Novocaine

There’s one thing about people’s logic that I can not understand.

We are not allowed to properly discipline our children anymore, touching strangers in public is generally frowned upon and hitting people are out.

Yet, we are more than happy to pay some dentist to torture us for everything from half an hour to an hour. I don’t understand that but then again, I don’t understand dentists and I really don’t like them.

I’ve had a pretty destructive week. I broke my car, broke my shower, broke one of my favourite cups and broke my tooth. In the tooth’s defence, it’s been begging to go. I’ve had trouble with it for almost a year. Every six months or so I suck it up and go to the dentist only to have myself told that I either need to get a nerve removed or there’s nothing wrong. I’ve stopped going since November last year, having decided just to tough it out. Thinking about it now, that’s probably the reason I can be pretty bad tempered at times.

This past week was no exception and I’ve really had to focus to keep my temper in general. The reason? Apart from my car that is, my sensitive tooth had become an aching tooth. It caught me off guard at night where I’d wake up from a sudden explosion in my mouth (I grind my teeth on a regular basis) and chewing anything harder than a cooked pea was painful. It reached a crescendo last night when I was having peas and potatoes (with mayonnaise and cheese… Yum). I was happily munching away at my first proper meal for the day when quite suddenly a shock ran through my mouth. I knew without a doubt, seconds after almost choking on my potatoes in pain, that I had broken something. At first, I thought it was the filling in said tooth but then as I rushed to the mirror and worked the hard bits out of my mouth I realized that it was in fact my tooth.

Dismay hit me like a rock because I knew that it meant I had to go to the dentist. There was no getting out if it this time, I had to go so that they could sort out the gaping hole in my gums.

I summed up my courage and went right after I’ve seen most of my clients for the day. I had to pay an emergency fee up front and then waited for almost two hours to be helped. When the dentist finally saw me, I was a wreck but I kept myself together even when I realized that he was preparing to give me a shot of novocaine. I’ve never found the sensation pleasant as it seems to have a bit of a delayed reaction in me. I’ve told this to my dentists countless times but they never listen. Once, one even drilled into my tooth live because he didn’t believe that I could still feel a thing. When I jumped up in pain, the nurse held me down. It was frightening and that experience is forever locked in my mind.

Today was no exception but luckily the dentist waited for the stuff to work properly before he started working on me. It wasn’t as bad as I had anticipated. Because I can’t afford a crown, he decided to build up the tooth which didn’t take a lot of time but it was just enough to reduce me to a bundle of nerves. I was so tense (and suffering from facial paralysis thanks to the novocaine) by the time that I left his room that I couldn’t even take out my debit card from my purse to pay for the torture. The assistant made me sit down for several minutes before she came round with the bill again.

I’m not even embarrassed to admit it!

I don’t know what type of person becomes a dentist and the worst part is that we need them. I know with the certainty of a bitter cold that I will have to return within the next 6 months, either to take care of this same tooth or to deal with a different one.

It is not something I look forward to.

Aheila’s Drabble Day – Guest

Argh, I forgot to schedule this for yesterday.

Good day everybody – as always, here is my drabble for the week. I get these drabble challenges from Aheila’s website.

 Remember how it works?

• Read the prompt and find your angle.
  
• Write a drabble (100 words story, give or take five words).
  
• Post a direct link to your drabble in the comments (or, if you don’t have a blog, just go ahead and post your drabble in the comments).
  
• In the post on your blog, make sure to link back to this post.
  

Today’s prompt is: Guest!
And the extra challenge for points no one keeps track of: avoid the “unwanted guest” twist!

Guest

“Well doctor,” Mr. Jones said looking pale and worried. “Can you tell me what’s wrong with me? Can you tell me why I’ve been feeling so ill the past couple of weeks?”

