Sad

It has been a month, to the day, since I last posted anything on my blog. Maybe because my life has become a bore.  It's not that I'm not doing things, or not busy. Actually I've been very busy. Over the last month I have patterned and made an entire wedding dress (photos later, when I get them), and I altered another wedding dress (hemmed it and replaced the bodice––and I'm waiting for pics of that one too). Now I'm working on Santa's coat, and then more sewing for Santa (to help out his elves––Christmas is coming fast!).  On top of that, I'm still trying to run my house––at least enough to keep us all alive.

But I'm running the house without my second half. Bruce has been teaching school in Vernal, 176 miles away, since August 11. You might wonder why he took a teaching job in Vernal instead of Salt Lake. Good question.  Bruce doesn't have a full teaching license, but because he does have a bachelor's degree he qualified for Utah state's Alternate Route to Licensure (ARL) program. This gives him a temporary teaching license so he can have a full-time teaching job while he goes to school to take the extra classes he needs to get the full certificate. He has two years (from the time he got the teaching job) to finish his license.  But the school districts here in the Salt Lake Valley absolutely will not hire an ARL teacher. So he applied in other districts in the state, and Uintah School District (Vernal) snatched him up. (He got a glowing recommendation from one of the principals he subbed for last year––because he is an awesome teacher!)

This is Mr. North's school picture for Maeser Elementary School. He is teaching 5th grade, and is a very popular teacher. :-)

At first we thought he'd find us a place to live out there and we'd all move. Instead he found that a one-bedroom apartment costs almost the same as our current house payment. (Fortunately Bruce found a very kind family who have taken him in as part of their family––rent free. He's become very good friends with them.) See, the oil fields in Vernal are booming right now and even an entry-level truck driver makes 1 1/2 times what a school teacher does. So housing prices have shot up (almost double what they are in Salt Lake, and triple what we still owe on our house), and the demand is high. In short, we can't compete.

I had considered this possibility when Bruce drove away that first day in August. I thought that he might have to finish his teaching certificate in Vernal while we lived here without him for two years, seeing him only on the weekends. And I knew it would be hard, but I believed that it would get easier as time went by; never fun, by any means, but more bearable with time.In fact, what has actually happened is that it gets harder and harder for me to send him away each week. During the weeks I have to take care of things like kidney stones, oral surgery, installing a dishwasher, the van completely breaking down (completely––not worth paying for more repairs), kids running six different directions, and managing the house all by myself. On the weekends I only see Bruce for 14 to 20 hours (waking hours); it's not enough. It's not enough time for him to do the things that I can't do myself, and spend time with the kids, and not nearly enough time for me. I am lonely.

And, consequently, I can't think of anything interesting to write about. Aaawwww! Pretty sad, huh? It makes me feel babyish just to write this. Especially when I have so many things to be grateful for—like Bruce's job, and his dad helping me out so much while Bruce is gone, and my really nice kids.
But I miss my husband desperately.

A Trip to the Oral Surgeon

As I was saying last night, before I was so rudely interrupted by pain-killer sickness . . .

Two-and-a-half weeks ago I went to the dentist for the first time in about seven years. This is not because I am so terrified of the dentist that I avoided going until my mouth was falling apart. Actually it was lack of insurance and the tremendous cost of dentistry that kept me away, but the result was the same.

A few years ago my back left tooth broke. Seriously—a chunk the size of one of my kids' baby teeth broke off. I was pretty stressed out about it at first, but it never hurt, and I mostly didn't think about it after a while.

Then, during my last semester in school, my lower left gum got a black spot ("It's the black spot!") and a big, old boil on it, and my third tooth got kind of wiggly. I was pretty sure this meant an abscess, so I looked it up online—even found pictures that looked just like what I had—and yes, I was right. This wasn't terribly surprising, because that tooth has given me trouble since before I had my braces, and has had three surgeries during it's little life. But I couldn't get it fixed yet.

So I had Bruce give me a blessing and I did a few things I knew from having my jaw surgery way back when, and hoped nothing terrible would happen. After a while the blister popped (while I was brushing my teeth) and a bunch of goo leaked out. This happened every other day for a couple of weeks, until the bubble just went away, my gums looked mostly normal, and the tooth mostly stopped wiggling. Which was good, because I was in the middle of my fashion-show craziness, and didn't have the time or money to deal with it just then.

So the green arrows point to the little wires that held my jaw in place after my jaw surgery (when I was 16). I drew black outlines around the teeth on the left side to make it easier to see where all the happiness was taking place. You can see that the naughty, bad tooth has never had a normal root like the others. The tiny white spot on the bottom of that tooth is where I had two "root canals" done. (Actually the dentist says that tooth never had a root canal—which makes sense since that tooth has no root to speak of. But after my second surgery on it I got a T-shirt that said "I survived root canal surgery!" So it must have been a similar procedure.)

