The week before I started work - four weeks ago - I broke a tooth.
Calling the dentist straight away didn't do any good. He was about to leave on vacation, and his receptionist - endlessly attitudinal - made me feel both vain and unreasonable when I insisted my situation was urgent: "Plenty of people walk around every day with broken teeth, Michelle."
My appointment was for the end of July, but I haven't made it that far. Today I got an "urgent" appointment (different receptionist) after half-pie fainting on the way home from work last night, and waking to pain from my tooth, right up the bones of my face and rounding off inside my eye socket. My throat was swollen and sore too, making it really difficult to talk or swallow.
I guess the biggest fear on my way to see the dentist today was that he would give me antibiotics and tell me to come back when the swelling had gone down. That I'd be stuck with this pain for another week. What I really wanted was for him to make the pain go away. To return me to a life of cups of tea and glasses of cold water; and breathing Winter's air without wincing.
What he ended up doing, however, was introduce me to a whole 'nother world of pain.
Holy crapballs, people. All the Google searches on well, Google, say that a root canal is a 'relatively painless proceedure' these days. Let me tell you, those Google searches lied! Half way through reboring my tooth with his snazzy, ever-larger files, he had to reinject anesthetic due to 'extreme discomfort' and even *that* nearly put me through the ceiling!
I cried my way home after collecting my antibiotics and pain tablets from the pharmacy and took myself to bed.
My. Face. Hurt.
Way worse than before. And I'm only half way through! I need to go back for phase two of the proceedure.
The analgesics have kicked in now though. It is still tender to chew, but as the pain seems to becoming more managble as I dutifully take my pain killers and the antibiotics, things ought to right themselves in the next day or so.
They say whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but sometimes it's hard to know if something's making me stronger, or just killing me.
"Hair is the first thing. And teeth the second. Hair and teeth. A man got those two things he's got it all."James Brown
It's late on Sunday night. Asleep is where my sensible says I ought to be, but here I am instead.
Lately has been a series of buses, working out work, cold days, gorgeous skies, podcasts and too much complaining.
I've been complaining incessantly about the weather - regardless of what it was doing - and how cold I feel all the time. I think it's not so much that Auckland is colder than Melbourne - or Castlemaine, for that matter - because it's pretty bloody cold over there too. I think it's that we Aucklanders don't keep our interior spaces as warm. I've noticed the house is colder, public transport air conditioning is set lower, offices are cooler.
Our house in Newstead was always toasty warm, the trains and trams cosy, and the heaters cranked up in offices. We just seem to have 'less' comfortable temperatures here. So from now on, we're just going to take all that as a 'given' and not complain about it anymore. Also not going to complain about any 'ghosts of managers past' either.
Because things are what they are, and it's time to build a bridge and just get over it.
Reading Challenge
Early in June I read a few blogs on reading. In particular, reading a lot more and finishing more books. I got all excited and decided I could really benefit from starting to read an hour per day. With a few things going on (and not going on) in my life, I didn't get a good bite into the routine I was looking to form. The book I was reading at the time is still half done on my Kindle.
I'm still very keen to develop the habit, so am kickstarting myself again, with a determination to finish the book I'm reading: The Element by Sir Ken Robinson, this week.
Some good news though, others of you did get a grip on the habit and I've heard a few have started really chewing through your book-logs. Good on you!
Hanging Out
People ask me why I came home. Why Michelle? Why now? What made you make that decision? I tell them the reason, that I miss my kids. I've missed 5 years of being here for the ordinary things. Sure, we've kept in touch, talked on the phone, on the computer, via Facebook and email. But it's the ordinary connections I was aching for, and completely terrified that if I left it much longer, I'd never be the habit of my children as they'd grow used to me not being there.
That is why I came home and, honestly, it's the only reason. I missed my children, plain and simple.
So days like yesterday are a treasure for me. David (my youngest, if you don't know) and I decided to brunch before going to the Museum. I picked him up from the flat he shares with his brother Simon, and Simon's girl friend Melissa. David navigated as I'm still getting my sense of Auckland layout back and have trouble remember where anything is. We drove to a cafe on Dominion Road called Cearal Killa.
Shortly after being seated, we spotted Simon and Melissa across the road coming out of a second hand furniture place. While David and I fumbled about decided whether to yell out or to phone, they came through the doors of the cafe and joined us for breakfast. Well, they'd already eaten, but had another round of hot drinks while Dave and I put away the delicious breakfasts we'd ordered.
After a fairly leisurely breakfast, we left Simon and Melissa to their day and carried on to the Museum.
The Auckland Museum has had a major redevelopment and upgrade since the last time I was there. It's really quite amazing to enter from the rear of the building into the huge new atrium. We were greeted immediately upon entering the building and directed to one of the two information/payment desks. There we learned that there was a talk by David Lloyd whose photography "Flick of the tail" had received a Specially Commended in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition (2011) and graces the cover of the competition portfolio.
We also booked a guided tour of the Museum. Sometimes it's just great to be a tourist in your own town. The tour was really great. I would highly recommend it as we saw parts of the Museum we usually dismissed on our way to our usual haunts and habits.
We ended up back at his flat for fish and chips, and watching tv with Simon when he got home too.
Today Amy and I went make-up shopping.
Anyhoo - to be able to spend time just hanging out with the kids like this is exactly why I came home.
Look at the time!
Gosh darn it, it's past midnight and I have to get up for a 7:10am bus. I could happily toodle around talking to you all night but each minute I spend awake right now adds to the lead in my head when I try to get up in the morning.
PS: I was in bed at 9:30pm but, as usual, time has escaped me!
Tonight, Auckland University old boy Mark Kruse gave a stimulating, down-to-earth talk, with some wavey hands, about the Large Hadron Collider, the Higgs field and the Higgs boson. And then the full aditorium asked really interesting questions - and one regarding religion.
A few of the interesting points from Mark's talk, which you might drop into your next cocktail party, include:
protons collide inside the LHC's detectors at about 40 million collisions per second
the universe hasn't got a middle nor does it have an edge (no edge!)
the Higgs boson decays immediately into two jets of hadrons
there's a lot of wavey hands when talking about unknowns in physics
at a hundreth, trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was a million, trillion degrees (slip, slop, slap, people)
a hadron is any sub-atomic particle made of quarks (not cheese)
only 4.6% of the universe is observable. (four.point.six.percent. That's not very many percents)
It was a really good evening - you know - if you like that kind of thing.
Which I do. So it was.
I topped it off by listening to Brian Cox and Robin Ince on The Infinate Monkey Cage podcast all the way home on the bus.
Science is so accessible and cool these days. These physists, they're like rock stars. Passionate, studious, rock stars.
"The Higgs boson was predicted, then a particle appears that fits that prediction. So now they have to work out that it is actually the particle. Just cos it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, doesn't automatically mean it is a duck"
"Quark, quark."
"Oh, shut up."
Update on 2012-12-12 18:49 by Michelle
"It’s great to not only see the artists inspired and having fun during these talks, but also in conveying the content to a broader audience. I think this is an excellent outreach device. I only wish I could draw better !"
