steve's deadjournal

(posted at 04:36pm)

You'd think I'd know by now to be careful when eating french bread of the crunchy baton persuasion: maybe I got lulled into a false sense of security by having had a bridge for so many years.

But anyway, today I managed, for the first time in years, to forget how fragile the damn' things were.

I'll say one thing: it does make Sean Connery impersonation that little bit easier....

(posted at 06:41am)

Now I know why people kept thinking we had enough torchies and stewards, thanks and were no longer recruiting. Someone posted on FaceBook saying Beltane was full back at the start of April....

EDT: FaceBook, not MySpace, sorry....

(posted at 02:13pm)

I'm breaking my usual rule here and posting something that doesn't involve physical pain or dental evilness - except, I guess if I grind my teeth much longer over this, I'll be spitting bloodied gravel mixed with chalk-dust.

Anyway, I've just had an email from someone rebuking me for talking about them behind their back (which I hadn't been -- but will happily do now, as I've already had the telling-off) over asking them to remove a community they'd set up to discuss an event/organisation many of whose members don't even use email, never mind the particular online service the community was set up on.

I guess it hadn't occurred to the person that these people may not like being discussed behind their backs....

(posted at 10:33pm)

Quite a nasty session. Had to lose the lower left molar that had the bone abcess, and have my bridge repaired. Trouble is,I seem to have re-acquired my insensitivity to local anaesthetic. So while that was cutting in, my bridge got taken out (revealing another problem - maybe why it keeps loosening) and new cement put on the steel rods. But this is only a temporary fix: some time in the next few months, I get to have either end of the bridge removed, and a plate instead. Not happy about this: I had a plate from age seven to my early twenties, and they've a nasty habit of breaking on food, but it seems you can't really have a 5-tooth bridge.

By the time we'd finished talking about all that, the second batch of lignocaine had cut in (or so we thought at the time, anyway). And bone abcess or not, the offending tooth was incredibly well rooted. I should not have needed to pull my head and jaw one way with both hands while the dentist pulled the pliers the other.

That didn't work, so out came the drill again to chop the tooth up. This made it possible to remove most of the top half in stages, but getting at the roots was tricky (and somewhat sore).

So here I am, with a rather sore mouth, and absolutely starving: I can't eat, really, 'cos of the blood clot that mustn't be disturbed, and my antibiotics are disrecommended on an empty stomach. Oh, and no alcohol (fair enough - it'd probably mix badly with the ibuprofen/codeine sweeties), smoking (fell off wagon with that on Friday and Saturday, but wouldn't have been, anyway), hot drinks, cold drinks, chewy food, sticky food, sharp food....

If all goes true to form, there'll be damn' all sleep tonight and rather a lot of discomfort for the next few days.

On the bright side, I am so glad I didn't have the tooth out the Thursday before Beltane.

current mood: ouch...

(posted at 02:37pm)

Just about to leave for the dentist. The intermittent swelling that I've had on the gum below one tooth for almost five years (and which was quite painless for 99% of the time) turned out to be a "bone abcess" - sufficiently far away from the blood supply that antibiotics were no use, but also not very close to any nerves).

Anyway, I finally had an appointment to get the tooth above pulled, and the whole thing scoured out in the immediate run-up to Beltane, but I really didn't want to have it done just then. Unfortunately, today was the next soonest appointment I could get, and the damn' thing finally started getting painful about mid-May.

[And of course, there's still the foot thing, and the cold from last week that made the beer festival such fun (I don't think it's hayfever- or tobacco-withdrawal- related, if only 'cos it's a bit more widespread than I'd expect either of those to be) - I guess I'm just getting old and falling apart]

current mood: not looking forward....

(posted at 04:37pm)

[Maybe if I write this here, I'll be able to keep the versions appearing elsewhere as the "good bits" version....]

Everything went very well in the run-up to Beltane, if I but knew it. This didn't stop alternate waves of stress and elation from knocking me all over the place, but the mixture led to me being even less good than usual at resisting the pub.

Either Thursday or Friday night on its own (if Friday had been marginally more sensible) would have been okay, I reckon, but being out so late both nights, on top of a week with not a lot of sleep anyway, was just plain stupid.

So not only was Saturday massively more rushed than it should've been 'cos I started later, but I was just plain tired and stressy into the bargain.

The procession mostly went well until the Stage and the Bower, when I seem to have had slightly more than my fair share of idiots - not all of whom were punters, unfortunately, but my mood crashed from about the time we discovered that it was almost 1am and we'd have to clear the Hill soon (second year running I never made it to the fire).

I should maybe have gone home then, but didn't really feel up to it - I thought that if I went on to the club and the after-after-party I could cheer myself up by main force.

