OK. So the phone rings at about 9:10 this morning. "Had I forgotten my dentist appointment?" Well as a matter of fact, I had. This was an appointment I had made just 2 days ago after receiving a medical credit card that allows me to pay back dental procedures over time. Dr. Mark has been telling me for a couple years that "# 17" really needed a partial crown. About $500 after insurance.
So I rushed in and found my self waiting for them to finish pulling a couple of teeth out of kid who had fallen and partially knocked out a couple of his baby teeth. He had slipped nicely into the time slot caused by my tardiness. So I played Bubblet on my PDA working into quite a nice average score. About half an hour later they noticed that I could have been on gas this whole time. It was time to numb me up... and with no gas to make me not care that they were sticking a needle in my mouth.
Dr. Mark started talking about needles and how they were made and why people were afraid of them. This is actually the wrong kind of thing to talk about to relax me. You actually need to distract me so I think of anything BUT needles. He seemed to use a little more numbing solution than usual and I felt my lower lip and the tip of my tongue first get prickly and then seem to disappear from my face. Oh well, the gas mask is now in place. Breathe deeply.
Skipping through the procedure itself (gas allows me to be somewhere else anyway), I'm back at home. It is 1:45pm. My tongue is OK but my lower lip is still not attached to my face, it seems. I'm hungry but there is no way I can eat anything without a lip. There is an itch where my lower lip used to be but when I reach up to scratch it, there is this fleshy blob in the way of my fingers reaching the source. Aaaargh!
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Crutches for the Gimp
Well now I've really done it. I was carrying a big box out the back door and I came down on one of the steps just a little bit funny and the next thing I know, the box is up in the air and I'm flat on my face in the dirt. (Now where is that delicious bit of Swiss cheese that was in my mouth?). Clearly my ankle is totally f*#ked up. I'm writhing in pain, the pit bulls are barking, VHS tapes are scattered around me and I keep wondering where the cheese ended up. When the cursing subsided in about 5 minutes, I resumed inventory. My brand new chinos now have a hole in the knee and blood stains too. My elbows are scraped up but the real story is hidden beneath my sock. Not only is my ankle already swollen up double, the top of my foot has a large bump with the skin peeling off. I must have scraped it as I fell. It all looks and feels so nasty that I'm sure there is a possibility it is fractured.Luckily, I have my cell phone and I call Mary. She is stuck at work in a deadline crisis. OK, I'll just lie here in the dirt a while longer. Slowly I attempt to get to my feet. There's that cheese! Completely covered with dirt. I throw it to the pit bulls.
Finally I drag myself in the house and attempt to put some weight on it. Ouch, yes, but I don't think it is broken. I call Dr. Hazle's office and describe what I see. They say "get thee to an emergency care facility". I call Bill. He's on a photo shoot. I call Margi and she is about to start a lesson. It is Grandpa Harold who comes through for me.
Shifting to the past tense, When we reached the hospital, Andy Willey, Mary's brother was the one opening the door and finding wheel chairs for people. (He works there.) They got me into x-ray fairly quickly and then it was back into the waiting room. Margi and Abby showed up to wait with me. Eventually, they called me into the inner sanctum so I could wait on a gurney for an available doctor. A drunken Indian dude on another gurney asked me the time. He was itching to get to work but the nurses kept telling him he needed to wait around and see the results of his expensive tests. He came over and gave me a packet of cheese crackers with peanut butter for some reason.
Finally a doctor and a physician's assistant pulled up my x-rays. They could see no broken bones but were quite surprised at the amount of calcification in my foot. That's arthritis. That explains why my feet hurt so bad every morning.
I was fitted with a splint and crutches and sent on my way with some ibuprofen and instructions to stay off my feet for a week. Sucky timing indeed. Although is there ever a good time to lay around and have people wait on you for everything? Don't answer that.
Tonight Michigan was inundated with thunderstorms and tornado watches. We finally got our downpour in Kent County around 9:00. I hobbled to the porch to watch the rushing torrents wash the garbage down Grove Street hill. There was a kind of beauty in it.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Seriously, It's October?
Holy crap! Seems like it was just summer. What happened to September? The hot humid weather really throws off the internal calendar.
The last two weeks have been all about getting the house at 44 Grove Street ready for the market. So here is the culmination of these efforts. Not all that impressive. I could have written a more attractive narrative. But the porch is painted, trees are trimmed and garage is gilded with wood putty in all the rotten places. From the outside, it all looks real nice. Compared to the other properties in this price range, seems like a real deal.
The real work is now inside. The idea is that when a buyer steps into the house they will gasp and think, "this place is so nice and roomy". This means all of our quasi-unnecessary crap has to go. I rented a storage space about 10 miles from here with the idea that it will be a holding spot until we move. My mom and Dad (and Jon) came on Saturday to make trips to this storage facility with boxes of books, shelves and other unnecessary furniture. At one point, Grandpa almost bagged a buck with his pickup truck. We were leaving the storage compound and I saw this dear about to bound into the road. I yelled and grandpa slammed on the brakes just in time to miss (by inches) this 6-point buck running at full-tilt.
