a rubber block propping open your jaw, trying to breath through your nose but feeling some errant sinus drainage blocking that route while a stretched rubber sheet is effectively smothering your attempt to breathe through your open mouth where the saliva is accumulating anyway, being asked to open up even wider though your jaw is so fatigued you start to shake, then being told to not move a muscle while three different implements and two hands are wedged between your jaws lest the whole procedure has to start again while your swallow reflex meanwhile suddenly becomes uncontrollable and your tongue starts flailing about impertinently. Oh Sisyphus cakewalked into eternity by comparison.

Bad to the bone

Ok, I should explain that usually I'm really a glass-half-full type. I know my posts lately have been a little manic, and so have I. But this is the exception, I swear. Unless I've turned that corner onto the one-way road to bitterness and despair. Which, seriously folks, is a possibility.

Anyway, on the good news side, my jury service is complete! Both prosecution and defence rested their cases on Monday, and we heard closing statements yesterday. After sitting through the juror instructions and a tutorial on the applicable laws, I was released yesterday afternoon and just got word this evening that the jury reached a verdict: the guy is guilty on both counts. Which is pretty much what I thought, but it still would have been interesting to get to debate that with 11 other people and arrive at the conclusion together. But whatever. Always a bridesmaid. At least it didn't carry over into my upcoming vacation or anything.

What may actually carry over into my time off, however, is the latest in the woe-is-me saga. Remember my unexplained mystery health issue of a few months ago? Well, everyone finally agrees that it's most likely a tooth issue. And not just any tooth, but the very one that had the root canal. The root canal that I never wanted to experience anything remotely resembling ever again.

My dentist told me today that it's probably leaking (!!) and so I'm going back tomorrow to experience something not just resembling the root canal, but in fact that very root canal all over again. See how the lightning strikes over and over from my own personal dark cloud? But wait, there's more! If the old root canal is leaking because the tooth's root is cracked, which is a distinct possibility and one that can't be ascertained until the dentist is rooting around inside my head, then -- get this -- he'll have to extract the tooth!!

Sweet merciful mother of crap. I knew this is the sort of thing that happens when you get old, but I'm only thirty-three! That's too young to be toothless. And? If it comes out, I should get an implant, an actual metal screw anchored into my skull. Which insurance will hardly cover. So I'm about to feel some serious pain in both my palate and my wallet.

No one mentioned the option of just letting it go on leaking, but that sounds pretty ok by me.
I think I'm going to go cry now.

**No pictures with this post. I just did a Google image search for tooth implants and nearly fell out of my chair in horror.

Bum-pee road to work

When I was young and naive and my urban experiences were limited to driving through Denver to visit my grandma in Littleton, I thought living in a city must be grand and exciting. Of course, now that I have spent the last 14 years enjoying all the wonderful joys of the urban existence, I can say with some authority that it ain't all glitz and glamour. Oh no, it requires a certain amount of intestinal fortitude just to go about your day.

As I've mentioned before, I walk to and from the office everyday with my co-worker/neighbor/friend Janet. It's a 1.5-mile 30-minute walk from North Beach through the Financial District to South of Market on Second at Harrison. All perfectly pleasant neighborhoods filled with coffee shops, restaurants, people in suits, shops, tourists and so on. And yet, this walk demands vigilance.

What I mean is that rarely a day goes by that we're not walking past some fresh horror: trying to avoid the mystery splatter of chunky ick in the middle of the sidewalk, holding our breath past the steaming sewer grate, stepping over the running puddles of bum pee, desperately dodging the tubercular coughs of the toothless woman with smeared lipstick ruddying her gaunt cheeks, avoiding eye contact with the crusty young psychotic who punctuates his constant mumbling with epithetic outbursts and wild gesticulations, staring straight ahead pretending not to see the pantsless person squatting between parked cars to the left while skirting the fresh pile of excrement to the right. It's sad, but it's become second nature to not even acknowledge these things, discussing instead butterflies and puppies and rainbows and mountain springs. Blinders are necessary else we'd be forever clutching each other in gagging repugnant depression.

I did wish I'd had my camera today, though. Not to poke fun at the less fortunate or anything like that, but simply to capture the moment. One of the old homeless guys who hangs around near the office had on a Monster.com hat and I couldn't help but smile at the wry incongruity.

Yes, life in the big city is so much more than I ever expected.

Voir dire of inevitability

I should have known. I really should have. It's just the way my luck runs. And yet I never seem to take the lesson to heart; instead I continue to test the fates, hoping the winds will blow differently to shift the raincloud out from over my fortune, drowned as it is in absurdities and mixed metaphors.

They say lightning never strikes twice, but I sometimes feel that it continues to zap me repeatedly, figuratively defying the odds in singling me out and leaving me stunned and bewildered but missing any marks as proof that something strange and ridiculous and hellishly divine may have just occurred to me alone, just as it quite literally did nine years ago while I was out for a solitary stroll along the empty shoreline with a borrowed umbrella for a lightning rod.

Anyway, this week was nothing nearly that improbable. Instead, rather than postpone to a future and, quite possibly, equally bad time, I answered my call to Jury Duty in the hope that, as a purely numbers game, I would walk away unselected. And that was clearly my first mistake.

Naturally my number came up Monday, so I reported to the Jury Room at the Hall of Justice on Tuesday at 1pm, still hoping for a reprieve. Of the several hundred people sitting around bored, reading, napping, and trying to conduct business in absentia, surely the majority of us would walk away without getting called into a courtroom. And my confidence grew as first one, then two, then three courts were filled or canceled without me. Several hours passed and the end of the day drew near and one court remained, and obviously my confidence was mistake number two.

Of course, among the 75 or so people ultimately assigned to courtroom 17, I was still sure that I would walk away. And in fact, all afternoon on Wednesday, I sat in the back of the room, uncalled, as the jury box seats were filled and reshuffled. 24 people whittled down to 12. Come back Thursday at 1:30. Seats 13-23 are refilled with the computer's random selections - a wave of relief washes over me as it becomes clear that they can't let all those people go. Even when I was called to fill that very last seat, #24, I still thought I would get to go home at the end of the day. I'd seen who they let go, I knew how to answer the questions to be excused: Guns are bad, that hypothetical question is pointless, it's difficult to set aside emotion to consider just the facts.

And yet, one by one, the seats in front of me emptied and I was left to occupy seat 13. And despite going through the motions with another 11 people, the counsel finally had no objections and I was sworn in as Alternate Juror #1. Seriously?! Seriously! Not only do I have to sit through the whole trial, but I likely won't even get to deliberate! I know this because it's precisely what happened the last time I was called to Jury Duty three years ago.
Oh the suckage.

This is why I don't gamble with money.