Everyday Stupidities

Greetings, my two readers. Time to let the other shoe drop and tell you all about my root canal! *cheers* Actually, first I want to tell you that I completed the grouting of the frontpiece of my fireplace. Click the image to the left of these words to get a semi-okay gander at the finished product... and ignore the white brick wall, that's going to be covered. It's anything but perfect but it suits the purpose. The photo below on the right is what the brick will be covered with -- the stuff on the left is going to be the body tile, and there will be an accent strip above the opening made of three rows of 2"x2" whitish tiles and four decorative accents (they came as a boxed set and the emblems are all different, here's a sample in the middle), and the 2"x1" tiles on the right are in the frame to better show you the colors of the frontpiece border tile and dark grout.

Okay, so now to tell you about my root canal. *cheers again* Wait, the blog is Everyday Stupidities so I feel obliged to tell this story about work first. This week I will not have worked one weekday. None of this was really by my choice and there's nothing wrong here, it's just how the schedule has been reshuffled. Over last weekend the scheduling guy asked me if I'd be willing to take paid time off on Monday, Memorial Day, because he didn't figure there would be much volume of work and because I've agreed to cover a coworker's shift on Thursday, June 14. So I had Monday off. And the funny kismet of it was, the Russian Mafia figured out that it was a holiday here so rather than creating their daily 5-20 domains with one or two dozen phishing sites, they created 41 of them... and added one of our clients to the list of brands 'represented', so my coworkers had to do ten times as much work as usual contacting hosts to have those sites taken down. Ha ha. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are off-days for me, but on Tuesday the scheduling guy calls me at home:

   Did you get my email?
Uh, no, I haven't been at the office since Sunday, you know that.
   I sent you an email asking if you were willing to swap this Friday's shift with [coworker] who needs Thursday the 7th off.
Yes, that is good by me... okay, this Friday I'm off, next Thursday I'm on.
   Could you reply to that email so I'll have documentation that the offer was accepted? Anytime is fine but preferably soon.
Okay, I'll send you a reply when next I'm downtown.

I had no plans of going downtown anytime soon, everywhere I was planning to go either was within six miles or was in another direction. But I got bored around 9pm Tuesday so I drove downtown, went to the building, let myself in (scaring the night person), turned on the computer, immediately set Thunderbird to "retrieve headers only" because it'd take an hour for it to pick up the 945 emails I had no need to read, restarted the program, waited a few minutes for it to finish compiling the list, found two emails from the scheduler -- the mail he was referring to, and a followup saying "you have verbally accepted the shift swap but please reply to this email to confirm", meh -- and replied as requested with "yes, okay, accepted". Deleted 945 emails, filed the two he sent in the Useless folder, set Thunderbird back to automatic message retrieval, and shut down the computer. A one hour or so round trip for five minutes of work and three written words. So on Friday I plan to maybe do a little tiling of the fireplace -- but that's pretty much all, since my wife is leaving town around 10am and I have not plotted anything fun in her absence (try as I feebly might).

Now I can tell the root canal story? *swelling cheers* Alrightie then! There isn't much to tell. Since all the stuff people stereotypically fear or hate about root canals had already been done, there wasn't any drilling or poking with voodoo skewers in the plan. I got there 20 minutes early, sat around reading some vapid celeb worship magazine (I don't recall the title but it was competition to In Touch - or as I call it accurately, "Out Of Touch"). Right around the time my brain felt like it was going to slide out of my head, which any story about Katie and Tom will invoke (though the article about which of the Top 8 on American Idol would win was amusing, Sanjaya was rated fourth and Melinda was rated first -- I didn't say this was the most current issue!), I was called back and seated, and told that the delay is because they have misplaced my file. So there was a bunch of refresher work and re-examining stuff, and after they opened up the temporary filling and took measurements a hygienist was dispatched to look through all the folders pulled one week ago to see if they could find mine. They did find my folder... on the receptionist's desk. (She said she doesn't make mistakes like that and I could ask her husband as a character witness. First, he's in Iraq so that's not an option. Second, husbands know better than to tell the truth about their wives' stupid mistakes to other people, if they like continuing to receive things such as homecooked meals, clean laundry, and sex.) So after about an hour's work of doing whatever it is that endodontists do in their orifices, the hole was patched again and I was sent on my way. And then I bought tile, see the photo at right.

I have a bonus stupidity to mention. It's been really hot in the Puget Sound lately, surprisingly so and it reminds me of growing up in the Lower Yakima Valley (difference being it's ten degrees warmer there and such weather there lasts for months, not days). So I'm driving along to my appointment and there are two young men sitting at a bus stop. One is attempting to use two elements of style that the kind of folks who wear their pants halfway down their asses consider hip: 1) he's hot so he's wearing his shirt like a poncho (head through the neck hole but the shirt is only covering his shoulders, draped over his chest and back); 2) he's got a little black wool cap on with the name of some aggro band glued to it. Okay waitaminnit, he's sweating across his chest and ventilating it, yet has his brain insulated. Kid, you deserve the heatstroke you're gonna give yourself... carry on.