Well now we have some insurance—a "health savings account" actually. So I finally went to the dentist. Yay! I told him that I had a slightly wiggly tooth, he looked at my x-ray and said, "I bet I know which one." Yes, I had an abscess and some infection in there. But before we dealt with that he wanted to put a filling in the broken tooth. So two weeks ago, Wednesday, they shot me up with ten shots of novacaine and not only filled that tooth, but built it up so it doesn't look broken any more. Coming off of the novacaine was miserable. (I've decided that since I never have any drugs stronger than two over-the-counter ibuprofen in my system (and even that's not very often), my body just can't handle anything stronger.)

For two weeks I had a low-level ache in my head and jaw that gradually dwindled as time passed. The dentist looked at that tooth again yesterday, and it turns out the new bit needed to be ground down a little so my bite would work right.

After that was done, I went in to the oral surgeon where I would be put to sleep and have my naughty, bad, abscessed tooth removed and my mouth prepared for an implant. Again, I'm not scared of that kind of thing, but I am scared of getting a needle stuck in me–which was the very first thing they did; they gave me an I.V. to deliver the sleep-inducing drugs. I was a very good girl, and did not cry, or wriggle or anything. They said I'd feel drowsy in about 40 seconds, and I guess they were right because the next thing I remember was my father-in-law helping me into his car. (After he took me home he picked up my prescriptions and brought me some flowers too. :-) )

These are not my flowers because my camera is still missing; but they are like my flowers.

The worst of it all was coming off of the drugs and being on the pain-killers yesterday. Severe dizziness and nausea every time I tried to stand or sit up! That, and being super hungry (which increased the dizziness and nausea). Today my mouth hardly knows anything different happened (except my tongue can feel there's an empty spot that hasn't been there since I was twelve), so I will avoid the pain medicine like the plague that it is. And in a few months I will go back for a crown and my teeth will be better than they have in a while.

Hooray for modern dentistry!

X-Rays Are Cool!

Having your mouth worked on . . . not so much.

And I will have to try this later, because I'm feeling very dizzy and nauseous all of a sudden.

Silly

Do you ever, sometimes, have a perfectly good day—get a lot done, feel pretty happy, enjoy your family—and then, just before bedtime you feel completely let down and have to cry?

And then do you wake up the next morning still feeling out of sorts and wanting to cry? And then you get lost and stuck in road construction for an hour trying to find an address and then make your way back home? And then you have to go to the dentist and get a tooth filled?

I'm not afraid of the dentist or dental procedures; I never have been (unless I was too little to remember). I had so many things done to my mouth in the first twenty to thirty years of my life that it's kind of hard to scare me off now. So I don't think it was the actual visit to the dentist—or the anticipation of it—that's caused this sadness. And, as expected, everything went fine. They gave me a half dozen shots to numb my mouth and later, when I could still feel my chin, they gave me another three (which I felt). The work on my tooth went fine (didn't feel any of that!) and now I'm home—albeit with a totally numb mouth. Standard. Painless.

Nevertheless I feel pretty sad.

I want to be consoled.

For what?

I don't know.

Maybe it's just knowing that no one is going to give me a hug, listen to my experience (mundane as it was) and tell me what a brave girl I am.

Silly.


And (by the way) my camera is still lost. I think it's a hopeless cause. Maybe that's the trouble.

Hair Day

I don't know yet if it's a good hair day, or a bad hair day; I just colored my hair and it's not dry yet. Me dyeing my hair is nothing new; I've colored it a lot. It's had blonde highlights, it's been red, it's been brown. But for several years now it's mostly been red—it would have saved me a lot of trouble if I'd just been born with red hair, because I love it!

I was born a blondie.
(Check out the cool car in the neighbor's driveway!)

This is close to what it looked like until I was probably ten or so. (It's a little reddish-looking because it's an old picture.)

This fabulous picture, apparently taken when I was half-dead first thing in the morning, shows my real hair color by the time I was a teenager. (I bet this was Christmas morning.)

And this is about when I first started coloring my hair—at Wendell's prompting.

Lately I've been thinking that it would save me a lot of trouble if I'd just go back to my own, real hair color—no more dyeing. (Although I am getting a few gray strands, and I'm not ready to go there yet. So I might still keep playing with the color.) Anyway, while I was at the store yesterday with Brandon and Ryan I told them to help me choose a color that was close to my real hair color. Brandon (age 16) says, "I have no idea what your real hair color is." Ryan (age 15) agreed. So I told them to look at the two to three inches of new growth since the last time I colored; that is the real color. My nice teenage boys humored me and we picked "medium rich brown."

And this morning I did it; medium rich brown all over my hair. I even dyed my eyebrows because . . . why not? I just finished showering after doing the whole hair-color process. It looks dark! Which means I may have come fairly close the the truth here. I'll have a pretty good idea when it's dry.

Sadly my camera is still missing! I have this picture in my mind's eye of it being about a foot down, right in the middle of the kitchen trash that went out four weeks ago. Oh man! I really hope not! But this means you'll have to wait and see my "new" hair color in person. So did I have a good hair day or a bad one? We'll see.