Archive: Minutia

It’s Friday, at last!
I have a three-day weekend,
Which makes my heart soar.

JG planned ahead
To take the day off today,
And he walked Ted! Swoon.

Getting to sleep in
Is so exciting to me.
Is that sad, or what?

Fun green shoes, good hair,
And not having to carpool
All make me happy.

It’s gorgeous outside!
I sing my commute away,
Sunglasses in place.

My floor is quiet.
My boss is working from home.
I don’t mind one bit.

Have I ever had
A good mood in the morning?
It’s nice, for a change.

… the fire chief lives on the corner of our street. He cooks on a charcoal grill at least two days a week, regardless of the season. He used to have a big squad car with “CHIEF” painted on the side, but he has traded it in for a manly SUV. When the volunteer fire siren goes off, it’s just a matter of moments before that SUV rolls quickly past with him in the driver’s seat, wearing his fluorescent green sweatshirt. He and his wife had a baby girl last year, and Ted is inexplicably afraid of her stroller.

… there are flags of all sorts flying from people’s houses. Collectively, we support the Flyers, the Seminoles, America, spring, and a duck in galoshes.

… there is a telephone pole that was completely taken over by morning glories. When I walked in the morning, before we got Ted, I always loved to see how its flowers faced the rising sun just over the hill toward the high school. This year, I realized sadly that someone had “cleaned” the pole, so there are no more morning glories.

… a publication called The Bulletin is tossed into people’s driveways. No one seems to want it, judging from how long the copies lie languishing on the sidewalk, but how to stop the distribution appears to be a mystery.

… the air smells like spaghetti sauce, chimney smoke, freshly-cut grass, or hamburgers, depending on the time of year.

… there is a preponderance of lawn ornaments in the shape of deer or sheep with holes cut into their backs to hold potted plants. I don’t understand those creepy things at all.

… the school buses tend to honk their horns if the kids aren’t at the end of their driveways. If I’m close enough and unaware, it makes me yelp and jump out of my skin.

… the ice cream truck began its rounds in the last weekend of March. It plays a mangled version of “Pop Goes the Weasel,” and it comes to our street at 6:30 on the dot every night. I’ve never bought anything from an ice cream truck before, so I am always tempted to raid the coin jar and flag down the driver, but I’m not sure how that would look. Even then, if I couldn’t get a strawberry Good Humor bar, I would be really disappointed.

… there is a car with a bumper sticker that is so faded that it reads only, “God Save.” I always wonder what it originally read. God Save America? God Save the Philadelphia Eagles? God Save Me Money?

… a group of high school girls walks to school with one of their moms, who walks a yellow Lab named Friday. The girls always squeal at Ted when they see him coming, and he starts wagging his tail even before I can see them coming.

One of the errands JG and I ran during our common day off last Friday was stopping by the dentist. See, yours truly is in need of some orthodontia work.

When I was a teenager, I managed to avoid wearing braces and all of the pain that entails. I don’t have really straight teeth, but I always thought they were pretty good for not having had braces. At my most recent cleaning, however, my dentist had a completely different opinion.

Apparently, I am a victim of “downward drift,” and my teeth will continue their glacier-esque travels toward the front of my mouth as I get older. They have already rotated and encroached on one another, which is part of the reason that I have a hard time flossing. The other part of it is that I have an overactive gag reflex. Oh, and I hate to floss. The team of hygienists made molds of my teeth, and my path toward straighter teeth had begun.

On Friday, we finally paid the down payment and I received my first treatment. Don’t be fooled — despite my moaning and groaning, it’s not bad at all. I have been saved the adolescent trauma of wiring my jaw by virtue of clear alignment trays. Instead of a mouthful of metal, I have the unpleasant sensation that I can only imagine is akin to that of wearing a mouth guard, not that I have ever worn one of those. The trays put pressure on my teeth, but there hasn’t been any pain, thank goodness. I keep sucking at my teeth furiously because I feel like something is stuck to them, which might be because, well, something is.

When I eat, I have to dig my fingers into my mouth to pry out the trays and put them in my handy carrying case for the duration of the meal. It’s lovely. Then, before bed, I feel like a geezer when I brush each tray with toothpaste. As if I didn’t have to brush my own stupid teeth! Apparently, denture cleaner is an absolute no-no, according to the brochure, which recommended that I buy a $75 cleaning kit, despite the fine print that said that toothpaste was okay, too. Huh! I should buy myself something with all of that saved tray-cleaner money!

So far, five days in, the biggest impact to my life is that I have to condense my eating pattern into three distinct times (so as to wear the trays for 22 hours each day), and that has really put a wrench in my previous strategy of Snack Constantly on Healthy Things. What, I have to eat my leftovers, fruit, crackers, and applesauce at the same time? Geez. My “S” sounds have become rather lispy in the past few days, and I find that I’m covering up my mouth more when I smile or laugh. JG says that he doesn’t even notice, but when I arrived at the wedding rehearsal on my first day of wearing the trays, the first thing the bride said to me was, “Do you have something on your teeth?” Great.

The bright side of the matter is that, in seven months, I will have a lovely, straight smile, and a mere eleven months after that, it’ll be paid in full. Beauty doesn’t come cheap.

After a night of Nyquil-induced dreams of a cartoon Hillary Clinton and an 80s-era Nancy Reagan, I called my boss to let her know that I would not be at the office. Even the shortened walk around the block for Ted made my head spin, so the thought of sitting through my commute and holding vigil at my desk was hardly feasible. I’m having a hard time distinguishing the fog from my cold medicine and the cotton balls that have replaced my brain. My ears are buzzing, I can’t breathe in through my nose, and I’m going through boxes of tissues at an alarming rate. My heavy breathing is punctuated by wimpy, non-committal coughs and insistent sniffles. In short, I am a mess.

It happened. I crossed my fingers all winter long, but today, during the onset of spring, I have finally been forced to take my first sick day. If anyone needs me, I will be on the couch in an appealing cloud of chamomile and menthol. Heck, barring a miracle combination of liquigels and chicken noodle soup, I’ll be here even if no one needs me.