forward retainer
Fuuuuuck this day has been annoying and stressful. Too much to do, too little time in which to get it done, multiple new things that have to be worked on today sent my way as well. These are the hazards of getting information and directives from anywhere between five and ten different directions, none of which have any real awareness of all the other information and directives coming my way.
And it's not just with work either. It seems switching out my external hard drives rather fucked up my playlists in the Music app yet again. At least this time I remembered how to reload the Music Library that existed in February, which repopulated all the playlists (while yet again creating several duplicates which themselves were either empty or incomplete—annoying), but only as they existed in February. Fuck a duck! On the bright side, at least it still salvaged most of my playlist history.
Two very important lessons to learn from this, though: 1) fucking turn Time Machine back on! I had not been running it because my hard drives did not have the memory capacity for it, but now I have a 4TB hard drive that should easily be able to handle it. I should have fucking done that the moment I plugged in the new hard drive. Side note, though: backups from Time Machine take a huge amount of memory, which makes me think maybe I actually should have gotten a larger new external hard drive than 4TB. We'll see. And: 2) Once I have the playlists updated to my preferences again, save a fucking backup copy of that library. Jesus Christ, when will I learn?
Anyway. It's also getting hotter and it's making me irritable. Shobhit did finally buy a standing fan from Big 5, since my old box fan stopped working, and it's offering some relief. I still seriously miss the air conditioning of the office though, and I won't be working in the office again until at least sometime next year, I am sure of it.
And by the way, I only got a little bit of work done last night on the Mom Home Movies compilation I'm working on, thanks to time-wasting distractions like the fucking Music app, which kept not being able to locate tracks when I tried updating Rufus Wainwright playlists.
At least I managed to make a loaf of banana bread. So I was kind of productive.
In other news, I went to my appointment at a new orthodontist just a few blocks up and over on 12th Avenue, which is why this is getting posted a bit later than normal. I had to get a mold of my teeth taken so they can make me new retainers, which won't be available for pickup for another two weeks.
They're called Fresh Smile Seattle Dental Care, and after being there, I think that, after 22 years with Gateway Dental, I think I'm finally ready to switch not just my orthodontist but my dentist as well. I mean, I really only stuck with Gateway for many, many years because I loved their views from the 16th floor of the Seattle Municipal Tower. That location isn't that much farther from my Capitol Hill condo now as it was from my Belltown apartment in the late nineties, but their newer location on the ground floor 2nd Avenue side of the Wells Fargo Building hardly holds any appeal on the same level. And, why not go to a place I can walk to in less than ten minutes?
Not only that, but their COVID-19 precautions far outstripped what Gateway Dental had going on last week. This place actually has separate, full rooms with closable doors for each chair, and they even had this sort of vacuum tube to point at my mouth while Maggie the Dentist looked over my teeth. The only problem was that with her double-layered mask under a face shield combined with a soft voice and an Asian accent, it was often difficult to understand her. But, that's not an insurmountable challenge.
Oh, and I'm not positive but I think they are only seeing one patient at a time in the entire building right now. Another mark in their favor. They had a sign on the door asking us to call their office number before being let in, in case you need to wait for a previous patient to finish. I was the only person in the lobby, they had glass barriers at reception, and there was hand sanitizer available.
The entire appointment took all of half an hour, if that. I needed to wait five minutes each for a molding to set over my lower and then my upper teeth, then even less time for a mold of my bite. That's all it entailed, really, and now I wait two weeks for the retainers to be available for pickup, and apparently I pay at that time.
I feel pretty good about the whole thing at the moment, really.
[posted 1:04 pm]