fresh smiles
Well, this DLU today will definitely have to be quick. I had a dentist appointment at 10:00 and I never wrote any part of this draft (well, except for the html commands for embedding the photos, as usual) before I left.
I went to Fresh Smile Seattle, over on 12th & Howell, a seven-minute walk from home, my first time there for dentistry after going there last summer to get my retainers replaced, since Gateway stopped doing orthodontics, as I discovered. After 22 years going there in the south end of downtown, it was high time I switched to a more conveniently located place anyway. So now here we are.
Coincidentally, the woman who owned the practice retired shortly after I was there last summer. Now there's an Indian guy who is the dentist, and we talked a lot about India and my obsession with the monkeys in Delhi. He's from . . . fuck, I can't remember now. Gujarat? Anyway he told me I should visit Goa and see the monkeys there, and he even came back later during my cleaning to show me a photo of his wife with one of the monkeys there. He said it's beautiful there and I don't doubt it, but I am dying to see how monkeys overrun the city in Delhi. I swear to god, one day I'll get to visit.
Anyway, I thought the appointment would take an hour and it took two. They did some topical numbing to do deeper tissue cleaning, evidently as a slight alternative to what Gateway Dental kept telling me every time I went there: that I needed gum graft surgery. I guess with deeper tissue cleaning and possibly upping my frequency of cleaning checkups to every four months rather than every six, it might make some of the improvements gum grafts would fix. So, although I made an appointment for six months from now pending Delta Dental approving coverage for three cleanings a year, and if that happens then the appointment will get rescheduled for June.
Even with the new ownership right after I started going there, I really like this place—so much so that I am going to write a positive Yelp review. They are all super friendly, are incredibly diligent about COVID precautions, and to a person they seem to have a real culture of kindness. Both the dentist and the hygienist (who loves PCC!) asked over and over about how comfortable I was while poking at my teeth, almost excessively so. But asking too often is far better than not asking often enough.
Apparently between several different owners of the practice over the years, this place has been in that very spot for some three decades! I should have made this switch ages ago, probably.
What about last night, then? Shobhit and I went to Costco for some grocery shopping, right when I finished my work day. We came back, put all the food away, heated up leftovers for dinner. I made hot chocolate. Then I retired to the bedroom to work on my digitizing old home videos. I'm very nearly done now. The very last original home video content was of Danielle and Patrick's wedding in 2005, the first of two spectacularly failed marriages for which I officiated the wedding. It was a little embarrassing watching and listening to myself "officiate," but I did get a really great clip of Reg, Danielle's dad who died ten years after this, looking healthy and laughing and talking a bit about Danielle. I excerpted it and texted it to Danielle, who was predictably delighted by it and told me it made her tear up.
Right now, I have only one tape still in my possession to digitize, and even that is not of original content: I am digitizing the collection of best-moments I made as a Christmas gift for family in 2005, which was too long to fit on one two-hour tape and so I made it a two-tape "movie." It clearly could have been far shorter. I mean, holy shit, the ability to edit digitally in a program like iMovie makes editing far easier than when I could only transfer from one videocassette to another. Now I can really make the editing tighter, and even within a digital context I am much better at it now than, say, when I started the "Year in Ten Minutes" videos back in 2014. I have some new projects in mind once I get all these videos digitized (and then the even more time-consuming part: editing them into separate parts of ten minutes or shorter so I can add all that content to my online Flickr account), and not only will they be shorter and therefore more digestible, but I’ll be able to do a lot better job of cutting out unnecessary filler. No wasted moments!
Anyway I've already spend way too much time on this post when I've had too much time not being able to get work done today. So I should get back to that!
[posted 12:49 pm]