Poor, Poor Pitiful Me

I'm sure that those of you who know me will be shocked when I admit this, but...

It's possible I may have overreacted about the door.

Turns out that little piece of wood that fell out from behind the hinge when I took it off -- that little piece of wood that I picked up, looked at, went "hm, little piece of wood," and threw away -- that little piece of wood, it turns out, was a shim. Intended to push the bottom hinge out a little bit so the door would hang properly. John B. is here right now fixing it, and he says as long as I keep handing him beers then he isn't on the clock. (Can we have a moment, please, to thank the universe for sending us good old, head-biting John B.?)

John B. may have saved my ass again from my own idiocy -- but even he can't stop the wrath I brought down upon my own pig-head for being a horrible person and having un-christian thoughts about the Kid.

Remember how I couldn't muster up sympathy for him and his abscessed tooth? Remember how I'd said I'd had one of those myself once, and so I knew? Well, I did. Eleven years ago. Abscessed, root-canalled, drilled and posted, temporarily-crowned -- and then never got around to going back for the actual, real, permanent-type crown. Eleven years ago. It's been holding up just fine (for eleven years), so every time I thought about it, I figured why bother? (Plus, there was the little detail of no money and no dental insurance to help make that decision for me.)

But then, on Sunday, with my whole family at my house and a whole meal prepared and a whole (rocking) football game on television -- I took a bite of crusty bread and my eleven-year-old shell of a tooth broke clean in two.

Nobody who was here yesterday knew that it had happened. You see? How brave I am? With enough beers lined up for putting in me?

So tomorrow I have to go to the dentist for the first time in eleven years. Fun! The good news is that I do have this everybody-gets-it, Massachusetts-style health insurance now, and it does include dental. There's a little question about whether they will pay for "restorative" work if it's not one of the front six teeth ("top and bottom only," as the woman on the phone explained to me -- which, yikes, am I supposed to have teeth somewhere other than top and bottom? Middle? Sides? Tongue? Yuck?). So I may end up having to have what they so delicately refer to as "extraction"...

But maybe I'm overreacting here, too. Maybe I should just wait and see what happens tomorrow before I go throwing out my toothbrush. In the meantime, though, it's soup for dinner. Leftovers from the meal I couldn't chew on yesterday.

And it probably serves me right that the Kid has still not shown up to finish the job. And that the electrician's a no-show, too. Think I'll lay my head on the railroad tracks and wait for the Double E...

Is it just a coincidence that those are my initials?