Sentiment#2 Smiling Faces

There is nothing sweeter than a bunch of smiling faces. That is why, I am going to write about the latest high tech gadgetry I recently purchased. No, not an i-phone or a carbon fiber and fiberglass monofin. I am now going to write about my brand new, right out of the sterilized bag, dental implants.

Thats right, I've got screws in my skull like Wolverine and they are right in the top middle of my face. They haven't picked up any of the new digital television stations I keep hearing about, and you can't see them cause they're capped with some temporary fake teeth. Unlike some of Wolverine's implants, I can't pop them out and stab people. Additionally, unlike Wolverine I know who put them in there, but, just like Wolverine, they are made of adamantium.

Here's an excerpt from the upcoming graphic novel:

As the good doctor was drilling the first one in my head, I started feeling a slightly sharp, increasingly burning pain under my nose. How was I to talk with a drill, suction, gauze and two gallons of saliva in my mouth? I slowly raised my hand in the direction of the man with the drill. The pain, in the time I had decided to raise my hand, had increased ten fold. The burning was now hot but bearable, yet the sharp pain was two or three seconds into the intolerable range. There was only one thing to do, and it wasn't pretty. I made a high pitched gurgle and twitched a leg (since moving my head would have gotten me a new cheek piercing). The doctor stopped and slowly moved his gaze to my eyes. I could see the pool of blood that was once my mouth in the reflection of his protective lenses. "Does that hurt?"

And... scene.

Oh, yeah, unlike Wolverine, I don't have super healing skills. So two weeks after the fact, I am still cutting everything from tacos to burritos up into tiny slices and popping ibuprofen regularly. My x-rays will never look the same.

New!!
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Sentiment#1 New Life

A heartwarming sentimental story about procreation fell on my lap the other day.

As soon as March rolled in new life started sprouting up all over the place.

Sammie's preschool is a co-op or parent-child workshop or job #2. All parents work there at least once a week. The jobs rotate every four weeks from art patio to upper yard to quiet area to blocks. The only job I like there is kitchen duty. After you bring all the other parents coffee or tea, you frantically start chopping fruit and vegetables for over an hour and then serve it all on trays for snack time. Child interaction is minimal and Sammie is really proud of the fact that I make the snacks. I traded a friend for sandbox duty so I could get back in the kitchen for the next few weeks. I hate sand, but I love coffee.

Sammie occasionally swings by as I am hacking up grapefruit or kumquats to request grapes or carrots. Usually, she just ignores me.

The other day however, she came up and said she found a bug in a bucket. She was so excited. I asked what kind. A beetle? An ant? A ladybug? A moth? No, no, no and no. It had antennae was all she could tell me, so I gave her a paper bag and told her to go get the bug. She asked if she could keep it and I said, "sure" and carefully arranged cashews on the platter.

Sammie came back with a couple curious friends following her and showed me the bug. It was a little brown slug. I told her how cute it was, the head of the place took her to the science area to get her a better container. I gave her left over peels from the compost bag. We took the slug home and Anna rolled her eyes.

After a day or two, the peels started getting ripe so I dumped them out, Sammie found a rock for "Olivia" and I put a bunch of oatmeal at the bottom. We put the home in front of the fireplace and let Olivia hang out in her own mess for days.

The other day, Anna informed us that there was a lot of mold in the slug cage so Sammie and I stepped outside to clean it out. As I reached in with a plastic fork to scrape out soggy oats, some itsy-bitsy transparent bubbles hiding under a LOT of fuzzy stinky mold caught a beam of light and started to glow.

I congratulated Sammie on her soon to be new babies. Soon, if all went better than our pet oak worm scene, Olivia would be a mother many times over. Cute cuddly little slug babies slurping all around, getting their antennae poked in, eating old peels. Sammie was super excited and kept asking to see the eggs over and over. I'm not sure she could see them.

We reassembled the slug nest and put it back in front of the fireplace.

At the dinner table Sammie told Anna all about the slug eggs. I told her how they had been laid in a dark place under a warm patch of mold. Anna stopped us mid-sentence and announced she was going to puke. For a second, she really looked like she would.