So now my computer work station is back upstairs in the old location but a bit tidier. I've been working on a piece for the Children's Museum which I just finished. I realized that for the price of a DVD duplication job I coulld probably run out and buy a DVD inkjet printer for my own labels. If I can find a good price locally, I might just do that. it seems to come up more and more often.
I took Bill Hebert too see the new house and he was thoroughly impressed. I sort of needed that. There is much anxiety surrounding the funding of such an endeavor.
Mary's credit check from one of the three bureaus looked stallar. But evidently, the other two both had record of a delinquent account. About 5 and a half years ago, Mary was enjoying taking a karate class in Cedar Springs. The thing was, they required an expensive "membership". She was feeling so good about the class that she signed up for a multi-year commitment. Then all of a sudden, her husband died unexpectedly and she found herself a single parent. She could no longer make the classes. She asked to get out of the contract but the owner said that she had signed the paper and it was beyond his control. He said that something could be worked out through the company in Pennsylvania that handled these iron-clad membership contracts. They told her that she could get out of her contract by paying $480. Seeing no other way out she resolved to pay the penalty. Instead of writing a personal check, Mary went to the bank and purchased a money order to make it more official and easily cashed. Problem was, the bank does not fill in the "pay to" line for money orders less than $500. Mary just stuck the money order in the envelope and sent it off to Philadelphia in first class mail. A week later, the health-club-membership-scamming organization called to tell her that time was up and since she did not send the $480, she would have to pay the entire $1500. Puzzled, she went to the bank and discovered the Money Order had been cashed but not by the company she had sent it to. They traced it to a bank account in Philly and got the name and address of the guy who had signed his name in the "pay to" line. Unfortunately, the police were unwilling to investigate for this "small" amount and the company pretended they never received the payment. The $1500 went to collections and there it sits as a blemish on her credit score. Of course, she would not pay a second time for services that she had not received.
The bank for our home loan said that she would need to arrange to pay off the $1500 before we could get the loan. We told them that that was a "deal breaker" and I just got word yesterday that they would overlook that particular requirement. Whew!
The weather has turned gorgeous again and the autumn colors are starting to come out. I'd go take a picture but the battery charger for my old camcorder is in the storage unit 10 miles away.
The last two weeks have been all about getting the house at 44 Grove Street ready for the market. So here is the culmination of these efforts. Not all that impressive. I could have written a more attractive narrative. But the porch is painted, trees are trimmed and garage is gilded with wood putty in all the rotten places. From the outside, it all looks real nice. Compared to the other properties in this price range, seems like a real deal.
The real work is now inside. The idea is that when a buyer steps into the house they will gasp and think, "this place is so nice and roomy". This means all of our quasi-unnecessary crap has to go. I rented a storage space about 10 miles from here with the idea that it will be a holding spot until we move. My mom and Dad (and Jon) came on Saturday to make trips to this storage facility with boxes of books, shelves and other unnecessary furniture. At one point, Grandpa almost bagged a buck with his pickup truck. We were leaving the storage compound and I saw this dear about to bound into the road. I yelled and grandpa slammed on the brakes just in time to miss (by inches) this 6-point buck running at full-tilt.
So now my computer work station is back upstairs in the old location but a bit tidier. I've been working on a piece for the Children's Museum which I just finished. I realized that for the price of a DVD duplication job I coulld probably run out and buy a DVD inkjet printer for my own labels. If I can find a good price locally, I might just do that. it seems to come up more and more often.I took Bill Hebert too see the new house and he was thoroughly impressed. I sort of needed that. There is much anxiety surrounding the funding of such an endeavor.
Mary's credit check from one of the three bureaus looked stallar. But evidently, the other two both had record of a delinquent account. About 5 and a half years ago, Mary was enjoying taking a karate class in Cedar Springs. The thing was, they required an expensive "membership". She was feeling so good about the class that she signed up for a multi-year commitment. Then all of a sudden, her husband died unexpectedly and she found herself a single parent. She could no longer make the classes. She asked to get out of the contract but the owner said that she had signed the paper and it was beyond his control. He said that something could be worked out through the company in Pennsylvania that handled these iron-clad membership contracts. They told her that she could get out of her contract by paying $480. Seeing no other way out she resolved to pay the penalty. Instead of writing a personal check, Mary went to the bank and purchased a money order to make it more official and easily cashed. Problem was, the bank does not fill in the "pay to" line for money orders less than $500. Mary just stuck the money order in the envelope and sent it off to Philadelphia in first class mail. A week later, the health-club-membership-scamming organization called to tell her that time was up and since she did not send the $480, she would have to pay the entire $1500. Puzzled, she went to the bank and discovered the Money Order had been cashed but not by the company she had sent it to. They traced it to a bank account in Philly and got the name and address of the guy who had signed his name in the "pay to" line. Unfortunately, the police were unwilling to investigate for this "small" amount and the company pretended they never received the payment. The $1500 went to collections and there it sits as a blemish on her credit score. Of course, she would not pay a second time for services that she had not received.
The bank for our home loan said that she would need to arrange to pay off the $1500 before we could get the loan. We told them that that was a "deal breaker" and I just got word yesterday that they would overlook that particular requirement. Whew!
The weather has turned gorgeous again and the autumn colors are starting to come out. I'd go take a picture but the battery charger for my old camcorder is in the storage unit 10 miles away.
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