Dr. Smith went to his notes, his face tight with concentration. “Well, just to recap, you’ve been experiencing diarrhoea, abdominal pain, you’ve lost a lot of weight, you’re always tired and this week you’ve noticed that the whites of your eyes have gone yellow…”

“I know what I had Doctor,” Mr. Jones said irritated. “Just tell me what I have!”

The doctor looked up from his notes and smiled slightly. “And unwanted guest,” he said. “You’re condition is called clonorchiasis… Otherwise known as Liver Fluke infection…”

 

 

Mystery Monday: Err…

I’m staying with my parents tonight on our one day a month rendezvous which means that there will be no Mystery Monday today. My parents live quite far from where I do, so when I have the opportunity to see clients in their area I embrace it with open arms.

Of course, that means that I don’t have time to do research. J

So, alas, I’ll leave you to debate the mystery of why a mother’s cooking is somehow always better than your own. Tomorrow my scheduling will continue as normal with Aheila’s Drabble Day Challenge.

Enjoy your Monday everybody, I have to say – I’m happy mine’s over.

Good night.

Mass Effect 2: A Commander’s Journal – Entry 1

Commander’s Log – Entry 1 – 2185CE

The date shocks me as I stare at it. Two years, two years since my last entry. Have I really been gone that long? Locked in a prison of my own body. In a coma they said. Dead others say.

Cerberus revived me to fight a war with no name against an enemy very few believe exist. A war I would never have seen if they had left me to die along with the original Normandy. I say original because I now sit in a copy, a hacked duplicate of my original beloved ship. Some things are the same, others – like the crew – so different. I have just returned from recruiting my first companion Mordin Solus the salarian geneticist who can supposedly help us fight the Collectors. He is the first of the Illusive Man’s party that I am to claim as my own. By rights, I should be choosing my own people, not following his orders but it seems for now, I have no choice. As told Joker, I got lucky surviving what I did. But, that luck comes with a collar and lease. I am, for now, a Cerberus agent.

A dog…

 

This is the mental dialogue I find myself imagining that my Commander Sheppard from Mass Effect 2 has with herself. I’m about five hours into the game. I had been 14, but then I found a way to download the Cerberus Network and restarted my game to make use of their Dark Horse Comic feature. Confused? Let me elaborate.

The Exciting.

This game might well become one of my favourites to date, knocking FallOut 3 out of its place (but let’s not get hasty). The dialogue is good, the system runs relatively well on the PS3 and as expected the dialogue is great. I love the details of the interpersonal relationships that you as Commander Sheppard can form with your crew. You also see old faces, link up with old friends from the first Mass Effect game and you have a nice, big and shiny new Normandy (even though you’ve had to endure seeing the first one blow up). All in all, this game is great and it might well keep me busy for months to come.

The Irritating.

As I’ve said before, when I just started playing this game, the copyright by Mass Effect 1 is held by Microsoft which means that it will never be released on PS3. Bioware overcame this issue by bringing out the PlayStation version of this game with an interactive comic book which gives you a broad overview of the first game. I’m saying broad because it takes what had been about a 100+ worth of gaming hours and reduced it to a 10minute comic. But, it does allow you to start your Mass Effect 2 game with the basic important choices of the first game in tact namely which of your crew members to save and who you want your primary romance to be. It redeems a lot of the game play which I found vexing in the beginning of my first start of the game. (For instance, I had chosen to sacrifice Kaiden Alenko instead of Ashley Williams, the default Mass Effect 2 start for a female Sheppard has it the opposite). But, the downside to this light is that you have to download this content despite the fact that they claim it comes with the game. Now, unlike in America, not all South African households have WiFi and more to the point, we pay quite a lot per megabite that we download (if you are your normal run of the mill household that does not possess an uncapped line). I decided – for the sake of the game, that I would try to download this pack but I had to MacGuyver my PS3 and my laptop together. Then, I had to fix my Vodacom Internet line and eventually jerry rig the whole system because my work computer that I was trapped on wouldn’t do what I want. Long story short – it was a LOT of trouble and throughout the 675MB download I kept praying that for some or other reason my connection wouldn’t be severed (which meant that I would have to pay for everything again). There, I have to say that Bioware and EA games were really REALLY stupid and short sighted. Even the ‘Game of the Year’ edition of Fallout 3 came with all the Downloadable content in game.