It didn't really work, and I could feel myself not quite avoiding people, but not exactly going out of my way to catch and thank all the people I'd meant to.

I was feeling better enough by the end of the club to think that the after-after-party was a good idea, but again there was that detachment, not really feeling a part of things, and when what I think was the last of the torchies left, I did likewise.

current mood: drained

(posted at 02:17pm)

It's not the mouth, it's the foot.

No, not foot and mouth disease, just an absolute bastard of a truly massive unhealed blister on the sole of one foot. How the HELL can the central part be all squishy and such while the edges have gone to the consistency (and sharpness) of old toenails!?

Gack!

current music: pulsations

(posted at 10:08am)

I was just thinking yesterday how I'd not updated here in ages - there'd been a certain amount of dental stuff over the last few months (steel pins holding a bridge in place coming unrooted - I felt cheated that the pins came out with the teeth rather than staying in place) but nothing up to the usual standards...

And no danger of anything too nasty coming up with a dental appointment later in the week: it's usually not long after I've had stuff done that things (usually unrelated) go wrong.

Or so I thought. i reckoned without the JD Wetherspoon's Mexican Platter last night at the Foot of the Walk. As far as I can tel it was a small hard lummp of something in the chili, and not a piece of nacho, that crunched a chunk off the outside of a lower left molar.

Not fun. No pain, mind, just a sudden disinclination to do the eating thing. The management were quite nice about it - refund of cost of meal and (when she arrived) a free meal for the partner. Who proceeded to tear into a mixed grill as if meat had only just been invented.

Went to the Pond afterwards, and you can bet i didn't have any pretzels....

current mood: working

(posted at 05:05pm)

Another bloody abcess. This time it's the tooth at the other end of my bridge from the one that flared up so delightfully on the anniversary of the first meeting between Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin.

The repairs done then were more or less excellent, apart from the fact that the dentist had to insert a small steel rod inside the nerve canal, and lasted until the beginning of this year when I got accidentally pushed into a beer glass and something in the bridge cracked.

It was no more than a minor irritation until a short while ago when it began to flare up. No problem, I says, I'm seeing the dentist next week anyway.

I was wrong, though, it's been doing the getting worse thing for some days, and so today I finally managed to get to the dentist.

[He's a darn' good one, by the way, and if anyone in Edinburgh is reading this, he's still got slots on his NHS roll]

Anyway, I was lucky with timing, so he saw me almost immediately. Yeah, another abcess, and this time a prescription for dead strong, don't even think about drinking with these, antibiotics (unless you like acetaldehyde poisoning, of course).

So, given that Thursday's my "night out", I reckon I'm starting them tomorrow, and facing the prospect of a totally dry weekend.

Thinks: I wonder if it interferes with anything else?

current mood: uncomfortable
current music: mild subnasal throbbing

(posted at 05:44am)

Toothache again. Mostly intermittent, but some things trigger it. In particular, while hot or cold drinks set it off, a sip or two of tap-water soothes it for a few minutes. Except, I can't work out if it then comes back worse, or just the same. I end up cracking and having another sip for the temporary relief, anyway.

Oh, and my favourite illicit anaesthetic simply doesn't work. I've heard that this is because cranial nerves are different, but could it just be psychosomatic? And if so, how do I persuade myself otherwise?

current mood: twinging

(posted at 10:26am)

Travelling alone avoids almost all the hassles of travelling in a group, but it's no fun when you suddenly start missing people. There's a very strong temptation to truncate the holiday and come home (this also flares up during attacks of tourist paranoia), but I've been envying people who've done this sort of trip for decades, and I'm damn well going to extract every last bit of experience (benign or bitter) from it.

It doesn't help that there's likely to be fuck all work to go back to, either.

Oh, and David Murray from the Fisherrow Brewery died over the weekend. Okay, he'd had a stroke before, and lived a very high-stress life, but he was younger than me, dammit! When I was spending time between Edinburgh and London, I'd occasionally get a phone call from him if he was delivering Fisherrow beer "dahn sahf" and we'd meet for a pint or two and maybe a chinese.

Actually, come to think of it, I knew him before then: when I returned to Edinburgh in 1994, I met him at a CAMRA do or two (I bloody well hope someone in the Edinburgh branch is doing him a decent write-up), and it turned out that not only was he a year or two after me in Chemistry at Edinburgh, but we both did the Chemical Pharmacology option in third year, run by the inestimable Norrie Wilson and Jameson Walker (I think the tag "whisky by name, frisky by nature" for the latter gentleman was one of David's).

