Two weeks ago, I had two teeth surgically extracted.   The teeth in question were my lower right 2nd molar and premolar.  About a year or so ago, the molar cracked and I got an abscess beneath those two teeth.  I had to get a root canal in each, which was difficult because the roots were twisted and almost entwined.  Unfortunately, the root canal treatment failed and I had to have both teeth extracted.

Because I’d had the root canal, there wasn’t any pain, so I didn’t go see the dentist after six months like I was supposed to.  If I had, they’d probably have detected the failure, and they might have been able to just extract the molar and leave the premolar in place.  But I’ll never know for sure, because I was just too busy to go to the dentist and put it off until I started noticing a little tenderness around that tooth this year.  By then, both roots had collapsed and had to be cut out (not pleasant).

Getting the teeth replaced requires titanium pins to be inserted into my jaw and then crowned, at a cost of $12000 in total.  Next to that, the crown I need (to replace a 15 year old root canal filling) seems downright cheap.  In fact, I’m going to get another molar crowned as well, because it is at risk of cracking and having the same problem as the molar I had extracted.  $1200 for a crown looks pretty good compared to $500 for an extraction and $6000 for an insert.

Why are my teeth so crappy?  Well, it’s not because I don’t brush them regularly or well.  In fact, it’s a little galling to have two teeth removed and then have the dentist and the hygienist gush about how wonderfully clean my teeth are and how I have such excellent oral hygiene.  Make is seem even more unfair.  Nope, it’s probably mostly genetic.  Pretty much everyone in my family has fairly crappy and weak teeth.  Growing up on Waiheke where the water doesn’t contain fluoride probably didn’t help either.

So, if you haven’t been to the dentist in a while, make an appointment now.  Better to spend a little up front than have to spend a huge amount later on.

I am a procrastinator.  Always have been.  And not just with my thesis – with just about everything.  I’ve been reading “The Procrastinators Guide to Getting Things Done”, which describes different kinds of procrastinators.  It turns out I’m not a pleasure procrastinator or a disorganised procrastinator.  I’m a self-doubt procrastinator and a binge worker. 

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My plans for giving to charity have advanced one step further – I’ve now signed up for the Unicef Global Parents program.   That pretty much takes care of the international and extreme poverty end of the spectrum.  At the more local and personal end of the scale, I also support the Auckland Rescue Helicopter Trust, since several of my family members have needed this to get to hospital. 

So far, my regular charity ‘portfolio’ looks like this:

• Unicef Global Parents
• Kiva.org
• NZ Breast Cancer Foundation
• Auckland Rescue Helicopter Trust

This year I also supported the Atheist bus campaign, although I’m unlikely to make that a regular thing.  Since my kiva lending will keep rolling over, I’ll have more money to spend next year,  so I’m still on the lookout for other charities to support:

• Charities that hand out condoms
• Something with an environmental/conservation slant
• Groups that support education, particularly science education for kids or, even better, educating parents about the importance of educating their kids

Here is the finished product:

And part of my official letter from the university confirming that I’m really finished:

I have no plans to change the name of my blog just yet though.  There’s still plenty of procrastination to be done, even if it’s not specifically thesis procrastination.   Suggestions for a new title welcomed.

This is the second part of the story of my hospital visit.  The first thing I had to learn about being in hospital is that nothing happens to a timetable.  The nurses come around every few hours (whenever they are free) to take vitals and dispense pain meds.  The doctors come around at some time, usually in the morning or evening and usually in flocks to ask a couple of questions and dispense directions.  Meals arrive at times roughly correlating with breakfast, lunch and dinner but varying up to an hour or more each day.  The phlebotomist arrives sometime in the morning.  They’ll come and take you to surgery sometime in the morning.  You’ll be discharged sometime tomorrow.  There’s no point asking for specific times for anything – the hospital just doesn’t work like that.  

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As most of you already know, at the beginning of this month, I spent a week in hospital having my gallbladder removed.  I’ve had gallstones for the past three years, but generally they only gave me a night of pain every few months or so and armed with tramadol (the next step down from morphine), I could handle it.  Unfortunately, one night at the end of June, I got the gallstone pain again and it didn’t go away.

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I’m still deciding how to spread my charity donations, but I’ve decided I want to support a mixture of local, national and international charities, and at levels ranging from relief of hunger and disease to support of education and entrepreneurship.   For the latter case, I’ve started lending through Kiva.

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If we just consider the poorest developing countries, what is the best kind of assistance we could give them?  Malaria nets? Drinking water?  Measles vaccines?  Antibiotics?   Food?  Or birth control?

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Everyone knows that donating money to charity is a good thing.  But which charity?  How do you decide which charities to give money to?

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I’ve been taking Spanish classes every Monday night for the past three months.  Tonight I started the level 2 intensive course – 2 hours every Monday and Thursday for the next six weeks.   Back when I signed up, I figured that I’d be over the busy part of the semester by now.  Look how well that prediction turned out.

Tonight’s class seems a huge step up from the previous level.  The tutor spoke in Spanish almost the entire time, and there were lots of things that other students seemed to know that I’d never come across before (like words for animals and fabrics).  However, I’m not too badly off – there were a few others there who seemed to know even less than I do.

Tonight was mostly about reviewing the basics – greetings, numbers and letters, introductions and basic personal information, the verb ‘to be’ and conjugations for a few of the most common regular and irregular verbs.  At one point, we were going around the class describing our personalities and one guy says ‘Soy caliente’.  Caliente means hot in Spanish.  He was trying to say he’s hot-headed and impulsive but we laughed a bit because we thought he was saying that he’s hot (as in attractive).  Turns out that if you use caliente in that context, it actually means ‘I’m horny’.  The tutor was too embarrassed to translate it out loud but he wrote some of the letters on the board until we got the idea.

Then he was talking about how someone would refer to themselves as being hot, as in attractive, and made me rate the guy as to how attractive he was, asking if he was a 60 or an 85 and saying he wouldn’t move on with the class until I’d given him a rating.   I said cien (100) and everyone laughed and the guy made a great show of thanking me.  When it came my turn, I described myself as optimistic, and everyone laughed when the tutor said that my rating the guy 100 was an example of that.

We have to do a regular writing exercise to practice our sentence composition skills.  Currently we only know how to speak in present tense, so we have to keep a diary describing our daily activities in present tense only.  Here’s my first week’s exercise (I have no guarantee that this is in any way correct):

Yo vivo en un apartamento en el centro.  Me levanto a las siete y media todos los días.  Mi trabajo es muy cerca de mi apartamento.  Por la mañana enseño en la universidad.  Hay ochenta y ocho estudiantes in mi clase.  Por la tarde trabajo en mi computadora.  Por la noche, mis amigos y yo bebemos tequila.

My intended translation is this:

I live in an apartment in the city centre.  I get up at 7:30 every day. My work is very close to my apartment.  In the morning I teach in the university.  There are 88 students in my class.  In the afternoon, I work at my computer.  In the evening, my friends and I drink tequila.

My love of tequila is a running joke in the Spanish class, and the tutor makes frequent reference to it.  Another student is travelling to South America to meet girls, and so the tutor often makes reference to him being sad because he’s single and mentioning him finding a girlfriend.