But, it didn’t irritate me for long and now I have the full benefits of the Cerberus network which is well worth the download. J

I will keep you updated on my progress and if you are interested, give you more ‘Commander’ Logs.

Happy gaming everybody.

Reviewing Redemption – a look at two sequel movies.

My Other Half and I watched quite a lot of movies last weekend and among them, two stood out. Both of these I approached with more than a bucket full of caution. The sequels of the past three years had really disappointed me. In both the genre’s and I wasn’t quite willing to deal with another disappointment. As it turned out, I was surprised.

X-Men Origins: First Class

Like most kids my age, I have been watching the X-Men cartoons ever since our country managed to get its hands on its first decent cable channel. Admittably, I never saw the later shows like X-Men evolution and anything after that, but the classic comic was enough for me. Like all kids, I had my favourite characters (specifically Storm and The Beast) and liked the idea that somewhere out there, there was a haven for people who were a little bit different than others.

I was very excited about the X-Men movies and wasn’t really disappointed with the first two. But then came X-Men: The Last Stand and Wolverine to a lesser extent and my faith in the show died. The movies were terrible. I can’t even begin to voice my displeasure in them because if I do – this blog will become R rated and I might just get banned for not warning my readers. But, it’s fair to say that I didn’t like them. I therefor approached this new addition to the franchise with caution and didn’t really expect a lot. Which is why, I suspect, I was pleasantly surprised.

I liked X-Men Origins: First Class. The beginning was a little bit rushed, but once all the characters settled in together, the story flowed well. I liked the interaction between the two main characters – Professor X played by James McAvoy and Magneto played by Michael Fassbender. There was something deeply touching about their friendship, what they shared in their isolation brought on by their power and how the ignorance of their youth shaped them to be the men that they are when they are older. The action was good, the special effects not disappointing and the supporting cast well put together. I also haven’t seen Kevin Bacon in a movie since Hollow Man so it was nice to see him around as well.

On IMDB they scored this movie an 8 (in comparison to Wolverine’s 2) and I have to agree. It was well worth the time and effort to watch.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Let me get something out of the way first. I like Johnny Depp. I really do. If I ever get the chance to have his children, I will embrace it with both hands. It’s therefore crucial that you understand that – when I say I didn’t like one of his movies, it means that there was really something wrong with it.

That was how I felt over the second and third Pirates movies. Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End were two of the worst written movies I have ever watched in my life. They were so bad that I even found myself unwilling to watch the first movie again. I eventually broke and watched The Curse of the Black Pearl earlier in the year and it reminded me how good it was, and how bad the others were. I didn’t think that the writers would shame themselves into attempting a fourth movie but apparently I had underestimated the tenacity of Hollywood ambition.

On Stranger Tides started showing here about a month ago and I found myself in two minds about whether or not I was going to waste my time and money watching it. I eventually broke under peer pressure when my best friend and riding companion dragged myself and Other Half to the cinema. Her faith in Johnny was still strong and she was very determined to watch this movie.

I went with a lot of reserve and found that – although it wasn’t great, it was most certainly better than the previous two. The humour, the character and the rhythm of the movie was a lot more like the first one. It wasn’t as exciting or as ‘new’ as it could’ve been but it certainly wasn’t bad. I’m a sucker for swashbuckling sword fights. The more ‘ca-ching’ of metal on metal that I hear, the happier I get.

So, Jack Sparrow managed to redeem himself and the ending they gave us was the ending I needed in the third movie. Jack got his ship back, all was well in the pirate world and… he didn’t get hit by another girl. 😉

I wouldn’t give it more than a 6 out of 10 score wise, but it wasn’t torture to watch from beginning to end.