Fuck. I think tonight I'm going to try and do a David Murray Memorial Pubcrawl...

current mood: melancholy
current music: bouncy czech stuff

(posted at 01:00pm)

Memo to Self: when planning to do things, especially things you've told a whole bunch of folk you're doing, do try to actually get the bloody ticket. yes, I fucked up. I missed getting a ticket for Roskilde Festival by about an hour. So, serious replanning called for. And I bet I've left finding a hostel for tonight too late, too.

current mood: morose
current music: mutterings from adjacent customer

(posted at 07:11am)

Sometimes it just hits you how fundamentally wrong past decisions were. I've just been poking around this site and it suddenly struck me how few photographs we have of the kids growing up. How few souvenirs we have of any sort from those days, in fact. Which led me on to think about how often I wasn't there, whether through working away from home, working late, or simply being out playing.

Hindsight's wonderful. Not.

current music: parcel of rogues: after the goldrush

(posted at 06:26pm)

Well, at first I thought it was the generic post-Beltane blues, the emotional come-down after the event merging in with the general lack of sleep and exhaustion. Mixed, no doubt, with a certain amount of overindulgence. The fact that the young lady of the house was also a tad lurgied could have been blamed on post-Whitby blues, too, but now that my partner's starting to get the throat thing I started with, I'm beginning to think it can't even be blamed on getting soaked during the final walkthrough.

I guess we're just a house full of sick people (and not in a good sense) at the moment.

current mood: blah
current music: generic background of snuffling, snorting and heavy breathing

(posted at 07:00pm)

You know how it is, when you're working somewhere fairly large, and about once a week or so some berk you've never heard of spams the entire company with a grotesquely in-jokey invite to some truly hideous dive for a leaving do of some sort?

Well, it's possible to over-react to this. No, I didn't crash a total stranger's bash (although I've often been tempted to, just to see what happened - not that I would, half the time I don't even go places where I have been invited). I carefully checked up which mailing lists we'd access to, and carefully sent out the invite to my own leaving bash to just the "Interactive Media MIS" group, not realising that many of the folk I wanted to invite were on the "Interactive Media Marketing" list, so most of them will have assumed they've specifically not been invited...

I've tried slamming the stable door with an extra email, but most won't see it until tomorrow morning.

current mood: pissed off

(posted at 06:17pm)

I don't seem to have come down with the full-fledged version of the lurgi that's been decimating the Dev Team (a few folk have been off for some days, and one person's flatmate was hospitalised for over a week). All I had was mild throat pain and a certain amount of tiredness/fogginess which didn't want to go away. It did me in for Friday and most of the weekend, though.

I continue to be surprised that I've not had a relapse in the eczema department - can only assume that my subconscious has decided that ending up back in Edinburgh for the foreseeable future is a Good Thing.

I'm still pretty pissed off - not with the job ending, I was expecting that (and it should have finished in Autumn 2000), but because there's almost certainly going to be a detectable drop in quality on the web site. Colour me selfish, but if there's one thing that's really pissed me off after working somewhere, it's seeing what some clown has down to the web site - just when I'm quoting the URL in my CV. The site's mostly generated dynamically, so I can't really save the code, and anyone can fake up a screen shot (Hell, in some companies the faked-up screen shot is the main design tool).

current mood: blah
current music: tom waits - 'til the money runs out

(posted at 11:43am)

The continuing story of the Afghan mini-cab driver is too cheery for here, and so it's at my livejournal...

In other news, the horrendous patch of eczema on my left arm has faded down to next o nothing, and the cigarette burn on my right is virtually healed. I guess there's a lot to be said for the combination of being busy and unstressed...

current mood: busy
current music: road runner - bloco vomit

(posted at 07:55pm)

I've also got a funny-coloured hole in my arm. At Samhain, some kind person rammed a cigarette hard into my arm as I walked past the edge of the dancefloor. Never mind it hurting like hell, it was a remarkably deep and messy wound, and I'd have been far better off if I'd not fallen for the temptation to "tidy it up". But even that would have been okay if I hadn't put one of those waterproof band-aid clones over it a few days later.

The damn' thing burst off about a day or so after that, and the bits that had been sort of healing up were all that horrid shade between day-glo yellow and luminous green...

Did the cleany-up thing again, and managed to not touch the damn' thing for a few days, with the result that it's slowly healing up.

It's shades of red and pink, now, and smarts rather, but at least it's not fizzing.

I'd been going to say something about the weekend, but there's nothing that really belongs here.

Now, if the afghan mini-cab driver had had photos to illustrate what he was telling me about the bombing, that would certainly have been suitable content...

current mood: sore
current music: afro celt sound system - saor / free & news from nowher

(posted at 05:45pm)

A great cold emptiness where once the purple and green flares of toothache crackled and fizzed (yes, honestly -- it fizzed!) as they added their own special flavour to an otherwise bland lunch

current mood: numb